TechFlash reports on a patent just granted to Amazon that covers offering paid previews of books and applying the preview price toward an eventual purchase. The idea is that preview systems cost money, and some people don’t want to buy a work when they can view it for free.
The Amazon patent 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." The patent also suggests incentives such as credits or discounts for people to view content online, and describes a "personal viewer account" to track balances.
Anybody who actually wants to sell books would probably agree that this is a terrible idea. The entire point of preview chapters is that they’re free, and by being free entice people to buy more. The idea of credits and “personal viewer accounts” is also likely to fail for the same reason that micropayment accounts for web content have also failed: little charges add up over time, and people don’t want to be nickel-and-dimed out of large sums of money.
On the other hand, just because Amazon has been granted a patent doesn’t mean they will necessarily use it. Amazon has historically been savvy enough to recognize the marketing value of previews, and I find it hard to believe they’d turn their back on that now.
This patent may be a disguise for a-la-carte system for buying a few pages or a chapter of particular books, mainly nonfiction.
Why buy the whole book on traveling through France when you are only going to Paris? Why buy a whole book when all you need is a reference link for that academic paper?
This will work if the “previewed” material can be selected, as seems to be the case. Think of the student researching a term paper. A small cost to view (and copy?) relevant material might well be considered reasonable to get that paper written. And Amazon has to be thinking about Google’s similar plan to sell online access to all or part of books.
It is terrible that a patent has been granted for somthing that trivial. What kind of invention is this? Or what does the word invention mean when this kind of application can be called an invention?
I’d assume paid previews would be much more substantial than the current free previews. You can then buy the book for its price minus the preview cost. Seems alright to me.
Cory, I think the previews would be much more substantial too and probably connected with the HTML5 previewing Amazon has said it’s focused on.
Sometimes, large corporations file patents not because they intend to create such a product or service but because they want to preclude others from doing so. That said, patenting business processes is something that the USPTO has gotten a lot of deserved criticism for.
I don’t see this getting a patent in Europe where this kind of software crap is much harder to get approved to the best of my knowledge. In addition like so many other daft patents granted by the US patent office, it is questionable whether it would hold up in court.
Does anyone here really think readers will actually pay for previews ? I believe they will not, however ‘clever’ Mr Bezos thinks it is.