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I remember once visiting a website that would present a book/novel summary in the most interesting way. It would show a list of words that were repeated most often in that book and which were unique/uncommon. In other words, it would show the maximum frequency words but not common words like the, I, you etc. Then it needs to have things like showing a phrase if that is repeated often. For example, Treasure Island would probably have words like - pirates, storm, fought, treasure, pieces of eight, island, Long John Silver, Jim, omen etc.

This was the most interesting way to quickly get a good feel of whether I would like reading that book or not. I cannot find that website anymore. So I thought of looking for a software that would do the job. I have a couple of books in pdf and doc format which I would like to have analyzed. Does anyone know of a good tool/software out there that can do this?

Of course I could probably code this myself but it sure would be nice to not reinvent the wheel. So my question is, "do you know of any such software?"

Thanks,
Mugen
(bookworm)

Mugen
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    well, if you can copy the entire text of the book, maybe http://www.wordle.net/ will work for you. It creates tag clouds and renders them in different ways, which are pretty cool. – Dave Sep 12 '10 at 20:56
  • Amazon has a version of this called [Statistically Improbable Phrases](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistically_Improbable_Phrases). – Matthew Flaschen Sep 12 '10 at 21:03
  • Simple enough problem to make an interesting diversion: [Code golf: Word frequency chart ](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3169051/) – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Sep 13 '10 at 17:36
  • Thanks to all for your responses. @Dave: wordle.net works perfectly. I can copy paste my books into it and get a good idea. Thanks a load. Too bad I don't have the option to mark a comment as the answer to the qs. Could you post your comment as an answer so I would be able to mark this qs answered? @Matthew: I checked Amazon but it seems they don't have it for all books. Only selected ones. Besides I also found another website called shelfari.com which also seems to have a similar feature. – Mugen Sep 15 '10 at 14:39

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Try Wordle.net. It creates tag clouds and renders them in different ways.

Answer attribution: Dave

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Eduardo Molteni
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