According to this article in ars technica, Google is going to unveil a service by which you can buy just chapters of books, instead of the whole thing. Ars technica focuses on the advantages of this scheme for its audience of techies. For example, a web developer confronting a knotty ASP problem could just download a chapter of ASP in a Nutshell rather than plunking down $29.95 for the whole tome.

Of course, publishers and authors won’t be too pleased about this, in the same way that musicians weren’t very happy about the music industry becoming dominated by singles instead of albums. With iTunes, you don’t have to buy the whole album to get just the one song you like; with this new Google service, the same would apply for books.

However, this new business model in the staid publishing industry, if it succeeds, could lead to a whole new world for authors and readers. What if you could buy the first chapter of a novel from an unknown author for $1 instead of buying the whole book for $21.95? Wouldn’t that get you to try many more authors than you would’ve? If you don’t like it, who cares, you’re only out a buck. It’s like a McDonald’s Dollar Menu for readers.
Publishers could even bundle first chapters from new authors together, like a buffet of writers. Pay $5 and get first chapters from a publishing house’s hottest authors. If you like one of them, you could buy the whole book, in an e-book format, at a discounted rate. (Pricing e-books at the same price of a physical book makes no sense to me, BTW. A topic for another time.)

Most exciting to me is the thought that this rumored Google service could bring back the old-fashioned serial novel, like Dickens for the 21st century. You could buy a novel chapter by chapter as it comes out or perhaps subscribe to the novel of one of your favorite authors. Why should we, as readers, wait for a novel to sit on some publisher’s desk for six months, then get printed on paper, bound, galleys sent out and finally shipped to bookstores? This is a market that is crying out for Google to bring some efficiencies to bear.