Slashdot Mirror
Amazon to Sell Books by Page, Display Books You Own
Josuah writes "Forbes is reporting that Amazon plans to sell books by the page, so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in. What I found more interesting though was the mention of a program called Amazon Upgrade, which will allow you to view books you own from any web browser. Sounds awfully similar to the MP3.com case. I'm guessing Amazon Upgrade also means you need to purchase all your books from Amazon. Interesting value-add proposition."
no... I don't think mp3.com could ever dream of having as much $$ as amazon to fight any potential fight of free use. And I doubt publishers have quite as strong a group as the RIAA to act as the 800lb gorilla.
Excellent - I now only need to pay for the first and last page of Lord of The Rings. Saving me money and time!
Karmady is the best medicine.
So I buy a book as a gift, and give it away, but I get to keep the online copy?
Cool for me, rats for the author.
Maybe they could do this with music?
They're going to make you pay for what you would otherwise do for free at a bookstore (read parts of the book before you buy).
Check out this guy's BZFlag cheat client!
Yeah, but will I have the option to buy the pages used?
And this has what to do with Amazon? ;)
wasn't paying attention I guess.
How will you know which page to buy if you can't see it until you buy it?
It is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.
This would be a very useful service if textbooks were included. I, along with many other students, know the pain of buying a $120 textbook and only using the first 2 chapters, then selling it back to the book store for $20 and a Hershey's bar.
Of course, this was before I figured out their racket and started buying international textbooks....
MP3 singles I can deal with since they are already sold seperately anyway, but why in the hell would anyone want to buy a single page?
It would get awful messy even if you used the examples given in the article, a recipe on a specific page - it would be a bummer if it then said "gather the same utensils as for the cake on the previous recipe" or something.
silly silly silly.
liqbase
Damn Slashdot editors. Mispelled vendor lock-in.
Sounds like a bit of "buy book, sell book, read book" could be going on in the future, if they go ahead with this online version of the book.
This'll do before content providers (music, movies, books, games) finally evolve into a pay-per-byte model - perhaps with a small monthly charge to allow you to search for free, take small `free` samples etc. For some books it makes sense to only grab a couple of chapters, while for reference books you really want it all on hand all the time.
I bought the last page of a bunch of books. Hope I don't get sued for posting them here. Here goes...Ready?
THE END
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Why would you pay for just a page from a book? What exactly could it be worth? Isn't the whole point of buying books is to, well, have the entire book and not just a few paragraphs of it (probably the same content/information you can get from somewhere else for free).
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I want the whole thing to read. I can read 20 pages in two minutes. If I want to read in tiny bits, I would get the newspaper or a magazine.
Not only that, but how are we meant to know which part of the book we want unless we buy it first? If we could read the excerpt to see which part we wanted, there would be no point buying it since we can clearly read it for free anyway...
DAMN YOU AMAZON!!1!!one! TRYING TO TRICK US INTO THINKING YOUR BEING REALLY NICE, MAKING THINGS EASIER AND CHEAPER FOR US.
Now, not only can the haters spoil a twist like this, but they can have page 606 on hand for proof!
This is an interesting article by Hal Varian on the economics of Amazon's used book sales:
m es/2005-07-28.html
l /articles.html?
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTi
His collection of articles make for pretty interesting reading about a variety of topics, from the perspective of an economist:
URL:http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/%7Ehal/people/ha
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Also, who'd want to pay by the page when you can read extracts on-line free with Google Print?
Issues of lock-in and implementation aside, this is a brilliant proposition for academics and researchers (like me). I'd pay money to be able to do full-text searches on my library: I can't tell you how common (and frustrating) it is to chase after a half-remembered quote or reference amongst your books. On the Mac, Tiger/Spotlight already makes searching your PDF copies of journal articles much easier. Books would be a great addition. Amazon should do this retroactively, as they know all the books I've bought from them. Ideally, it would also be available via their API, so that beautiful but basically useless applications like Delicious Library would aquire real functionality.
Forbes is reporting that Amazon plans to sell books by the page, so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in.
Well, we read only a page a time, so I guess that would work.
What I found more interesting though was the mention of a program called Amazon Upgrade, which will allow you to view books you own from any web browser.
What I'd find interesting is having free access to O'Reilly's on-line versions of printed books I've already bought and paid for. Or even better, have the good folks at O'Reilly send me a bound and printed copy of whatever it is I'm paying for the privilege of reading on their pricey website, or previously bought as an electronic version. Or maybe they'll just start including an electronic version on CD gratis with every book they sell, and save me all this head scratching? Or maybe someone else will come up with a Netflix version of a Monthly Book Club and confuse the hell out of everyone.
