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Amazon.com Enable Customers to Purchase Online Access to Any Page, Section, or Chapter of a Book
After over 10 years of online businesses, Amazon.com still the #1 when it comes to innovations. Over the last years, it has introduced new services that make its image as a cutting-edge retailer.
At the beginning of November, 2005, Amazon.com announced two innovative programs to benefit readers, authors, publishers and affiliates.
The first program, Amazon Pages, will allow customers to purchase and read online just the pages they need. For example, a Netpreneur interested in marketing his business online could purchase the relevant chapters from several internet marketing books.
(I’m not sure this will apply to novels, biographies, etc!)
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.
(I’m skeptical that consumers want to read entire books online, because of the inconvenience of staring at a
computer screen for a long time.)
“Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade leverage Amazon’s existing Search Inside the Book technology to give customers unusual flexibility in how they buy and read books,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon.com. “In collaboration with our publishing partners, we’re working hard to make the world’s books instantly accessible anytime and anywhere.”
For Amazon Pages, Bezos said, the cost for most books would be a few cents per page, although readers would likely be charged more for specialized reference 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, Bezos said. For instance, a $20 book might cost an extra $1.99.
Copyright holders would determine whether the pages could be printed or downloaded. “We feel strongly that copyright holders get to make these decisions,” Bezos said.
Coincidence or not, the Amazon announcement came on the same day that Google Inc. began serving up the entire contents of books and government documents that aren’t entangled in a copyright battle over how much material can be scanned and indexed from five major libraries.
Google reportedly has also been interested in selling individual pages of text. A spokesman for the search giant,
Nathan Tyler, said that Google “is exploring new access models to help authors and publishers sell more books online but we don’t have anything to announce.”
Digital book efforts are also made by Yahoo and Microsoft who are working with the Open Content Alliance, a group that is copying material in the public domain. Participating companies are therefore protected from most legal obstacles.
Separately, Microsoft said that it will digitize 25 million pages of the British Library’s out-of-copyright holdings, the equivalent of 100,000 books.
Rick Prelinger, administrator of the Open Content Alliance and board president of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco organization that is a major backer of the effort, said he hopes the companies will work together so their efforts aren’t duplicated. “I don’t think this area will be characterized by cutthroat competition,” he said. “Even if it is competition, it’s wonderful that it’s over something as great as books.”
Putting books online is the latest battleground among big Internet companies but “Amazon.com is skilled at finding features that boost sales while creating value for customers,” says Patti Freeman Evans, retail analyst at Jupiter Research.
The publishing industry largely embraced Amazon’s digital book plan. Only books Amazon licenses will be available for reading online.
For Amazon.com, these innovations have paid off. Net sales are expected to be between $8.4 billion and $8.7 billion
this year, with operating income projected to range between $403 million and $478 million!
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