Amazon announces Pages service and Amazon Upgrade for readers

Amazon announces Pages service and Amazon Upgrade for readers

Amazon is feeling the pressure of upcoming services for book readers from Google, MSN, and Yahoo! All of these tech giants are investing heavily in making books more accessible to the end user by making them searchable using search services. Users can use these to find books of their interests and purchase them directly from the participating publishers.

The global e-commerce giant has now announced two services for their book reading users. First, one is the Amazon Pages service that enables the user to buy portions of a book for online viewing. This can be even one single page or entire chapters of books available for sale on Amazon. Another service is planned called Amazon Upgrade which would let users get online access to books they have purchased from the store.

Both of these new services from Amazon are expected to be out by early next year. The cost for portions of books is expected to be a couple of cents per page though the prices would go high for specialized reference works. Users would however be required to pay a small fee to get the online access to books they have purchased from the store under the Amazon Upgrade scheme.

The copyright holders of the books would have the right to state whether the online version would be made available only for reading or printing as well.