So many options. so little time.
Interesting value-add proposition.
Indeed. I consider myself a cliche.
Something I have yet to hear mentioned is that some people still have little or no interest in reading a book online (or printing the online content out). I personally enjoy the weight of a book and the feel of the pages. If Amazon does make all the content of all the books I've ever bought from them (many) available online to me, I probably will not use this feature.
I won't deny that it has applications (I bought a textbook, left it at home, need it at school, or simply don't want to carry it), but it is not something that would generally sway me to buy from Amazon.
1) Go to library ...
2) Find quote(s) you are interested in
3) Photocopy said pages under fair use, or take notes the old fashioned way
4)
5) Save money (profit?)
How am I going to know what pages to buy? Am I going to be allowed to read through the book online and only buy the pages I want? Wouldn't that then mean I could just read the entire book online and not buy anything? Or do I need to already have access to a copy of the book and then buy the pages I want? So, why would I then buy from Amazon, since I already have access to a copy of the book?
This business plan makes no sense.
Google searches text and gives you relevant quotes. The page itself might be available if it looked like the thing was related to what you were interested in to begin with. This service is mostly useful for finding books that might help your research, like a very good card catalog. If the book's copyright is expired, Google will save you the trip to the library, but not always yet. In my last search, I found a 2004 reprint of a book originally published in 1918. Gutenberg had the text.
The only other case I can think of is that someone might reference a book or a passage of a recent book. That might make me want to look at the book. Hopefully, the author would simply quote enough of the book to get their point across. If I really wanted more I'd go to the library.
Oh wait, these same greed heads have already assaulted the libraries. See here. It's always amazing how greedy and stupid people can be. RMS was right again. How else can you get people deep into debt over school books besides charging per word?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What kind of format would the pages be in i wonder? PDF? Html? Graphic Images? It wasn't apparent from the article.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
Come on! Why should I buy a full page when I'm interested only by a sentence or two? No, that won't work.
Million Dollar Screenshot
Seems a not-so-smart thing, at least at first glance. ... in the bathtub I mean :-) ... if any.
For users: they will spend more money by printing the pages at home, unless they will read only by screen. Very unconfortable if you like to read while in the bathroom
For the company: I see people trading the book pages in order to gather the whole book and paying just few pages
Later I can also see the rise of issues with the DRM for books and magazines.
Finally, a lot more of wasted paper and empty ink cartridges (and dead trees) for badly printed books.
Let's revert to the old faithful printed books. At least at the moment.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I'm mostly with you, but you also have to remember the accreditation authorities. For your school to stay accredited, they have to keep the average age of their texts below a target set by the accreditors. It's even worse because the accreditors don't just tell them what that target is. They say it's "part of the whole picture" they look at when the school is up for re-accreditation, along with scholarly publication by faculty and modern equipment and facilities. My undergraduate school unwent re-accreditation by AACSB when I was there and you wouldn't believe what a pain in the ass it was.
The textbook thing was mostly an overreaction to schools that never adopted new texts. Imagine an accounting text that never mentioned Enron and Worldcom. Instead of assessing each adopted text for relevance and currency, they just look at average age. Once the accreditation agencies had made this decision, it was a no-brainer for the publishers to move to 2 or 3 year edition cycles. If your text is due for renewal and there isn't a new edition available the professor/department may be forced to adopt a different book, and to hell with the students (especially the poor ones.)
For years I made money off of textbooks as a student. I would buy my books early so I always got used ones. When the next semester started I would take all of my books and camp out in front of the bookstore. Once the line got long enough, there was always some guy who was only taking one class and was willing to buy the book from me at a premium to keep from waiting in line for two hours.
Amazon.com is undoubtedly doing this with the permission of the publishers. The publishers are obviously fans of Amazon.com and probably trust them - whats good for Amazon is good for the publishers and vice versa.
That wasn't the case with mp3.com and the record industry, mp3.com didn't sell any RIAA music.
Buying books by the pages and chapters is not a new idea. I actually wrote about it way back in 2003. Random House, the mega publisher, is obviously giving its approval to Amazon's proposal by coming out with its own idea of micro-payment model -- charging 5 cents a page, with 4 of that going to the authors and the publishers, as reported here.<br><br>
These days, Johny and Susie Happy-Clickers gladly "click to purchase" 99-cents songs, so it seems like a natural progression to click to buy a page here, a chapter there.
Sun and Fun
... Cable companies start to offer something like this. I only watch about 10 channels, so why am I paying for the 120 others?
Believe me, I won't be holding my breath for this to actually happen.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
This could really hurt conference proceedings, which may only have one or two really worthwhile new papers. If you can buy those separately, why spend $ 120 for the full book ?
