Commercial cyberbooks debut at booksellers
CHICAGO - Next month, bibliophiles with computers will be able to buy and download books or parts of books from the Internet via a service dubbed the Electronic Book Aisle.
The service was unveiled at the American Booksellers Association trade show in Chicago by Steve Potash, president of Overdrive Systems, a Cleveland-based software company.
The Electronic Book Aisle will enable publishers to reach a worldwide audience 24 hours a day, Potash says.
Since it's up to the customer whether to read the downloaded book on their computer or print it out and read the hard copy, there are no printing or shipping costs and no physical inventory, according to Potash.
The site on the Internet's graphical World Wide Web will initially list books on cooking, self-help, hobbies, computing, business and travel from such publishers as Time Warner, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons, he said.
When a buyer with a computer equipped with a modem downloads a book, they will get software to view, search and print the digitized book from their own computer. Or, for a smaller fee, they can download just a portion of a book -- from a single recipe to a chapter.
The Electronic Book Aisle will open for business on July 15, Potash told Reuters. In the meantime, a preview site is available for viewing at the Web address bookaisle.com.
As for concern about the security of credit card use over the Internet, Potash said 600,000 credit card charges were made over the Internet last year. That number is expected to swell to over 2 million this year.
Traditional paper books are already the second biggest selling items on the Internet, right behind computer software, Potash said. |
