yellowhandman: Books by the page

"Could I have Lord Of The Rings without all the boring hobbit bits, please?"

Google and Amazon will be selling downloads of pages and chapters from books (NY Times, reg'n req'd). The idea, apparently, is to enable you to buy just one recipe from a cookbook, or a particular chapter of a textbook.

I can imagine some people finding that useful, and also the possibility of buying individual essays from collections, or favourite poems, or maybe a single short story from an anthology. It's interesting, but hardly something that I imagine consumers have been clamoring for.

I also wonder how you'll be able to browse books to determine which bits you want to buy. They can't just let you browse the contents completely online, because otherwise you could just read the book online without buying, so I guess this is where their engines for searching the text of books will come into play.

Ultimately, it's a very Long Tail idea, isn't it? Allow people to buy stuff the way they want to, so that you can wring every last cent out of your content, by earning $1 from someone who isn't willing to spend $10 for the entire book.

Perhaps someone will shortly suggest a subscription model for online books : sign up for a membership plan and get to read as many books as you want (or a specified monthly quota) on your computer, but without being able to download or print the books. Probably too easily hackable, but much more appealing to me, because it means having a potentially huge number of books available for actual reading on your desktop, without even having to trudge down to the library.

Hmmm...perhaps I should patent that idea...Mr Bezos, are you reading this?

Trackbacks:

This entry was quoted on CNET's News.com Blogma on 4 Nov 2005.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and the man who coined the term 'Long Tail', also mentioned this entry on his Long Tail website (well worth a visit!). Looking forward to his book in 2006.

Another trackback, from a Japanese language blog, kenjimori.com, that seems to be about tech.

Technorati Tags: books, ideas, internet, longtail, web 2.0

2 Comments:

At 11:42 AM, Anonymous said...: It is also a very bad idea and cuts against the affordances of paper. See, "The myth of the paperless office" by A.J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper for a rundown of the reasons...
At 6:32 PM, Ed McLean said...: In the academic research market subscription model aggregations are thriving (for example, ebrary and netlibrary). There are still plenty of publisher unwilling to take a leap like this. Publishers are a cautious bunch - and in many ways understandably so.