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Books Media The Internet Your Rights Online

Amazon to Sell Books by Page, Display Books You Own 138

Posted by CowboyNeal from the shaky-ground dept.
Josuah writes "Forbes is reporting that Amazon plans to sell books by the page, so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in. What I found more interesting though was the mention of a program called Amazon Upgrade, which will allow you to view books you own from any web browser. Sounds awfully similar to the MP3.com case. I'm guessing Amazon Upgrade also means you need to purchase all your books from Amazon. Interesting value-add proposition."
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Amazon to Sell Books by Page, Display Books You Own More

Amazon to Sell Books by Page, Display Books You Own

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  • no... I don't think mp3.com could ever dream of having as much $$ as amazon to fight any potential fight of free use. And I doubt publishers have quite as strong a group as the RIAA to act as the 800lb gorilla.

    • Re:Similar to mp3.com? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Gubbe ( 705219 )
      This could be good in the sense that if Amazon gets sued, fights and wins, it'll set a precedent that'll help someone else try the same thing again with music.
    • Amazon.com is undoubtedly doing this with the permission of the publishers. The publishers are obviously fans of Amazon.com and probably trust them - whats good for Amazon is good for the publishers and vice versa.

      That wasn't the case with mp3.com and the record industry, mp3.com didn't sell any RIAA music.

  • LOTR (Score:3, Funny)

    by Munta ( 925134 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @10:29AM (#13957317) Homepage
    Excellent - I now only need to pay for the first and last page of Lord of The Rings. Saving me money and time!

  • The gift that keeps on giving (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lildogie ( 54998 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @10:29AM (#13957320)
    So I buy a book as a gift, and give it away, but I get to keep the online copy?

    Cool for me, rats for the author.

    Maybe they could do this with music?

    • Re:The gift that keeps on giving (Score:4, Insightful)

      by martijnd ( 148684 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @10:49AM (#13957384)
      > So I buy a book as a gift, and give it away, but I get to keep the online copy?
      > Cool for me, rats for the author.

      So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.

      If the service allows you to go back it actually good for the auther -- he/she has another opportunity to convince you buy that next episode of the series.

      I cleaned up my book collection the other day -- nearly all of them I have read about once and then they started gathering dust. Nearly all books out there are read at most once , if they are that lucky. Plenty of books I started to read only to decide half way through that it wasn't worth my time (though that happens most with library books where I tend to pick and choose books beyond my usual favorites )

      • Same chances of somebody going back to a computer game they have finished I'd guess. Or the same chances somebody will watch a movie again. Because they enjoy it, or because they missed something out, or because now they know the basics, it will make much more sense the second time round.
        If the book was good enough I see no reason why they wouldn't read it again. I'm currently reading HHGG again, and The Elegant Universe, it's pretty much like I'm reading them for the first time simply because theres so muc

      • So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.

        I've always found my books have a much higher 'repeat' value than any DVD (which many people obssessively collect). While I cleanse the collection of the trash periodically there's no way I'd part with most of them.

      • he/she has another opportunity to convince you buy that next episode of the series.

        Umm, D00d, there is more, thankfully, to the printed word than "Dragonlance" or "The Wheel of Time."

        Sure, one can argue that this program helps the 'unknown' but prolific author who might value promotion over coin at that particular stage in his career, but it hurts an established, "name" author. You may not care that it hurts an established "name" author, you may even derive a certain degree of glee in sticking it to someon
      • What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway?

        ?

        I re-read my favourite books every 2-5 years. More than half of my main bookshelf I've read at least twice.

        A friend of mine once made the same comment as you, and I thought it was totally strange. I see the stories I like as being similar to landmarks - I can come back to them every so often, and see how I perceive them differently as I get older.
      • Eh? I have quite a few books and enjoy reading them over again. I've read some books 20 times or more. Sometimes books that are a series or have relation to other books don't come out very often. So I have to break out the first books and read them again to figure out where I am in the series :)

        What, do you listen to music only once? Watch movies only once?

        [John]
      • I cleaned up my book collection the other day -- nearly all of them I have read about once and then they started gathering dust. Nearly all books out there are read at most once , if they are that lucky.

        Then set them free [bookcrossing.com].

        That way they get to be read more than once, by many different people, and fulfill their purpose in life. Release your dusty books into the world and let them live again!

