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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."
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!
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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).
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How will you know which page to buy if you can't see it until you buy it?
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....
Damn Slashdot editors. Mispelled vendor lock-in.
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.
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.
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?
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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
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.
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 ?
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!
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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make install -not war
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.