Amazon.com Offers Sneak Peek At Grisham's New Legal Thriller

Posted on January 25, 2002

Amazon.com is making the first two chapters of John Grisham's new novel, The Summons, available as a free, instant digital download to customers who order the book before its Feb. 5 national on-sale date. Amazon.com has recently offered free streaming music content to customers who have placed pre-orders for new releases from such artists as Jewel, Elton John, Alanis Morissette and others.

Grisham fans can go directly to Amazon.com to pre-order the book and download the first two chapters. The Summons download is in Adobe portable document format (PDF). Though not scheduled for release until Feb. 5, The Summons has already been among Amazon.com's 10 top-selling titles since November based solely on pre-orders.

Many online bookstores and book-related websites offer excerpts and first-chapters from books. However, the excerpt is typically no larger than one chapter. The excerpts are a way for readers to preview a book -- like they can in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. Amazon.com also recently launched its Look Inside feature which allows visitors to view the interior pages of books online.

"John Grisham is a perennial Amazon.com customer favorite, and we're thrilled to be offering customers an early look at his new legal thriller," said Steve Kessel, general manager of Amazon.com's Books, Music, Video and DVD business. "We've had tremendous success offering advance digital downloads for new CD releases, and extending that experience to books is a huge win for both customers and publishers."