    • Re:The gift that keeps on giving (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Spacejock ( 727523 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @11:10AM (#13957452)
      I'm a published author, and I like the idea. Only a tiny fraction of the public will sit and read an entire book off their screen, but they might read the first chapter if they think they've managed to scab a freebie off someone. (Ill-gotten gains and all that.) If they get hooked you can bet there's a chance they'll buy a paper copy, or perhaps the author's next book. The only sales you might lose are to those people who read a bit and don't like it. On the other hand, those people currently have to pay for the paper to preview it, and if they then decided it sucked they could bad-mouth the book for weeks. They're less likely to moan and whinge about it if they paid nothing.
    • As was brought up many times in the Google print articles here, very few people will sit and read a book on their computer screen. I suppose there are a few, the same people who drive 10 miles out of their way to save .02/gallon on gas or to redeem a .25 coupon, but horay for them. You'd have to pay me a pretty good price to sit here and read a book online.

  • So basically (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheNationalist ( 908193 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @10:31AM (#13957325) Homepage
    They're going to make you pay for what you would otherwise do for free at a bookstore (read parts of the book before you buy).

    • Re:So basically (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mac Degger ( 576336 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @10:49AM (#13957383) Journal
      It gets even better: "...so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in." [from the blurb].

      Basically, they're selling you what fair use already allows you to do!
      • Not only that, but how are we meant to know which part of the book we want unless we buy it first? If we could read the excerpt to see which part we wanted, there would be no point buying it since we can clearly read it for free anyway...

        DAMN YOU AMAZON!!1!!one! TRYING TO TRICK US INTO THINKING YOUR BEING REALLY NICE, MAKING THINGS EASIER AND CHEAPER FOR US.
      • ### Basically, they're selling you what fair use already allows you to do!

        That however would requires that you already have the book at hand, which most often you don't.
        • Fair use is also limited in amount and scope of usage. When you *buy* a book, you can fairly use a certain percentage of the book--I believe it's 15%--but if it's a compilation of works, then you can't excerpt a whole short story, for example. In terms of scope, you can use it for personal reasons or for some educational purposes.
        • Or to go to a library.
      • It all really depends on how big the exceprt is. From a tutorial/learning textbook point of view, maybe there's a couple of chapters I'd like to learn while the rest I already know. It's quite easy to see which chapters contain what information and I would only get the chapters that I want to see and learn. By owning paying for the part that I want to see, I don't have to pay for all the extra crap that I either know already or don't want to see.
    • They're going to make you pay for what you would otherwise do for free at a bookstore (read parts of the book before you buy).

      Isn't the key here that the portion of your library bought from Amazon becomes automatically computer-indexable? It does indeed sound as though Amazon should give it away for free...

    • But you don't have to bother to go to the bookstore. You can do it at home. That's all that Amazon does, really, it lets you do things that otherwise would take place in a physical store.

  • Yeah, but will I have the option to buy the pages used?
    • I know you were joking around but that raises a good selling point for this venture. Previously, authors and publishers got no revenue from the sale of used books. But an "Amazon Upgrade" would presumably entitle them to some revenue from the sale whether or not the book was new or used. Seems a good reason for them to support it.

  • Question... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fullcircleflight ( 883189 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @10:37AM (#13957350)
    How will you know which page to buy if you can't see it until you buy it?
    • Easy, they'll hire the newly form army of underpaid mechanical turks to write a 3-cents-worth informative preview on every and each book page they sell. Is amazon going down the drain or what?
    • Amazon still provides excerpts, Search Inside, and Look Inside for many books. You can many times at least see the table of contents, selection from the introduction or first chapter, and index. Also, see the above comments.
    • I am a graduate student studying psychology,
      and I make extensive use of online databases such as PsycINFO
      in order to find journal articles and books that are relevant to
      the topic I do research on. Now, there are many edited books out there,
      chapters in these books are contributed by different professional researchers,
      and these databases tell me which chapter I might be interested in, with
      complete chapter titles, abstracts and page numbers.

      Normally if I want to get hold of these chapters I would go to the lib

  • textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TedCheshireAcad ( 311748 ) <ted@fUMLAUTc.rit.edu minus punct> on Saturday November 05, 2005 @10:40AM (#13957359) Homepage
    This would be a very useful service if textbooks were included. I, along with many other students, know the pain of buying a $120 textbook and only using the first 2 chapters, then selling it back to the book store for $20 and a Hershey's bar.

    Of course, this was before I figured out their racket and started buying international textbooks....

    • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tink2000 ( 524407 )
      Sucks for you then, because pretty soon 1. Congress will pretty much force the publishers to sell international editions at the same markup as our versions 2. the publishers are already offering etexts at about a 45% of new book cost. Why is 2 bad? Because you can't sell back your license. As for getting back only $20, blame your professor(s) for not adopting the same text semester after semester, and blame yourself for (most likely) going to sell back on the day of the exam. Most buybacks buy a certain num
      • Yes, the blame is on the publishers. The professors are just ignorant in this case, so up on their academic high horses that they don't even bother to think of how much the book costs the students.

        Textbooks are such a gouge. I for one believe strongly in the power of the free market economy, so I guess they're not that big of a gouge if people keep buying them. Still, though, I'll continue to import my books from the Netherlands as long as I can - and if Congress does legislate these costs as you say t
        • Textbooks are such a gouge. I for one believe strongly in the power of the free market economy, so I guess they're not that big of a gouge if people keep buying them.

          If there was ever an example illustrating how little free market there is for certain items, textbooks are one of them. It is a mandatory compelled purchase. On campus/off campus bookstores typically 'compete' with books at the same fixed prices.

          Here is interesting study about why textbooks are so expensive: http://calpirg.org.nyud.net:8090/r [nyud.net]

          • That is an interesting study, to be sure. However, the apparent proposed solution to the problems (online texts with updates every so often) isn't quite the soothing balm the author intends it to be. Certainly, etexts would reduce immediate costs, but the cynic in me says that eventually those etexts would be running the price of a real book. Publishers are all about getting as much money for the product as possible (and that makes sense, in a free market sort of way). But don't ever kid yourself; those edu
            • Now granted, textbooks don't need to be bulletproof and able to withstand an atomic assault, but they are going to get used more than the King book

              You must have taken different classes than I am.
      • I'm mostly with you, but you also have to remember the accreditation authorities. For your school to stay accredited, they have to keep the average age of their texts below a target set by the accreditors. It's even worse because the accreditors don't just tell them what that target is. They say it's "part of the whole picture" they look at when the school is up for re-accreditation, along with scholarly publication by faculty and modern equipment and facilities. My undergraduate school unwent re-accred
      • It's not the professors. They're just as hamstrung as the students. The publishers keep rolling out new versions and you cannot buy new the old versions, so they cannot list the "out of print" edition as being the official text book. What I do appreciate, though, is when professors make their own problem sets or scan to PDF the problems from the book. That way, if I buy an older edition to save money, I at least have the right exercises, because that's often the only (if any) thing that changes from one edi
    • See, your problem is that you went through the middle man. Much more money can be made off used textbooks if you sell them directly to the students. If you buy it for $125, then the bookstore will buy it from you for $20, and then resell it to some other student for $75. You coul sell it for $60, or maybe even $74, because students are always willing to save money. I think that there's even some sites that facilitate you selling books online, so you don't even have to go through the trouble of making po
      • Ah yes, the old microthink method. The difference is that through your example there are only a certain number of students that will get exposed to your advertising, be it through posters or one of the internet board swaps. By selling it to your bookstore, you are selling it to not just the students in your area, but students across the country as well. Most bookstores buy a certain number for their shelves and the rest are bought for a third party used bookseller. In some cases, those same books get bought
        • You don't even see the point. If your school sells the books for 93.75, then students could sell it directly to other students for $90.00, or $80, or even $65, and they would still be getting more than the book store would give them, assuming they sold it before the exam. Which is a pretty bad idea, considering you'll probably need that text to study from. With a $30 differential between what the book store is selling the book for, and what the bookstore is buying the books for, you can bet there will be
          • No, I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't see the point. Having worked this business for a year longer than most people are in undergrad, I have found that people who hustle their books to other students instead of selling it back to the store tend to end up with a bunch of books they didn't sell to students. Without fail, every June I see some new graduate show up with a tub full of books that are absolutely obsolete. You are also not taking into account the concept that people drop classes, making that tex
    • The one I am most familiar with is Wiley. They have a program called WileySelect [xanedu.com] that allows an instructor to create a custom textbook with only the chapters they will use. They have a demo [xanedu.com] you can check out. Of course, they don't let a student create one of these for themselves... "Your custom courseware product can be delivered to your students in print format with digital access, or as an online-only product with one-time personal printing rights. You can also bundle your printed product with a leadi
      • ... and you'd be right, except on these custom publications the bookstore usually loses money because there are only 10% returns rate on these books (as opposed to a regular textbook from Wiley or Pearson, where you can get 100% of your cost back provided you return the book within 365 days from the invoice date). Too, that's an $18 cost. Apply a 25% markup (standard for the new text markup) and then add a few more points on top of that because you aren't going to be able to return everything. Add to that t
  • MP3 singles I can deal with since they are already sold seperately anyway, but why in the hell would anyone want to buy a single page?

