Amazon - Books by the Page
More Amazon stuff this evening:
Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade will provide paid access to books by the page, and the ability to “upgrade” access to the full contents of the book.
Press release:
The first program, Amazon Pages, will “un-bundle” the physical-world experience of buying and reading a book so that customers can simply and inexpensively purchase and read online just the pages they need. For example, an entrepreneur interested in marketing his or her business could purchase the relevant chapters from several best-selling business books.
The second program, Amazon Upgrade, will allow customers to “upgrade” their purchase of a physical book on Amazon.com to include complete online access. For example, a software developer who buys a Java programming book will not only get the physical book delivered to his or her home, but will also get 24×7 Web access to the complete interior text of the book. Buy a cookbook and you will not only have it on your shelf, but also be able to access it anywhere via the Web.
Personally, I like owning actual books, as I find them much easier to read and carry around than a computer or PDA. But something like this would be handy to get at my personal collection while travelling. Plus it might cut back on the volume of books I end up donating to the Palo Alto library.
This shouldn’t affect fiction book sales at all (who wants half a novel?), but could put a dent in sales of some types of reference books.
This seems a little bit like a “book” version of the old mp3.com service. If you owned the CD, they would let you stream the bits from their server. I seem to be slowly reconstructing my own private version of that service in our house, although if disk storage increases quickly enough I may just switch to duplicating the content everywhere.
More comments at TheStreet.com
November 4th, 2005 at 5:18 am
Ho John,
I have come across this bug again. I can see the ‘new and improved….’ and ’six low cost …’ posts under the recent posts listing on the left menu but can find these articles as i roll down the blog? The blog entry after the mechanical turk item is the one to do with windows live and not the ’six low cost…’
Have you come across this?
November 4th, 2005 at 9:38 am
This is a navigation issue — only some of the posts are marked to show up on the front page, but the sidebar shows the most recent posts in all categories except “links”.
The previous/next post links on the post page aren’t filtered by category, which is also confusing.
I still haven’t come up with a good (simple) scheme for partitioning the content.
November 6th, 2005 at 6:46 am
Amazon will Bücher seitenweise verkaufen
Ob Google, Microsoft oder Amazon, alle stellen neuerdings Bücher ins Netz. Seit kurzem ist das viel kritisierte Google Print als Testversion online. Wer Buchinhalte nicht nur suchen, sondern auch betrachten will, muss sich bei Google als User registri…