Andrew Wylie in the Times of London

Andrew Wylie is a big wheel.

The Times Online guest contributors Opinionb:

Both Amazon and Google are involved in the search for new models. Many alternatives are being considered. As things stand in this rapidly shifting landscape, it’s contemplated that you will be able to access and buy pages of a book from Amazon; or buy a book for $25, and acquire a digital copy of that book for an additional sum. Then you will be able to start reading a book at home, in your living room; continue reading it on a handheld device as you travel to work; and finish reading the book in bed at night.

From Google, you might rent a book retailing for $25 at a price of only $2.50 per day. The book would sit on Google’s server, and your access would be shut down 24 hours after payment. Or, as Random House has recently suggested, you could buy part or all of a book at 5 cents per page — 1 cent to the website retailer, and 4 cents split between publisher and author — from Amazon or Google.

But it’s hard to kill old habits: when publishers initially thought about cookbooks in the digital realm, they felt that individual pages should be acquired at perhaps five times the price of the very best non-fiction, fiction or poetry. After all, one recipe can feed an army, whereas “To be or not to be” can only engender alienation.

Can one extrapolate from that model, and assume that relatively unfamiliar words or passages will be judged correspondingly less valuable, and deserving to be sold at a lower price than more familiar passages? We’re at a decisive point in the development of our industry,

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