    It would get awful messy even if you used the examples given in the article, a recipe on a specific page - it would be a bummer if it then said "gather the same utensils as for the cake on the previous recipe" or something.

    silly silly silly.

  • typo (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Interesting value-add proposition.


    Damn Slashdot editors. Mispelled vendor lock-in.

  • Sounds like a bit of "buy book, sell book, read book" could be going on in the future, if they go ahead with this online version of the book.
  • This'll do before content providers (music, movies, books, games) finally evolve into a pay-per-byte model - perhaps with a small monthly charge to allow you to search for free, take small `free` samples etc. For some books it makes sense to only grab a couple of chapters, while for reference books you really want it all on hand all the time.
  • I bought the last page of a bunch of books. Hope I don't get sued for posting them here. Here goes...Ready?

    THE END

  • Whats the Point? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by p0 ( 740290 )
    Why would you pay for just a page from a book? What exactly could it be worth? Isn't the whole point of buying books is to, well, have the entire book and not just a few paragraphs of it (probably the same content/information you can get from somewhere else for free).
    • If you're doing research, and you want to see the context of a quotation or footnoted item, you could just buy the page referred to.

      I hated having to hunt down books in the library to find a referenced passage. I'd happily pay a bit to just go to Amazon and say "give me page 502 of this book".
  • I want the whole thing to read. I can read 20 pages in two minutes. If I want to read in tiny bits, I would get the newspaper or a magazine.
    • This guy's telling us he can read a page in six seconds, and even keep up this incredible pace for 20 consecutive pages? Bull-shit. Obviously I can't bring myself to believe he can think this fast, but that's not all - only a small portion of the eye sees well enough for reading, and I doubt he can have it traverse 20 pages in 2 minutes.
      • The exceptions would be the Bible and Robert Massie's "Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War". These books take forever to read!
  • I doubt this idea will go through as planned. It seems to me that many people that cite things haven't actually read the relevant work in its entirety and have just skimmed through snippets. (A general point about academia, here, feel free to enlighten me.) I'm sure this would affect sales.

    Also, who'd want to pay by the page when you can read extracts on-line free with Google Print?

  • terrific idea for academics (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gonerill ( 139660 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @11:19AM (#13957486) Homepage
    Issues of lock-in and implementation aside, this is a brilliant proposition for academics and researchers (like me). I'd pay money to be able to do full-text searches on my library: I can't tell you how common (and frustrating) it is to chase after a half-remembered quote or reference amongst your books. On the Mac, Tiger/Spotlight already makes searching your PDF copies of journal articles much easier. Books would be a great addition. Amazon should do this retroactively, as they know all the books I've bought from them. Ideally, it would also be available via their API, so that beautiful but basically useless applications like Delicious Library [delicious-monster.com] would aquire real functionality.

  • Nothing to do with mp3.com (Score:4, Informative)

    by DeepRedux ( 601768 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @11:26AM (#13957528)
    This has nothing to do with mp3.com, because Amazon is getting permission from the copyright owners unlike mp3.com. From CNET: [com.com]
    As with Amazon's existing "Search Inside the Book" feature, only books in the public domain or whose copyright holders have granted permission will be included in the new digital book programs, he [Jeff Bezos] said. That will help the company avoid the copyright concerns Google's project has sparked.
    This is more like iTunes than mp3.com.
  • Forbes is reporting that Amazon plans to sell books by the page, so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in.

    Well, we read only a page a time, so I guess that would work.

    What I found more interesting though was the mention of a program called Amazon Upgrade, which will allow you to view books you own from any web browser.

    What I'd find interesting is having free access to O'Reilly's on-line versions of printed books I've already bought and paid for. Or even better, have the good folks at O'R
  • Something I have yet to hear mentioned is that some people still have little or no interest in reading a book online (or printing the online content out). I personally enjoy the weight of a book and the feel of the pages. If Amazon does make all the content of all the books I've ever bought from them (many) available online to me, I probably will not use this feature.

