These announcements, of course, represent Amazon's response to book digitizing and indexing initiatives by major Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Amazon Pages was also occasioned by the blessings that Random House, the world's largest trade (mass-market consumer) book publisher, bestowed on the micropayment-per-page business model that Amazon Pages will support. Like the existing Search Inside the Book feature, these programs will be offered to book publishers on a voluntary basis, as opposed to Google's "opt-out" scheme for its Google Print program.

Welcome to the next generation of e-publishing. We now know where the book publishing market is headed online, now that the eBook market appears to have run out of steam -- an occasion marked about a year ago when Adobe decided to pull its eBook packaging/serving software off the market and focus on corporate document security instead.

The new e-publishing generation differs from the eBook generation in two important respects. First, the Internet is no longer merely a distribution channel for digital content; it is also a rendering technology. Through web services, it can be extended to many other ways of slicing, dicing, and rendering content as well. Second, and much more important to the publishing industry, search engines will potentially be intermediaries to a far larger number of content purchase transactions than was the case with eBooks, thereby altering the dynamics of the industry's supply chain.

But the new e-publishing paradigm also shares a rather depressing similarity with the past: all of these new efforts from Amazon, Google, and so on are essentially shovelware initiatives. The idea of per-page purchases mirrors Apple's model of unbundling tracks from albums in iTunes, but somehow it seems awkward. With a few exceptions, book publishers have yet to embrace the idea that they can produce different types of products for online consumption. All of these efforts contain what amount to proprietary DRM-like technologies that control usage while facilitating new business models, but the latter are thin on the ground at this point.

In the end, Amazon's new programs are cautious, incremental steps that reflect the company's close relationships with publishers and its desire not to alienate them, as Google has done. The true innovation here is making copyrighted material discoverable online while still taking reasonable steps to protect it from unauthorized use. Although others invented this idea years ago (such as MediaDNA's Eluminator technology in 1999, now owned by Inceptor), Google deserves credit for bringing the idea to the fore.

If publishers want more control over their supply chains in the digital era, as well as flexibility to try new business models without relying on a single company like Amazon to build the infrastructure, they might consider starting to develop ways to offer content and rights descriptions to service providers from their own infrastructures. Work that the International Digital Publishing Forum -- formerly the Open eBook Forum -- has already done on rights expression language standardization is an existing step in that direction.

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