Buying pages of books online?

[ibneko]

http://news.com.com/Amazon,+Random+House+throw+book+at+Google/2100-1025_3-5931569.html

As Google put thousands of public domain books online Thursday, Amazon.com responded by announcing plans to allow people to read books on the

Comments

[jaiwithani]

This runs square into a little problem with fair use law. It's legal to quote, say, a page of a substantially long book as long as you attribute it (as Amazon.com does with their previews). So, really, any given page is FREE already. It's the collective work that has value, or any "significant" portion of the work. If you can buy by the page...I think the analogy is buying seconds worth of music. It's copyright law purgatory, confusing, and unlikely to appeal to a large group.

That said, I would buy portions of books...if I cold actually have the content, in an open format, which I could back up/edit/copy at leisure. A .txt, maybe a .pdf.

[ibneko]

Hmm, interesting. Dunno. They said the release date is a year from now, at least... so... things may change before then. I dunno. It would be convenient to be able to pull up, say, a page from a cookbook, after searching. Although it's also true that you could probably just as easily find the information online anyways... I'm not sure how it'll work...

Nah, they'll never let you copy it. Even though it's pretty impossible for them to stop us from copying it even if we wanted to - shown as an image, it could be screenscraped and then OCRed into text...

:: shrugs:: either way, I now carry around a number of my favorite books in eBook form, since that's easier than transporting a suitcase of real books. I still have a few here with me, but, yeah... ...I don't know where I'm going with this. ^^;;; Oh well, back to NaNoWriMoing

[shanrina]

I said maybe...I can't imagine a situation when I'd only want a few PAGES of a book and not the whole thing, though.