Pay-Per-Page: Does It Help School Libraries?
Mixed reviews for Amazon’s plan to sell individual book pages, chapters online
By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2005
While most people are abuzz over Amazon’s plan to sell individual pages and chapters of books online, school librarians are responding with mixed feelings.
There’s no denying that the proposed service is a brilliant business plan, given today’s need for convenience and access to information 24/7. But there’s a danger that students may end up misinterpreting ideas and information because they’ve only looked at parts of a book rather than the whole thing, says Barbara Stripling, director of library services for the New York City Department of Education. The service, she says, also strips librarians of their most important role—to promote curiosity. “School librarians nourish a sense of wonder about the world by providing access to all kinds of information, some of which you find serendipitously,” she says. “You don’t do that if you order a little chapter here and a little chapter there.”
In short, the pay-per-page or chapter model—which is an extension of Amazon’s free “Search Inside the Book” feature—may be convenient, but it “doesn’t build an inquiring mind, and it doesn’t build a learner,” says Stripling. With the new Amazon Pages Service, expected to begin sometime next year, customers can buy portions of a book for online viewing. A second program, Amazon Upgrade, will offer full online access to those who purchase a print book.
Joyce Valenza, a media specialist at Springfield Township High School library in Pennsylvania, is more concerned that paying for this kind of information will broaden the digital divide. “My kids go to the mall to shop at Abercrombie & Fitch and would spend $5 a page for information,” she says. “What about those kids without the disposable cash?” Valenza adds that most kids already have access to the books that Amazon plans to offer by page or chapter through various online databases like netLibrary, ProQuest, GaleNet, and EBSCO, which many school and public libraries provide for free.
But Doug Johnson argues that applying the iTunes’ model to publishing may actually close the digital divide. “If I am poor… I may not be able to buy a $25 book, but I might be able to afford a $2.50 chapter from a book,” says the director of media and technology at Mankato Area Public Schools in Minnesota, emphasizing that the service is a natural technological progression given that today’s kids find electronic information more appealing than print.
Although there’s yet to be a public announcement, Google, which offers over 10,000 public domain books online, reportedly plans to develop a similar system in which users would be able to search its digitized library of books and buy relevant parts. Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher, says it will offer its books to Amazon, Google, and other vendors on a pay-per-view basis, with the goal of targeting individuals rather than institutions such as libraries, says spokesman Stuart Applebaum. Random House is proposing that vendors charge five cents a page, with four cents of that going to the publisher.
