I received a link to a Wall Street Journal article today. This article was about Random House testing the feasiblity of offering books for sale online one chapter at a time. They likened it to record labels selling individual songs from CD.
It seems like an interesting idea, and it might appeal to those who only want to read the first chapter to see if a book appeals to them. It might also work well for a “serial” novel that would be published one chapter at a time, but I wonder how well it would work on a larger scale. I can’t see it working for the vast majority of books, or customers.
What if the library started offering e-books one chapter at a time? How would that affect our usage licenses? Our circs? Do you think it would be something that would appeal to patrons, or would it cause problems?