    I won't deny that it has applications (I bought a textbook, left it at home, need it at school, or simply don't want to carry it), but it is
  • 1) Go to library
    2) Find quote(s) you are interested in
    3) Photocopy said pages under fair use, or take notes the old fashioned way
    4) ...
    5) Save money (profit?)
    • Even people who enter a lot of information into Wikipedia don't often visit libraries. The huge bulk of it comes from Google. Surprise, people overwhelmingly prefer convenience, and are willing to sacrifice other things (quality, money) for it.
    • 1) Go to library 2) Find quote(s) you are interested in 3) Photocopy said pages under fair use, or take notes the old fashioned way 4) ... 5) Save money (profit?) Or if you actually worked at a library you would discover that there may be fifty additional steps in that process. Trust me when I say that it isn't always easy finding a book that you need quickly and I work at one of the largest university libraries in Boston.
  • How am I going to know what pages to buy? Am I going to be allowed to read through the book online and only buy the pages I want? Wouldn't that then mean I could just read the entire book online and not buy anything? Or do I need to already have access to a copy of the book and then buy the pages I want? So, why would I then buy from Amazon, since I already have access to a copy of the book?

    This business plan makes no sense.

  • A Brainless Assault on Google and Fair Use. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by twitter ( 104583 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @11:40AM (#13957598) Homepage Journal
    Buy a page? How stupid. How on earth would I know I want the page before I read it? Why would a particular page come up to begin with? I can think of few instances I'd want to look at a single page of a book but none of them would separate me from my money. Google's print service and book reviews spring to mind.

    Google searches text and gives you relevant quotes. The page itself might be available if it looked like the thing was related to what you were interested in to begin with. This service is mostly useful for finding books that might help your research, like a very good card catalog. If the book's copyright is expired, Google will save you the trip to the library, but not always yet. In my last search, I found a 2004 reprint of a book originally published in 1918. Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] had the text.

    The only other case I can think of is that someone might reference a book or a passage of a recent book. That might make me want to look at the book. Hopefully, the author would simply quote enough of the book to get their point across. If I really wanted more I'd go to the library.

    Oh wait, these same greed heads have already assaulted the libraries. See here [slashdot.org]. It's always amazing how greedy and stupid people can be. RMS was right again [gnu.org]. How else can you get people deep into debt over school books besides charging per word?

    • Have you used Amazon's "look inside this book" feature? You can either flip through the book electronically, or search for keywords; Amazon then lists all the instances of a particular keyword in the book, as well as the context. It's incredibly useful.

      But why in the world would I want to *buy* a page when I can look at it for free right now?

  • What kind of format would the pages be in i wonder? PDF? Html? Graphic Images? It wasn't apparent from the article.
  • Come on! Why should I buy a full page when I'm interested only by a sentence or two? No, that won't work.
  • Seems a not-so-smart thing, at least at first glance.
    For users: they will spend more money by printing the pages at home, unless they will read only by screen. Very unconfortable if you like to read while in the bathroom ... in the bathtub I mean :-)
    For the company: I see people trading the book pages in order to gather the whole book and paying just few pages ... if any.
    Later I can also see the rise of issues with the DRM [wikipedia.org] for books and magazines.
    Finally, a lot more of wasted paper and empty ink cartrid
  • Buying books by the pages and chapters is not a new idea. I actually wrote about it way back in 2003. Random House, the mega publisher, is obviously giving its approval to Amazon's proposal by coming out with its own idea of micro-payment model -- charging 5 cents a page, with 4 of that going to the authors and the publishers, as reported here [blogspot.com].<br><br>

    These days, Johny and Susie Happy-Clickers gladly "click to purchase" 99-cents songs, so it seems like a natural progression to click to buy a p
  • ... Cable companies start to offer something like this. I only watch about 10 channels, so why am I paying for the 120 others?

    Believe me, I won't be holding my breath for this to actually happen.
    • Can't agree more. Especially when half of the channels are "PPV" so you have to pay more to view them. Cut out the numerous "home shopping" channels and you don't have many left. If lucky, you'll have about 200 real channels of content (including about 10 iterations of discovery, 10 iterations of business channels (CNBC, BLOOMBERG, etc.), 15 "News" channels (CNN, MSNBC), other intellectual channels (about 20 or so), and the rest "entertainment"). Stick it to "the man"!

  • This could hurt conference proceeding (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mbone ( 558574 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @12:15PM (#13957764)
    This could really hurt conference proceedings, which may only have one or two really worthwhile new papers. If you can buy those separately, why spend $ 120 for the full book ?
    • Would it hurt conference proceedings or help them? If before I wouldn't buy a compendium for $50, but now I can buy a few choice papers for $15, there's now money that previously the conference would not have received. It's similar to an argument for iTunes, that people aren't willing to buy 10 tracks of music when they really want 1. But if you give them the option, they will buy that 1.
    • I think most scientific publishers already sell articles by the article over the Web.

