Amazon, Practice What You Preach

Teddy Wayne described one of the attractions of a physical book over an e-book:

“there’s something irreplaceable about a printed book: the heft of it in your hands, the striking cover, and, most important to me, its smell.”

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, agreed with that sentiment. Which is why he said:

“…we have to look for things that we can do that you can never do with a paper book.”

Features like the ability to write reviews for everyone else to see and to search for information as you read your e-book.

Now contrast all of those Amazon features with a patent the same Amazon filed some time back about resale of e-books. See, e-books don’t degrade over time unlike their “dead-tree brethren”. So unlike physical books that can’t be sold an infinite number of times because of all the wear and tear, an e-book could be resold forever. Not very good news if your business is selling e-books, is it? So here’s the gist of Amazon’s patent: add a (digital) counter in the e-book that decreases by 1 at each resale. When the counter hits zero, it can’t be resold anymore.

And then I read this article about TotalBooX, an e-book company, that came up with this idea to allow you to pay as you read: one page at a time. If you read the entire book, you pay the same amount as the guy who bought the entire book. But if you drop off after the first 10 pages, then you would only have paid for those 10 pages.

Looks like TotalBooX just did the kind of thing Amazon should be doing! Is Amazon starting to behave like a regular big company, more interested in protecting its turf than in innovating?