Apparently, amazon.com is already doing this with some books. A few days ago I bought French Grammar: A Complete Reference Guide; after purchasing it, I was given the option to get the digital version as well, for a mere $1.89. I of course jumped on the option.

I’m not crazy about the implementation, as you have to login amazon.com to read it, and the reading is done in their online reader (the same system which you can preview books in). It makes sense, though; if they allowed PDF downloads they’d be all over the internet in a matter of hours.

The online reader lets you highlight and add annotations, as well as make an unlimited number of bookmarks. You can then search the whole book, just bookmarked pages, highlighted text, or your notes. The only feature which seems to be a bit wonky right now is the copy feature. Standard copy and paste is disabled in the reader, so you have to select the text you’re after and then press a “Copy” button at the top of the controls. However, when I try this, a little “Loading…” window pops up, and stays there indefinitely.

Still, though, it’s cool to see things moving in this direction. I wish I could upgrade my long-ago purhased copy of Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage, but it looks like it’s not yet available in digital format.

Of course, I wouldn’t want to buy each book twice at full price. In the future, I’d like to see some sort of sysem that allowed one to buy the ebook at a deeply discounted price when you purchased the hard copy; say, if I buy a $40 German grammar text, I can add the ebook version to my amazon.com cart at checkout for $10. I would assume the publishers would still be making money here; how much does it cost to print an ebook? I suppose preparation of the ebook has to be considered, but I’m guessing the bulk of publishing prep is now done on computers, so how much preparation work could there be?

Apparently, I’m not the only one wanting this. And indeed, if I could buy a hard copy of a book and get an ultra cheap digital version thrown into the basket… well, I might just hop onto the ebook bandwagon. Quick, someone buy me a Kindle!