Originally published December 3 2005
Amazon.com joins the online book fray
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Amazon will launch two new programs for accessing books on the internet. One will allow users to buy access to any part of a book. The other will give users online access to the physical books they have purchased.
Amazon.com became the latest Internet giant to jump into the fight to bring novels, biographies and textbooks online, announcing two new programs Thursday that allow the retailer to sell books that can be read on the Web.
With Thursday's announcement, Amazon joins Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in the arms race over books.
Each is working on projects to become, in slightly different ways, libraries for the digital age.
For Amazon, the idea is to make money by selling users the pages they want at a few cents per page, or entire digital copies for what may be a couple of extra dollars.
Chuck Richard, vice president for Outsell Inc., a media industry research firm based in Burlingame, said that the recent interest in digital books by major Internet companies is partly competitive.
As soon as one of them said it was interested -- Google was the first in unveiling plans last year -- then the others reflexively followed.
Richard was skeptical that consumers want to read entire novels online, because of the inconvenience of staring at a computer screen for a long time.
The online feature allows users to sift through books sold on the site for relevant snippets, if permitted by publishers.
The unveiling of Amazon's digital book program came on the day Google Inc. offered the first taste online of its year-old project to scan millions of library books.
Books published after that date are protected by copyright law, and it will show only snippets of them in search results.
Even so, the project has prompted two lawsuits from the publishing industry that accuse Google of violating copyright law.
"I don't think this area will be characterized by cutthroat competition," he said.
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