This Wall Street Journal article just plopped into my inbox (subscription only, so no link):
Amazon.com Inc. is planning a program that will let customers purchase online access to books in a move that could be a more publisher-friendly alternative to Google Inc.’s online library project.
The Seattle online retailer announced two new programs Thursday. The first, dubbed Amazon Pages, allows customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books. The second service, called Amazon Upgrade, bundles the purchase of a physical book with online access to the complete work.
For instance, a customer could buy a cookbook and keep it on the shelf, and “also be able to access it anywhere via the Web,” the company said in a press release Thursday.
The two new services leverage Amazon’s existing “search inside the book” technology, a free feature launched two years ago on the retailer’s Web site that allows users to search the content of books. However, the feature can’t be used to read entire books – the site only shows the passage where the search phrase appears.
I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. Would you buy a few pages from one of my books for a buck or two instead of paying $25-plus for the whole thing?
Ed Bott 
I would request that my library purchase your book, borrow it and scan the pages I need at home and return the book 😉
Uhh… Isn’t the idea behind most books that you read the whole thing? I’m assuming there’d be some kind of major search technology behind this that would let you pick the pages you wanted to buy (if they showed you the pages, there’d be very little point in making you buy them), but I still don’t see it working as magically as they seem to portray it.
The answer is “No”. I’d rather purchase the entire book. Besdies, your books are collections of various things. Half the value (to me, anyway) is flipping through and finding out cool things I didn’t know BEFORE the problem arises and I have to scramble to find a fix for it.
As for the online version, I’d love it. I think evertyhing from textbooks to recipes should come with eBook versions (either downloadable from the publisher’s website or on a packaged CD). I still want the actual book for flipping and browsing purposes, but when I’m looking for a specific sentence I read in the real book, I want full-text searching, baby!
Amazon’s won me over as a customer. I could frequently find books $5 or so cheaper than on Amazon, but now they’re packaging the actual book up with an online version I can search through from anywhere, any time. You just can’t beat that…