CareerCup

It is like a DB design question.
Before designing a DB , we have to know what features will be develop.

wow if I had that then why would I interview for any company. provided I sell each book for 1 $ and I could sell even 5-10 million such books thats more money that I can earn if i worked for microsoft, amazon or google for all my life :)(ok I lied about amazon or google)

You just have the text, not the right to sell the books.

This isn't a technical question though. It's a brainstorming question. What features / products could you build with such a database?

I think they meant to build an IR system, i.e., build inverted files, dictionaries and concordances so we won't have to access the data itself, but rather the inverted files only.

I don't think they were looking for a particular answer - just some ideas about what kind of products you think you could build with it. It's about brainstorming / creativity

(1) A search tool to display matching text and that allows the user to scroll through the text may be useful.

(2) Can to text mining to categorize the books based on their content, so the search time can be reduced. Use the database a s a training corpus.

(3) I might start something like O'Reilly Safari bookshelf and make the books searchable. I am not sure whether I will be allowed to do this as I dont have the rights to sell.

any other creative products ?

* Create a feature of the related books - i.e. If you like one book - then you also might like a list of other books

* Sort the books by terms of their popularity and demand

* create a virtual bookstore where people can check out and read those books

* ............

1) I would implement a search engine based only for e-books using TF*IDF (Term Frequency times Inverted Document Frequency).

2) I may furthur continue adding categorised searching too... based on relevance factor

3) If allowed collaborate witha a company like Amazon and start selling the e-books, as to lure customers show them one chapter of the book they want....

I would index all the words in the text database and store it. If a customer was searching for a particular topic say health, i would give him information about the topic and list down all the books available in Amazon for that topic. A simple and effective way of advertising the books.