Amazon to serve up books by the page
Book buyers will soon be able to buy books by the page in a new service from Amazon.com.
The Amazon Pages service will let customers buy portions of a book online, as little as a single page.
The cost for most books would be a few cents a page, though it might be higher for more specialized works.
Amazon’s announcement came on the day that Google Inc. began creating online links for entire contents of books that are in the public domain.
Google is involved in a copyright battle with writers and publishers over how much material can be scanned and indexed from major libraries.
Amazon also plans to offer a second program, Amazon Upgrade, with access to the full text of traditional works.
Under Amazon Upgrade, anybody purchasing a paper book could also look at the entire text online, at any time, for a “small” additional charge.
Both services are expected to begin next year.
“We see this as a win-win-win situation: good for readers, good for publishers and good for authors,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Thursday.
Because it plans to show only snippets from copyrighted books, Google argues its scanning project constitutes “fair use” of the material.
Amazon had statements of support from some publishers and an expression of confidence from the U.S. authors’ guild.
The Amazon programs are the way copyright is supposed to work,” the guild’s executive director, Paul Aiken, said Thursday. “You provide access to readers and some compensation flows back to rights holders. It seems like a positive development.”
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