Google, Amazon working on $0.05/page on-line reading

It’s really quite striking how Google and Amazon are setting the agenda for book-lovers here in 2005.

As a publisher I’m not sure this is a net positive for me — I do worry about revenue being cannibalized.

New York Times

In a race to become the iTunes of the publishing world, Amazon.com and Google are both developing systems to allow consumers to purchase online access to any page, section or chapter of a book. These programs would combine their already available systems of searching books online with a commercial component that could revolutionize the way that people read books.

The idea is to do for books what Apple has done for music, allowing readers to buy and download parts of individual books for their own use through their computers rather than trek to a store or receive them by mail. Consumers could purchase a single recipe from a cookbook, for example, or a chapter on rebuilding a car engine from a repair manual.

The initiatives are already setting off a tug of war among publishers and the potential vendors over who will do business with whom and how to split the proceeds. Random House, the biggest American publisher, proposed a micropayment model yesterday in which readers would be charged about 5 cents a page, with 4 cents of that going to the publisher to be shared with the author. The fact that Random House has already developed such a model indicates that it supports the concept, and that other publishers are likely to follow.

Related posts:

• Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade
• Andrew Wylie in the Times of London
• Google Print Rent-A-Book
• Let’s do the logical thing with on-line book searching? don’t think so
• SCOOP! GBS online fee share is 70/30 pub/GOOG