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By David Rothman


worldsworstcriminals"They are the world’s worst criminals. This stylish book is packed full of over a hundred of the most extreme from Bonnie and Clyde who shot 8 victims to Pedro Lopez who slaughtered some 300 people for sex and to Harold Shipman who may have finished off even more victims that that. Read it if you dare." – Free at Wowio.

Loftier reading: If you’d rather not go with the above or, say, Nazis and the Occult, I also notice two Einstein biographies and writings on or about J. Robert Oppenheimer and other greats of physics, including Stephen W. Hawking.

Catches and suggestions: Wowio is ad-supported, but so far I haven’t seen enough advertisements in the books to get in my way. I hope that as Wowio becomes better established and can draw in advertisers galore, it can strike a happy balance between readers’ preferences and the bottom line—which, after all, will suffer if too many ads alienate the readers. I continue to root, too, for Wowio to go with the .epub format in the near future and to make at least some of its offerings available outside the States. More immediately, I hope that Wowio will offer large-"print" PDF for users of the Sony reader and other mobile devices.

Wowio’s FAQ on DRM: "Since anyone can defeat the most ‘sophisticated’ DRM with the print screen button, we believe that technology-based DRM is essentially a fraud.

Our approach takes the market incentive out of misbehaving, rewards people for doing the right thing, and tries to stay out of the way of honest users. To help keep everyone honest, however, readers must authenticate their identity and agree to a licensing agreement when they set up their account. Then, each e-book is serialized with the reader’s authenticated name and a unique serial number, as well as other less visible markers. WOWIO will immediately terminate the account of anyone caught illegally distributing ebooks, and will prosecute serious offenders."

Which mobile devices can read Wowio books: "You can read WOWIO ebooks on any device that will run Acrobat Reader. Note, however, that WOWIO ebooks can not be read by reader software using 40-bit encryption, which includes Documents To Go on Palm devices."

 
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