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."

Comments

LOTR

[Munta]

Excellent - I now only need to pay for the first and last page of Lord of The Rings. Saving me money and time!

The gift that keeps on giving

[lildogie]

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?

Re:The gift that keeps on giving

[martijnd]

> 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 )

Re:The gift that keeps on giving

[Spacejock]

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.

So basically

[TheNationalist]

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).

Re:So basically

[Mac Degger]

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!

Question...

[fullcircleflight]

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

textbooks

[TedCheshireAcad]

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....

terrific idea for academics

[gonerill]

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.

Nothing to do with mp3.com

[DeepRedux]

This has nothing to do with mp3.com, because Amazon is getting permission from the copyright owners unlike mp3.com. From CNET:

As with Amazon's existing "Search Inside the Book" feature, only books in the public domain or whose copyright holders have granted permission will be included in the new digital book programs, he [Jeff Bezos] said. That will help the company avoid the copyright concerns Google's project has sparked.

This is more like iTunes than mp3.com.

A Brainless Assault on Google and Fair Use.

[twitter]

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?