Selling books by the page

By Steve Malone

Posted on 7 Nov 2005 at 10:41

The book digitisation gold rush took another turn last week when uber-store Amazon announced a new scheme to sell books by the page.

The online store, which started out selling books before branching out into various other forms of merchandise, says it has come up with two new propositions for customers. The first scheme is called 'Amazon Pages' in which a potential customer can buy just a chapter or even a page of a book that can be read online.

The idea, according to Amazon, is that someone can purchase the use of references across a range of books to create a particular archive. For example, someone selling spices might want to cull pages from the best curry books from a range of books to create their own list of recipes.

The other scheme is 'Amazon Upgrade' although it sounds more like selling you the same thing twice. Under this plan, once you have purchased the physical version of a book you can - for a small fee - purchase an online version of the same volume that can be read online 'anywhere'.

Both plans are merely announced at the moment. The launch dates and the pricing plans have yet to be announced.