One of my favorite new online services is back online with a new twist. Wowio.com is an online service that lets you read books for free or for pay. All you do is sign-up for a free username and then you can access all of the books uploaded by wowio‘s publishing partners, in an ad supported window. Or if you like, you can buy a pdf copy of the book and download to your desktop/pda/laptop/e-book reader/etc.
I’m not sure how the new partnership models will work out for the publishers, but if Wowio can have another year of growth, like they did last year, then they could become a force to be reckoned with (and no doubt the model for many copycat services).
DaliyLit.com is now serving up dollop size doses of books. The new service sends you the book you are reading in installments, either via email or rss, so that you don’t have to ‘burden’ yourself with finding a place to sit and actually hold a book.
I guess there is a market for this? I can’t imagine reading The Terror (which I am about to finish) in my RSS reader alongside random posts from the blogs I lurk. I wondered how long it would take to read a book, the faq’s say:
…am currently reading Dracula, which has 187 installments and I am receiving installments on weekdays, i.e. 5 days/week. So at most it will take me 187/5 = 37 weeks. But when I am on the train or waiting, I often read more than one installment, so I usually wind up reading about 10 installments/week. This means I will finish Dracula in about 19 weeks or 5 months.
I guess that “send me the next installment immediately” feature helps some. The cool part are all the free titles. You don’t have to pay for the Public Domain stuff. So most of the classics are there. I couldn’t find any book that cost more than $6.95. So I guess there’s that factor too.
Let me know if any of you have experience with a service like this. It just seems like it’d be too hard to digest the books in any meaningful way.
{via Guardian Unlimited}
Books, Publishing and Birmingham
