News Analysis: All three agree that the time is ripe for book digitization, but the exact path, well, that's a different story.The world of e-commerce is starting to look at books differently. The 20th-century view was that a book was a single product to be sold in its entirety for a set price.
The 21st-century view might end up being that a book is a collection of pages, which can each be sold on its own.
That's one conclusion that can be drawn from almost simultaneous announcements from Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com this week, where each of the Web giants announced slightly different plans to sell digitized book parts.
Microsoft's move was a strategic partnership with the British Library in London wherein it will digitize about 25 million pages of content, according to a report in The Financial Times.
Microsoft will invest about $2.5 million as "an initial investment" in a long-term project that will start with 10,000 books being scanned, the newspaper reported.
Google's move was its long-anticipated effort of scanning published works that have passed into the public domain, starting with books from the libraries at Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library and the University of Michigan.
The documents will be readable in their entirety at print.google.com.
The documents can easily be saved to a user's computer, Google said.
The potentially most aggressive move came from Amazon.com, which introduced two programs: Amazon Upgrade, which lets customers immediately access a full digital version of a purchased book; and Amazon Pages, which will allow customers to purchase pages or chapters of books, instead of the full books.
Both programs grow out of Amazon's Search Inside service, which lets users see a few pages inside any participating book.
Amazon estimates that 50 percent of all currently offered books on Amazon now support Search Inside.
Search Inside is intended to be used as a browsing tool, to replicate the physical bookstore experience of flipping through a book before deciding to buy it. Amazon tries to discourage people from printing or saving those pages, but it can't prevent users from doing so if they are persistent.
"Anything you can see on your computer, you can always do a page [screen] capture, but we can disable the print function so it makes it harder to print," Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said in a Ziff Davis interview, adding that his firm might be doing other things to discourage data capture.
"We have two years of experience. We don't discuss the kinds of things we do to make Search Inside secure."
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Microsoft, Amazon and Google Tackle E-Books Their Own Way
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