Amazon.com Un-Bundles Books, Eyes Rival Google

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said it would offer customers the option of buying online access to any page or section of a book, as well as the entire book, in an announcement that came the same day that rival Google Inc. started offering online access to library books and documents.

The Seattle-based online retailer said customers would have the option of "un-bundling" any of hundreds of thousands of books in its Amazon Pages program. Researchers, for example, could choose to buy just the pages or sections they need and read them online.

In addition, Amazon.com said it would give customers buying a physical book the option of also having that book available online for reading. The program is called Amazon Upgrade.

The company did not say when the services would be available.

The upcoming offerings are being built on the company's technology for searching entire texts of books in order to deliver pages and sections based on any topic, from cooking to writing software.Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, said the company was giving customers "unusual flexibility in how they buy and read books."

"In collaboration with our publishing partners, we're working hard to make the world's books instantly accessible anytime and anywhere," Bezos said in a statement.

The announcement came the same day Google started serving non-copyrighted books and documents from the New York Public Library and four university libraries, Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford.

Google's library project, which is expected to take years to complete, has sparked a bitter dispute with authors and publishers, who object to Google's plans to also scan and store in its database copyrighted works, without first asking permission. The Mountain View, Calif., search engine, however, says it won't make those works available online or make any money off of them.

Nevertheless, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild have sued Google, challenging the project and arguing the company needs to have permission to copy protected works. Both cases are pending.Antoinette Marty, analyst for Current Analysis, said Amazon.com was "speeding past Google in the digital book domain," arguing that the search engine's legal troubles would slow it down.

Marty believed Amazon Pages would be more successful, particularly among researchers who would "get exactly what the need, without having to purchase useless content."

"However, customers won't likely take to Amazon Upgrade like they will to the Pages program," Marty said. "It's simply an up sell."

Both of Amazon.com's upcoming services stem from its Search Inside the Book option announced two years ago. The feature lets customers find books by searching the text inside, rather than just by author or title. The company says half of the books it sells in the United States are found through such searches.

The company is also offering the advanced search function in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Japan.0