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Ad-cluttered Wowio e-book site: The uglier side of globalization—minus those classy free PDF downloads
August 3, 2008 | 11:24 am
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By David Rothman
Wowio, the ad-supported book site, once worried me. I didn’t see enough ads in the free PDF files.
Someone had to pay for this feast.
Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn—those were among the distinguished writers whose works you could download for free. Wowio catered to comic fans, but it offered plenty else, in keeping with its slogan of "Free books, free minds."
And so I was delighted to learn that Platinum Studios had bought Wowio and would open up the books to visitors outside the United States.
Retraction! Huckster alert
May I retract that for now? So far, the new Wowio model is to tease you with books viewable online, then see if you’ll download a PDF file and pay $9 or whatever. The ads must be part of the plan. Just torture you with them until you buy the books. The problem is that the ads are beyond mildly obnoxious. Believe it or not, I don’t want repeated software pitches to pop up at the top of the pages of The Great Santini.
The old Wowio gave us ads at the starts of books and in various places, but not in a constant, in-your-face way that the new online viewer does. Unlike me, Vonnegut (photo) seems to have hated even restrained advertising. Imagine how he’d feel about Slaughterhouse-Five as a vehicle for huckstery ad nauseam.
Conspiracy to discredit ad-supported books?
Again, I’m rather pro-ad; and in fact the TeleBlog runs Google, Amazon and Powell’s advertising even though it would be wonderful if we didn’t have do. But we try not to let the ads constantly interrupt the main flow of the blog.
By contrast, Platinum’s advertising is so intrusive that I almost wonder if it’s part of a conspiracy to discredit ad-supported books.
Meanwhile here are a few of the companies you might want to complain to: Bomgar software (especially!), Vonnage, Hewlett Packard, Volkswagen, and Google, the latter of which should be ashamed of itself for cooperating with Platinum. Tell ‘em you want ads in Wowio books to keep ‘em free, but not quite so often. Is an ad almost always in sight when you watch television?
I would heartily suggest that the advertising community shun Wowio unless it promises more humane treatment of visitors in the future. As it happens there don’t seem to be that many advertisers, or at least as viewed by me. It’s just that I keep seeing some of the same ones again and again. Sad. Is it partly because smart companies are already avoiding the reborn Wowio—preferring to see their products presented in a less cluttered environment?
In fairness to Platinum…
Of course, maybe the Wowio site is just in transition. I’m going to e-mail the company and invite it to present its side of the story. Likewise Gerry Manacsa, Wowio senior designer and author or a wonderful e-reading blog, is very very welcome to speak out here.
Perhaps Wowio already has something planned without the sensibilities of used car hucksters. A friend of mine, a fellow booster of the old Wowio, suggested that I not write up the reinvented site for now, and I can see why. But I couldn’t resist. Even as just a possible placeholder, this site really does suck. Wowio, which vanished for a stretch, should have delayed its reincarnation until it worked out a better approach. We boosters would have understood.
Think goodness I’ve kept PDFs of old Wowio files I downloaded for personal use, because I suspect that all of them or at least most are no longer accessible online for free.
Some suggestions…
So what should Platinum be doing?
1. Return to the model of ad-supported files of books. The ads could appear at the starts of chapters and in between. You could pay, whenever you wanted, to turn them off. Yes, it’s cool that Wowio is selling books.
2. Ditch PDF for text-intensive works so people can more easily resize fonts. ePub, anyway? My Sony Reader’s reflowable-text feature for PDF is better than nothing but is far from a complete solution.
3. Do iPhone and Android apps with better-presented ads built into the downloads—as well as the ability to pay to banish them. I know Wowio probably has desktops, laptops and tablets in mind. But mobile phones are going to be big.
4. In general, improve the online viewer while making the ads less intrusive. The fonts are too small when I size the text to fit my 22-inch screen. Part of the problem is the aspects ratio of my Soyo monitor. But for me, the viewer is still a disaster, aggravating the other problems.
Once again, I see a definite future for ads in books. But this had better not be it. I hope that Wowio will listen to these heart-felt suggestions—offered not to kill the company but help it survive.
The DRM angle: I don’t know if Wowio is using it on the PDF files. Let’s hope not.
Related: Heidi MacDonald’s PW comic blog, accompanied by anti-Platinum comments from some creative people worried about the financial side of the company’s Wowio deal.
Question: When viewing books, does anyone else have problems seeing Wowio icons against the black background near the top of the screens?
Technorati Tags: Wowio,Platinum Studios
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Comments:
Rather than complain, I’d suggest doing as I many others did — just delete Wowio from our Favorites and not bother with it at all. The best way to get a point across is to not buy the product: money talks.
I wish I had been as smart as David was and downloaded the max from the old WOWIO.
One participating publisher, with whom I have discussed WOWIO at length, is VERRRRy unhappy with the changes.
He, at least, is hopeful that they will reconsider some of the “improvements.”
