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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."
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....
This could be good in the sense that if Amazon gets sued, fights and wins, it'll set a precedent that'll help someone else try the same thing again with music.
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.
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.
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