Last week, I read an interesting article in Publishers Weekly about a new e-commerce effort  by Simon & Schuster to sell electronic chapters of books for a few bucks.

The chapters hail from the insanely popular "You" series by Dr. Michael F. Roizen and Dr. Mehmet C. Oz. Individuals can purchase just the chapters they want, instead of the entire book.

I can really see this as a key selling point to certain nonfiction books. Looking at my own bookshelf, I see a ton of nonfiction books that have only a few chapters marked. I don’t need the rest of the information in them, but I have to take them.

The downside to ordering just a few e-chapters is that someday, I might need that other information – especially in medical tomes. Also, electronic pages are much easier to lose. Printed pages don’t have the same wear-and-tear time as a regular book. I’d need to either keep them in file folders, or a three-prong notebook. If I purchased a variety of e-chapters, then I’d have to invent a new filing system to keep track of them both in print and on the computer. (I’m not trusting enough to believe my Mac will NEVER crash and I won’t lose anything, so hardcopies are key.)

Still, I could imagine selling chapters of a book would be a terrific marketing tactic for a business owner who is using a book to develop expert status. For example, if you are a plumber who wrote a DIY manual, some folks may just want the chapter on unclogging a drain, but don’t want the rest (until they need it, of course!). It would be cost-effective and would be a great way to track which information readers want the most – and follow up on that with blog posts, or a book entirely on that topic.

What are your thoughts on this new effort? Are certain topics easier to sell as chapters than others?