Amazon Pages service will allow individual book pages to be purchased

Amazon is launching two new services:
The Amazon Pages service plans to let customers to buy portions of a book (even just one page) for online viewing.
The Amazon Upgrade service will offer full online access when a traditional text is purchased.
Both services are expected to begin in 2006.
The cost for most books would be a few cents per page, although readers would likely be charged more for specialized reference works.
Under Amazon Upgrade, anybody purchasing a paper book will get instant online access to it, plus they will receive a physical copy of the book.
"We see this as a win-win-win situation: good for readers, good for publishers and good for authors," commented Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
The new programs are an extension of Amazon's "Search Inside the Book", which lets users browse a book's contents for free.
Amazon Shorts, another program, offers brief, original fiction and nonfiction for 49 cents each.
The Amazon announcement came on the same day that Google began serving up contents from books and government documents from five major american libraries.


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