Amazon MatchBook to Standardize “Marvel Style” Ebooks Approach

Amazon announced yesterday that they will be taking a page from the Apple Playbook with Amazon MatchBook, which will allow publishers to include free or deeply-discounted ebooks as a toss-in when customers buy the physical copy from the popular online retailer.Purchases made on your Amazon account back to the company’s founding in 1995 are eligible for the program, and electronic backup copies of your books will begin to be available (for select titles and select publishers) beginning in October. Amazon expects more than 10,000 titles to be available at the time of launch, although many of those will be self-published works and Amazon Books publications, the authors for which reportedly opted in to such a program when they signed their initial royalty agreements.Amazon MatchBook is a bit like iTunes Match, a program by which your CDs and other previously-purchased content can be synched to your iTunes account by paying an annual fee for the program. Your “matched” content will be available for download on demand to your iTunes-compatible PC or mobile device, much the same as Amazon’s program, where books you’ve purchased will be available for download to any Amazon app. The major difference, besides the fact that you’re paying a la carte on the Amazon MatchBook program rather than subscribing to a service, is that since there’s no practical way to “prove” ownership to Amazon, the program is, at least so far, only available to those items you’ve purchased at Amazon.