Amazon beefs up book content with browsable pages
Booksellers and publishers know the power of browsing when it comes to selling books. Amazon.com today launched an initiative that allows shoppers to browse a book at Amazon in almost the same way they would browse a book in a bookstore. Amazon is displaying covers, front and back flaps of covers, tables of contents and browsable images of pages from 25,000 books, with more to come, the company says. Amazon is calling its content initiative Look Inside the Book.
Amazon has set up a reading room at www.amazon.com/reading-room where customers can browse books that have excerpts available.
“Simon & Schuster is excited to participate in the Look Inside the Book program at Amazon.com,” Jack Romanos, president and COO of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement issued by Amazon. “Helping their customers crack the spine is simply smart marketing that will allow readers to make even more informed choices.”
Amazon.com is working with several publishing houses including DK Publishing, HarperCollins Publishers, Holtzbrinck Publishers, Hungry Minds, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Random House, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, Stewart House Publishing and Time Warner Trade Publishing.
Barnes & Noble.com also offers books excerpts at bn.com. A spokeswoman says the excerpts number in the thousands. Unlike Amazon, the Barnes & Noble excerpts are text from the books, but not images of the actual pages.
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