Better Than Pages

Tyler Cowen highlights the most compelling paragraph in an article by Jakob Nielsen about the Kindle:

Letting customers read a book's initial pages for free is a great Kindle innovation and makes good use of the digital medium's ability to dissolve the print requirement to bundle chapters. (Thus, this is a better-than-reality feature.) The innovation will no doubt sell more books particularly for fiction, where people will want to see what happens next once they're gripped by a story. In fact, for mystery novels, Amazon could probably give away the first 90% for free and charge the entire fee just for the last chapter.