      Conference proceedings and journals are a scam anyway. They cost an arm and a leg, and none of the money goes to the researchers or reviewers. Luckily many researchers route around this damage by posting their papers on the Web.

      It's cool to have a row of proceedings on my shelf, but I just get the ones from the conferences I actually go to; I'd never buy proceedings separately.
    • The worlds smallest violin plays for those lovely people tonight....

  • The first two pages were great, page three sucked (Score:3, Funny)

    by silverbax ( 452214 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @12:41PM (#13957917)
    Amazon: Which page of 'War and Peace' would you like to buy?
    Me: I dunno...I'll try page 27.
    Amazon: Here you go...KA CHING!
    Me:Oh man, this page is boring. Let me try page 54.
    Amazon: KA CHING!
    Me:I read pages 27 and 54 and they were both boring. Could you recommend something?
    Amazon: Try page 12. Lots of readers rate page 12 very highly.
    Me: Okay, give me page 12.
    Amazon: KA CHING!
    Me: Hey, this is just part of somebody's foreword. What the hell?!?
    Amazon: No refunds!
  • Myself, I'm disappointed - I was really hoping to buy books by the word, and then complete my collection of every "the" ever written.

    • So here's my plan: We offer to sell books by the word, and each word has a different price. For example, "the" costs $0.00040103, or $0.00040104 if it is capitalized. Then we publish a price list:

      Moby Dick

      word 1: $0.00022790
      word 2: $0.00010781

      etc., and for comparison shoppers, a per-word price list would be handy:

      "Aardvark": $0.00091193 ...
      "Call": $0.00022790 ...
      "me": $0.00010781 ...
      "Zyxel": $0.00000001

      Our catalog would include all the published works in the world, and be available fre

  • It's a Jungle Out There (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday November 05, 2005 @01:05PM (#13958035) Homepage Journal
    That MP3.com case never made any actual legal sense. I can't put my CD content on an FTP server and download it myself to another location for consumption there? Even when it's just me consuming it, not another person without the right to use it (without buying it from the copyright holder)? That's nonsense. But the RIAA had more money than MP3.com, and few people understood the broad implications. It just looked like "copying" to a lot of people, no different from Napster, though the essential difference was that Napster let people without the right (purchased) to listen to the music do so. I hope Bezos strikes directly at the MP3.com ruling, provoking the RIAA to sue him, cite their crummy precedent, and have it reversed. Bezos has the money, experience, brand clout and recognized vision that can compel justice to be served, pushing our fair use protections back up inside the envelope of our rights.
    • Amen brother.

      Moreover, I'm hoping Bezos will let me ship my 12,000 volumes to him, and just access them online,
      saving me an enormous expense every time I move house, and a lot of dusting in-between.
      • I'm also hoping Bezos will go beyond just lockers like MP3.com had. We have the right to fairly share our hardcopy books with friends. As long as we're not charging for the transactions, and only one copy exists at a time. I hope Bezos will carve out a virtual way to keep doing that. The right to share books is not inherent in the physical format, it's inherent in the content, and in our culture. So if they're going to shove DRM down our throats, we might find Bezos' work lets us use that DRM we buy to actu
  • "It was a best of times, it was the worst of times..."

    That'll be $0.86 please.

  • THIS IS BAD BAD BAD (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The underlying notion here is that by paying a fee you are then *licensed* to read the book. But books *aren't licensed*... they are *purchased*. You can go to a library right now and read a book for which you have never paid a cent. You can pass along a single book *infinitely* and remain within copyright law. By shifting the definition of "purchase" to "license" we are actually losing something, not gaining something. We're losing the freedom to control that information post-purchase.

  • If you can see it then you can take a screenshot and share it, for college students you can split the cost of a book between several people, take screenshots of each page if there is DRM, and put them together into a long PDF. I see this going well.
    • I predict that the warez nerd with a copy of whatever OCR software is the flavor-of-the-month will be very popular with his fellow students

      There's really no reason for e-books not to be fully searchable
  • For many books on Amazon, you can already do this using the "Search Inside this Book" function. You can only look at a few pages before and after where your search term was found, but of course this isn't too hard to get around (go to the last visiable page, search for something on that page, and continue).

    A few weeks ago I went away to write a paper on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception [amazon.com]. Unfortunately I left my copy of the book at home. Enter Amazon.com: I was able to retreive all the quot

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