The New York Times reports on programs being developed by both Amazon and Google that would allow readers to purchase online access to specific sections of books — say, a single recipe from a cookbook, an individual chapter from a how-to manual, or a particular short story or poem from an anthology. Such a system would effectively “unbind” books into modular units that consumers patch into their online reading, just as iTunes blew apart the integrity of the album and made digital music all about playlists. We become scrapbook artists.
It seems Random House is in on this too, developing a micropayment model and consulting closely with the two internet giants. Pages would sell for anywhere between five and 25 cents each.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
perhaps i just don’t know enough about either law or programming, but a question comes to my mind: is there a good reason google or amazon or whoever can’t simply create some sort of temporary e-book, one that would cease to be readable after 30 or so days (like the trial versions of premium programs) and make the entire texts of any book available for download, effectively functioning as a library? i mean, it doesn’t seem as though random house is pissed off by my ability to go to the local library, check out any of their books – for free – and effectively own it for a month, so…