1. Your professor(s) suck(ed).
2. You are wasting your (opt: parents') money. Drop out now.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Amazon: Which page of 'War and Peace' would you like to buy?
Me: I dunno...I'll try page 27.
Amazon: Here you go...KA CHING!
Me:Oh man, this page is boring. Let me try page 54.
Amazon: KA CHING!
Me:I read pages 27 and 54 and they were both boring. Could you recommend something?
Amazon: Try page 12. Lots of readers rate page 12 very highly.
Me: Okay, give me page 12.
Amazon: KA CHING!
Me: Hey, this is just part of somebody's foreword. What the hell?!?
Amazon: No refunds!
Myself, I'm disappointed - I was really hoping to buy books by the word, and then complete my collection of every "the" ever written.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This guy's telling us he can read a page in six seconds, and even keep up this incredible pace for 20 consecutive pages? Bull-shit. Obviously I can't bring myself to believe he can think this fast, but that's not all - only a small portion of the eye sees well enough for reading, and I doubt he can have it traverse 20 pages in 2 minutes.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
^topic^
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
That MP3.com case never made any actual legal sense. I can't put my CD content on an FTP server and download it myself to another location for consumption there? Even when it's just me consuming it, not another person without the right to use it (without buying it from the copyright holder)? That's nonsense. But the RIAA had more money than MP3.com, and few people understood the broad implications. It just looked like "copying" to a lot of people, no different from Napster, though the essential difference was that Napster let people without the right (purchased) to listen to the music do so. I hope Bezos strikes directly at the MP3.com ruling, provoking the RIAA to sue him, cite their crummy precedent, and have it reversed. Bezos has the money, experience, brand clout and recognized vision that can compel justice to be served, pushing our fair use protections back up inside the envelope of our rights.
--
make install -not war
"It was a best of times, it was the worst of times..."
That'll be $0.86 please.
The underlying notion here is that by paying a fee you are then *licensed* to read the book. But books *aren't licensed*... they are *purchased*. You can go to a library right now and read a book for which you have never paid a cent. You can pass along a single book *infinitely* and remain within copyright law. By shifting the definition of "purchase" to "license" we are actually losing something, not gaining something. We're losing the freedom to control that information post-purchase.
I am a graduate student studying psychology,
and I make extensive use of online databases such as PsycINFO
in order to find journal articles and books that are relevant to
the topic I do research on. Now, there are many edited books out there,
chapters in these books are contributed by different professional researchers,
and these databases tell me which chapter I might be interested in, with
complete chapter titles, abstracts and page numbers.
Normally if I want to get hold of these chapters I would go to the library of
my school, or order them through inter-library loans if I cannot find the books there,
and wait for a few weeks, which happens quite often actually.
With this service, I could do my research at home (or at the school library)
and instantly print out these chapters. ILLs are OK if you are not in a hurry,
but this service can help a great deal if you are on a tight deadline.
If you can see it then you can take a screenshot and share it, for college students you can split the cost of a book between several people, take screenshots of each page if there is DRM, and put them together into a long PDF. I see this going well.
Actually, this would encourage succinct writing, without all the bloat of normal writing.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I think most scientific publishers already sell articles by the article over the Web.
Conference proceedings and journals are a scam anyway. They cost an arm and a leg, and none of the money goes to the researchers or reviewers. Luckily many researchers route around this damage by posting their papers on the Web.
It's cool to have a row of proceedings on my shelf, but I just get the ones from the conferences I actually go to; I'd never buy proceedings separately.
The one I am most familiar with is Wiley. They have a program called WileySelect that allows an instructor to create a custom textbook with only the chapters they will use. They have a demo you can check out. Of course, they don't let a student create one of these for themselves... "Your custom courseware product can be delivered to your students in print format with digital access, or as an online-only product with one-time personal printing rights. You can also bundle your printed product with a leading Wiley textbook."
Here's another one--Pearson Custom Publishing, which allows an instructor to create a custom textbook made up of pages of different texts. It looks like they are charging $6.00 plus $0.06/page, with a minumum order of 25 copies. So, I guess if you just needed 200 pages, that would be $18. Not bad.
There seem to be a bunch of others too...
I imagine that they will now give you the table of contents for all these books, so that if you're really strapped for cash, you can purchase books by the chapter.
the question is will it be an e-reader download or a physical copy?
and do you have the right to print copies for a class or something?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Umm PAY for an excerpt?!? WHAT DO YOU THINK FAIR USE IS FOR? Fucking greedy assholes.
