Pay-to-Preview on Amazon?

by: Ian Crouch

There may be bad news in store for customers—and book bloggers—who have grown accustomed to previewing books with Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. Eric Engleman, who covers Amazon for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, reported yesterday on a six-year-old patent, granted last week, which, according to Engleman, “describes a system of paying to electronically preview ‘one or more chapters, sections, pages, paragraphs, or sentences from a work’ with variable fees based on the genre or publisher, or ‘consumers’ past viewing behavior or purchases.’”


Amazon, at least according to the language of this patent (which credits Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos as one of its inventors), expresses concern that the current preview model—which includes an especially handy word-search function—may discourage customers from actually buying books. Yet, as anyone who has used the search function knows, not all content is made available; like with the current model for Google Books, many pages are held back for copyright purposes. For bloggers, the “Look Inside” function does, however, make it easy to quickly track down quotations from texts, or to perform more general surveys of a particular book. It’s a great tool—one that I use every day. I suppose that Amazon would prefer that I purchase the texts from which I quote, and this nominal-fee structure would be something of a compromise in this area. But for customers, monetizing previews seems to make little sense. You can browse a book at a normal bookstore for free, so why not online?

As Sarah Weinman writes at AOL’s Daily Finance, “All it takes is one flat-footed move to drive away customers, and charging them for the privilege of previewing once-free content is a sure way to send them looking elsewhere for their try-before-they-buy book needs.”

Amazon has not confirmed what the approval of this patent means for customers, or when, if ever, such a system might be put in place. But it’s worth keeping an eye on, both in regards to Amazon, and also for the Google Books project—Engleman reports that Udi Manber, formerly of Amazon and now at Google, is also listed as an inventor on the patent.

from: New Yorker