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Amazon launches campaign to sell books by the page

Book buyers, soon you'll be able to pay by the page.

With its new Amazon Pages service, Amazon.com plans to let customers buy portions of a book -- even just one page -- for online viewing. A second program, Amazon Upgrade, will offer full online access when a traditional text is purchased.

Both services are expected to begin next year.

"We see this as a win-win-win situation: good for readers, good for publishers and good for authors," Amazon chief executive officer Jeff Bezos told reporters on Thursday.

For Amazon Pages, Bezos said, the cost for most books would be a few US 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 US$20 book might cost an extra US$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.

The Amazon announcement came on the same day that Google 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.

The Authors Guild and five major publishers are suing to prevent Google from scanning copyrighted material in the libraries without explicit permission. Because it plans to show only snippets from copyrighted books, Google argues its scanning project constitutes "fair use" of the material.

"The Amazon programs are the way copyright is supposed to work," the Authors Guild's executive director, Paul Aiken, said on Thursday. "You provide access to readers and some compensation flows back to rights holders. It seems like a positive development."

Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg said his company had been talking to Amazon, Google and others about pay-per-page and other programs, but added that no commitments had been made.

Random House Inc released a statement on Thursday saying it will "work with online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals and other appropriate vendors to offer the contents of its books to consumers for online viewing on a pay-per-page-view basis."
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