For many books on Amazon, you can already do this using the "Search Inside this Book" function. You can only look at a few pages before and after where your search term was found, but of course this isn't too hard to get around (go to the last visiable page, search for something on that page, and continue).
A few weeks ago I went away to write a paper on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Unfortunately I left my copy of the book at home. Enter Amazon.com: I was able to retreive all the quotes I needed based on my notes via the search function.
Cool! I just want to buy the centerfold.
I predict that the warez nerd with a copy of whatever OCR software is the flavor-of-the-month will be very popular with his fellow students
There's really no reason for e-books not to be fully searchable
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Guitar tablature (or other music) books -- only purchase the tabs to the songs you want. Much like iTunes, instead of buying the whole album, only buy the "hits."
The ony difference I can see is:
1) I have to pay for the page, which I guess you would pay for the paper form the copies
2) I can do it from the comfort of my home
This is more tangential than offtopic I hope, great anonymous coward moderator or metamoderator:
I'd like to see a all you can read subscription model from amazon.com... but here's something I worte about all you can fly model for the airlines:
The american airline industry is struggling. The internet is allowing businessmen to travel less. Rising ticket prices, secondary to rising oil prices, cause leisure travelers to postpone travels, or only buy heavily discounted tickets. I propose an "all you can fly" business model. With a subscription model, airlines can encourage overuse by consumers. They should learn a lesson from healthcare and netflix.
Price discrimination is annoying to intelligent consumers. Weather it be getting ripped off by late fees or late airfare buying, the modern american consumer doesn't want to have to waste his time to be "smart and thrifty" and shop around, return movies on time, plan vacations ahead of time... They are more than willing to pay more in a system that encourages more consumerism... I totally abused netflix for a year, watching about a 100 movies last year for $20 / month. But, now that its part of my lifestyle, I only watch 2-4 movies a month, but I can't imagine not having netflix... I was just encouraging my dad to get an MRI(=>about $1000), mainly for peace of mind.
If I could fly on unlimited domestic flights for $1000 / year or something, I would be flying a whole lot more, and eventually the airlines would be making money off me, and they'd be profitable too. I hate flying, but I'd fly more if my costs were capped (ofcourse premiums would rise yearly just like healthcare). Without the subscription, I probably would only spend $600 / year on airfare, and would do it mainly on thrifty flights... For the holidays, the airlines can add a premium subscription model, or increase reserve capacity just for the holidays... or transfer planes from business sh uttle markets to vacation traveler markets.
You are so intelligent. Grammar and spelling are imposed on languages. There is no real true grammar or spelling.
...
... "I have a New York edition, dated 1848, which contains an advertisement stating that the annual sale at that time was more than a million copies, and that more than 30,000,000 copies had been sold since 1783. In the late 40's the publishers, George F. Cooledge & Bro., devoted the whole capacity of the fastest steam press in the United States to the printing of it. This press turned out 525 copies an hour, or 5,250 a day. It was "constructed expressly for printing Webster's Elementary Spelling Book [the name had been changed in 1829] at an expense of $5,000." Down to 1889, 62,000,000 copies of the book had been sold." ...
...". Noah Webster and many other early dictionary compilers made their own spelling reforms, that is invented which spelling they felt best. I wonder where enlightened holy men such as you were to inform him that there is one true spelling for every word. Perhaps the cloud nine?
Have you ever heard a teacher say that you are not supposed to say, may, instead of, can I go to the bathroom? This is one example of grammar imposed on language. No one thinks can is wrong as used in living language(speech) save for grammar nazis(dead artifical language).
"The successive editions of his[Webster's] dictionary show still further concessions. Croud, fether, groop, gillotin, iland, instead, leperd, soe, sut, steddy, thret, thred, thum and wimmen appear only in the 1806 edition. In 1828 he went back to crowd, feather, group, island, instead, leopard, sew, soot, steady, thread, threat, thumb and women, and changed gillotin to guillotin. In addition, he restored the final e in determine, discipline, requisite, imagine, etc. In 1838, revising his dictionary, he abandoned a good many spellings that had appeared in either the 1806 or the 1828 edition, notably maiz for maize, suveran 11 for sovereign and guillotin for guillotine. But he stuck manfully to a number that were quite as revolutionary--for example, aker for acre, cag for keg, grotesk for grotesque, hainous for heinous, porpess for porpoise and tung for tongue--and they did not begin to disappear until the edition of 1854, issued by other hands and eleven years after his death."
and the popularity of Webster's dictionary work:
Do your elitist ass a favor and read H.L. Mencken's: "The American Language
I myself can read an average page in about 8 to 10 seconds - I can easily see someone beating my own time. That said, I don't usually read at that speed, especially if I'm really enjoying the book.