Keep in mind that some of their classics are free at other sites, such as Project Gutenberg. I’d rather give a donation to PG than pay WOWIO.
The so-called zoom function is a joke. I can’t and won’t try to read the miniscule print that WOWIO is using now.
I do know that a couple of old sponsors are in $$ trouble, and getting less interested in sponsoring books.
For those of you who are true readaholics, the NY Public Library has a pretty good collection, fairly heavily weighted toward audiobooks, but much to read.
Free to NY state residents. $100/yr to others. They do seem to be amenable to taking acquisition suggestions from their users. I’d like to see a concerted round of patrons requesting more e and less audio.
I’m still looking for other state libraries with similar setups for which I can buy a nonresident card, but no luck so far.
Elle
Tim O’Reilly wrote skeptically about trying to obtain revenue for e-books via advertising back in December 2007:
This quote is excerpted from the blog post Bad Math Among eBook Enthusiasts. If the ad rates given are accurate then a publisher or author who is trying to raise one dollar per e-book must afflict a beleaguered reader with one-thousand advertisements while he or she is perusing a single book.
If the reader is from a highly-valued audience and the publisher wishes to raise ten dollars per e-book (the typical cost of an Amazon Kindle edition) then the reader must be tormented with five-hundred advertisements while scanning the text.
Of course revenue can be much higher for a “click-through” instead of a simple “impression”. The “click-through” payment can be remarkably high for certain search terms at Google as a New York Times article from 2007 revealed:
This data implies that advertisement packages masquerading as e-books will be created for certain lucrative topics. Indeed a variety of pseudo-e-books and promotional vehicles already do exist.
What about the non-targeted audience? Perhaps publishers attempting to use this model will somehow obtain higher ad rates, or will accept less revenue per book, or will effectively up-sell.
Oh dear, oh dear. The death of a good business model.
There are dozens of “read online/pay to download” e-book businesses. This was the only “read offline with discreet ads” e-book business that I knew of. Why should I pay $9 for a PDF when I can get an e-book in an accessible format for less?
I’m glad that the online editions are still there, but I agree that the ads are incredibly intrusive.
I’m very sad to see this change; I was a supporter of Wowio, directing other readers to it. But not in the future, unless they revise their current business model.
[...] download high-quality copyrighted ebooks from leading publishers for free.” [On August 2, 2008, David Rothman blogged about the sale of Wowio to Platinum Studios, which changed Wowio's advertising [...]
DR:
I’m sorry to hear about WOWIO’s decline. The service had everything going for it when it launched.
Can I point you to another of my favorite bloggers, Jeff Jarvis? He just initiated a discussion of ads in books that could benefit from your input.
Robin
Garson: Totally agree that the ad model can be abused. But I continue to believe it works for the right books. One possibility would be the use of librarians and others to evaluate the offerings of quality sites. Meanwhile it’ll be interesting to see if Platinum listens to users. Thanks. David
Being a publisher on Wowio (well former publisher) I benefitted greatly by the ad supported downloads. Even with only a small percentage of my readers able to download the books…I was able to bring in $40,000 last year. And it cost my readers NOTHING.
It was a great thing for everyone.
The new Wowio, I hope, is transitional.
What made it great was the free books with sponsorship.
I’m still in talks with them. And hope they’ll go back to their old ways. But the comic industry isn’t all they’re trying to capture.
They want major book publishers. And major book publishers…for some ungodly reason…don’t want ads in their books.
So they needed to go to pay per download.
I have NO idea what their thinking is…other than maybe it’s some backwards “we’ve never had ads in REAL books” type of thinking.
Either way. With 100,000 page views and over 7,000,000 readers a day just for my site alone…and I’m not even CLOSE to the most popular webcomic out there…I would hope there’s room for both “real books” and webcomics/comics at Wowio.
Bring us back the sponsored downloads and now with the whole world being able to get them…watch how big it grows!
Many are mourning the demise of free, sponsored downloads on WOWIO, but it’s important to realize that these remain available whenever sponsors are available. For example, WOWIO members in the US looking for a comic book or graphic novel will find that a sponsored — and free — download is available, with exactly the same ad presentation and non-intrusive social DRM as was available previously.
Regarding some of the questions about Platinum Studios, I’d suggest a read of this transcript of a Publisher’s Weekly interview with Platinum President and COO Brian Altounian, conducted shortly before the WOWIO acquisition:
http://blog.platinumstudios.com/?p=3
first, the ability to read these books online at the wowio site blo..stinks! If you are visually handicapped it is nearly impossible to read these. There customer service is narcissistic, if not down right ignorant and sarcastic. I have many issues with the new way they do things, I boycott them now…not because of the advertising, which is incredibly irritating, but more because of their uncaring and bs way of dealing with the public, which I might add is the only true way to obtain constant revenue. The original way of sponsorship vs paying donation was the best way. I cannot read the issues that they have now. I have influenced more then 1000 people to stay away and I will continue to boycott