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Amazon to Sell Books by Page, Display Books You Own

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the shaky-ground dept.

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."

16 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Similar to mp3.com? by maverick215 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  2. The gift that keeps on giving by lildogie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:The gift that keeps on giving by martijnd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > 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.

      So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.

      If the service allows you to go back it actually good for the auther -- he/she has another opportunity to convince you buy that next episode of the series.

      I cleaned up my book collection the other day -- nearly all of them I have read about once and then they started gathering dust. Nearly all books out there are read at most once , if they are that lucky. Plenty of books I started to read only to decide half way through that it wasn't worth my time (though that happens most with library books where I tend to pick and choose books beyond my usual favorites )

    2. Re:The gift that keeps on giving by Haydn+Fenton · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Same chances of somebody going back to a computer game they have finished I'd guess. Or the same chances somebody will watch a movie again. Because they enjoy it, or because they missed something out, or because now they know the basics, it will make much more sense the second time round.
      If the book was good enough I see no reason why they wouldn't read it again. I'm currently reading HHGG again, and The Elegant Universe, it's pretty much like I'm reading them for the first time simply because theres so much to them you can't possibly remember it all after 1 reading.

    3. Re:The gift that keeps on giving by Spacejock · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm a published author, and I like the idea. Only a tiny fraction of the public will sit and read an entire book off their screen, but they might read the first chapter if they think they've managed to scab a freebie off someone. (Ill-gotten gains and all that.) If they get hooked you can bet there's a chance they'll buy a paper copy, or perhaps the author's next book. The only sales you might lose are to those people who read a bit and don't like it. On the other hand, those people currently have to pay for the paper to preview it, and if they then decided it sucked they could bad-mouth the book for weeks. They're less likely to moan and whinge about it if they paid nothing.

      --
      Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
    4. Re:The gift that keeps on giving by shudde · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.

      I've always found my books have a much higher 'repeat' value than any DVD (which many people obssessively collect). While I cleanse the collection of the trash periodically there's no way I'd part with most of them.

    5. Re:The gift that keeps on giving by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 2, Insightful

      he/she has another opportunity to convince you buy that next episode of the series.

      Umm, D00d, there is more, thankfully, to the printed word than "Dragonlance" or "The Wheel of Time."

      Sure, one can argue that this program helps the 'unknown' but prolific author who might value promotion over coin at that particular stage in his career, but it hurts an established, "name" author. You may not care that it hurts an established "name" author, you may even derive a certain degree of glee in sticking it to someone with more talent and/or money than you have, but let's not pretend for a moment that every author everywhere is in favor of this, like "we" somehow managed to convince ourselves that every musician and composer was in favor of free music downloads but were being constrained by those evil music industry types.

      The bottom line is that it should be up to the author whether or not his book is part of this program. Anything else is digital mob rule.

    6. Re:The gift that keeps on giving by Bigbutt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Eh? I have quite a few books and enjoy reading them over again. I've read some books 20 times or more. Sometimes books that are a series or have relation to other books don't come out very often. So I have to break out the first books and read them again to figure out where I am in the series :)

      What, do you listen to music only once? Watch movies only once?

      [John]

      --
      Shit better not happen!
  3. So basically by TheNationalist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:So basically by Mac+Degger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It gets even better: "...so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in." [from the blurb].

      Basically, they're selling you what fair use already allows you to do!

      --
      -- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
  4. Question... by fullcircleflight · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How will you know which page to buy if you can't see it until you buy it?

  5. Whats the Point? by p0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  6. terrific idea for academics by gonerill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. A Brainless Assault on Google and Fair Use. by twitter · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Buy a page? How stupid. How on earth would I know I want the page before I read it? Why would a particular page come up to begin with? I can think of few instances I'd want to look at a single page of a book but none of them would separate me from my money. Google's print service and book reviews spring to mind.

    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.

  8. This could hurt conference proceeding by mbone · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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 ?

  9. THIS IS BAD BAD BAD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful


    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.