A day after Google offered up public-domain books online, Amazon.com announced its plans to offer digitized books on the web; Random House said it had come up with a business model for allowing people to pay to view its books online; and Microsoft announced a digitization deal with the British Library.

The "Amazon Pages" program, to be launched next year, will let people purchase online access to anywhere from a few pages to an entire work, writes CNET.

Random House said it would negotiate separate agreements with online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals and others to offer the contents of its books to consumers for online viewing on a pay-per-page basis. The books would be available for indexing, search and display, with up to 5 percent of each book available as a free sample for viewing.

And according to the BBC (via paidContent), about 100,000 out-of-copyright books in the British Library are going to be scanned and put online by Microsoft next year. Some 25 million pages from the British Library's collections will be put online and made searchable.