Buying pages of books online?

[ibneko]

http://news.com.com/Amazon,+Random+House+throw+book+at+Google/2100-1025_3-5931569.html

As Google put thousands of public domain books online Thursday, Amazon.com responded by announcing plans to allow people to read books on the Web.

Meanwhile, Random House, the world's largest publisher of trade books, said it had come up with a business model for allowing people to pay to view its books on the Internet.

Amazon's new "Amazon Pages" program will let people purchase online access to anywhere from a few pages of a book to an entire work. The e-commerce company also announced a program called "Amazon Upgrade" that will let customers pay extra to be able to access books electronically that they've had shipped to them in printed form.

...you know, now that I think about it, it might work. Apple's iTunes store has been highly successful. I think, some part because of the much lower cost, and the ability to chose select songs... and this would do the same for books. Although, the thing is, I wouldn't participate in it, like I don't buy songs off the iTunes music store, because I can get them elsewhere for even cheaper - similar to eBooks.

So, I bring to you, my first poll for a long while:
[Poll #604710]

Comments

[jaiwithani.livejournal.com]

This runs square into a little problem with fair use law. It's legal to quote, say, a page of a substantially long book as long as you attribute it (as Amazon.com does with their previews). So, really, any given page is FREE already. It's the collective work that has value, or any "significant" portion of the work. If you can buy by the page...I think the analogy is buying seconds worth of music. It's copyright law purgatory, confusing, and unlikely to appeal to a large group.

That said, I would buy portions of books...if I cold actually have the content, in an open format, which I could back up/edit/copy at leisure. A .txt, maybe a .pdf.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. Dunno. They said the release date is a year from now, at least... so... things may change before then. I dunno. It would be convenient to be able to pull up, say, a page from a cookbook, after searching. Although it's also true that you could probably just as easily find the information online anyways... I'm not sure how it'll work...

Nah, they'll never let you copy it. Even though it's pretty impossible for them to stop us from copying it even if we wanted to - shown as an image, it could be screenscraped and then OCRed into text...

:: shrugs:: either way, I now carry around a number of my favorite books in eBook form, since that's easier than transporting a suitcase of real books. I still have a few here with me, but, yeah... ...I don't know where I'm going with this. ^^;;; Oh well, back to NaNoWriMoing

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

I said maybe...I can't imagine a situation when I'd only want a few PAGES of a book and not the whole thing, though.