Amazon.com Enters the Bookscanning Wars
Posted on November 7, 2005
Just to make things even more confusing in the Bookscanning Wars, PC World reports that now Amazon.com is getting into the game. Amazon.com will offer two plans in 2006 where customers can buy a digitized part of a book.
Amazon.com plans to offer two programs next year that will allow customers to buy digitized books and portions of them in combination with its traditional, mail-order book service.Amazon.com is actually going to pay royalties, so that's a plus for authors and publishers. But if we've already bought the book, do we need to be able to see it online? Will authors really want to sell only Chapter 22 of their latest book? And will readers only buy the naughty parts out of the Jade Lee books? Only time will answer these burning questions.With Amazon Pages, customers can search through its index of online texts and purchase the pages or chapters they want to read, according to a company press release. Amazon Upgrade will allow customer who purchase a physical book to have online access to the entire text through the Internet, it said.
For two years, Amazon has offered its Search Inside the Book function, which mines digitized text for selected keywords. The company says now that one in two of the books it sells are in the program, and the service has been expanded to the U.K., Germany, France, Canada and Japan. The company said it is working with publishers and authors to ensure they are compensated fairly.