Amazon to Let Readers Buy Just the Good Parts
Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday previewed a service to sell just a few pages or chapters of a book -- allowing one of the world’s oldest media to be chopped up and customized like an album on iTunes.
Although he offered few details, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said Amazon customers soon would be able to buy digital snippets of books for as little as a few cents a page. That might come in handy for tourists planning a trip, chefs seeking recipes or students assigned one chapter in an expensive textbook.
The service could help the Internet retailer emerge as a more publisher-friendly digital library than Google Inc., which Thursday launched a free database of online books. Unlike Google, Amazon plans to offer books only with the blessings of their publishers.
Analysts said Amazon’s approach, which builds on a current feature that offers a peek into some books, expanded the online experience and prepared for a day when people were more accustomed to reading long passages of text on the computer.
“It makes it more like browsing in a bookstore,” said Think Equity Partners analyst Edward Weller, “and you don’t even have to put your clothes on.”
John Sargent, CEO of Holtzbrinck Publishers, which includes St. Martin’s Press and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the success of Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store gave him hope that book publishers and authors could find an online business model that gave them a fair share of the proceeds.
“This is a brave new world,” he said.
Amazon said it would sell a digital “upgrade” to some books for an additional fee. For example, a computer programmer who buys a software manual would receive the book in the mail but could also read through the digital version online.
“The search engines have been working on book-copying strategies themselves,” said Legg Mason analyst Scott Devitt. “This is Amazon showing people it too has a pretty compelling database of book text.”
In contrast, Google is scanning vast numbers of books to add to its Google Print search engine -- many without permission from the publishers. Its partners include the University of Michigan, Stanford University, Harvard University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University.
On Thursday, Google opened its digital library with thousands of books that are in the public domain, meaning that they’re not under copyright. Users can search for keywords among the pages or read entire books on their computer screens.
“This is a surprising bit of playing by the rules for a company that routinely makes up the rules,” said Outsell Inc. analyst Chuck Richard.
On Wednesday, Google said it would resume scanning books, regardless of whether they were covered by copyright. For copyrighted books, Google displays only snippets of pages.
But the fact that it displays ads beside search results infuriates many publishers. Trade groups representing publishers and authors have sued Google for copyright infringement, contending that the Internet firm has no right to scan entire books, even if it doesn’t display them in full.
Google contends that the scanning is allowed and that its program can help boost sales by making titles easier to find.
