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Free, ad-supported books: Vonnegut, Orwell, Styron, Huxley among modern greats included
August 15, 2006 | 2:14 pm
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By David Rothman
Legally and for free, I downloaded Cat’s Cradle, a Kurt Vonnegut novel—one of the modern offerings of Wowio, which is distributing ad-supported books.
Works by Styron and Orwell and Solzhenitsyn are also online at no cost to people sharing information with Wowio about their incomes, other demographics, and various likes and dislikes. Surfers can pick up other goodies, too, ranging from graphic novels to Huxley‘s Brave New World, as well as some nonfiction. No more does “free” encompass just public domain books or, for noncommercial use, Creative Commons books.
Real books, not MMF sleaze
The age of the ad-supported books under copyright—real books, not just “Make Money Fast” sleaze—has finally arrived and could help reduce the incidence of piracy. Why steal if it’s easy to be free and legal? Wowio’s collection is limited right now—I’m guessing it has no more than several hundred copyrighted and public domain titles—but I suspect that will change.
Kudos to Wowio and participating e-publishers, especially Rosetta Books, which is focused to a great extent around modern classics, including works of John Updike (not available via Wowio).
PDFed but free
At least for now, Wowio isn’t overwhelming me with advertisements (might depend on your demographics). The one I’m seeing right now is a public service ad for helpyourcommunity.org.
Format used is, ugh, Adobe’s PDF, generally a terror on systems with smaller screens; but for free books, I’ll put up with it. The Vonnegut book reached me with fewer hassles than library books did in the PDF format.
Hello, libraries? You’d better switch to e-book systems without major DRM barriers for patrons to get past; or else ad-supported books could eventually eat your lunch, especially since readers can probably keep them as long as they want.
Easy-to-use site
The Wowio site itself is easy to use. The only annoyance is the delay of having the links arrive via e-mail. Maybe that’ll be less of a problem later.
Please note that you need to give a credit card number for identifying purposes at the least. I have no idea at this point whether some kind of eReader kind of copy-protection is involved. Judging from the looks of the site and the participation of a company such as Rosetta, however, Wowio strikes me as a legitimate operation, worth entrusting your card number to.
I’d much rather that ads not appear in books. But what choice is there? Politicians are stingy toward public libraries; meanwhile librarians are increasingly keen on spendig their money on videos, audios and the like. Oh, how I hate it when I’m looking for an e-book and instead can find only an audio.
I wish Wowio all kinds of luck–and libraries, too, in managing to stay competitive. Librarians may even want to start experiment in topic areas and genres where readers will tolerate the ads. The big challenge is for this to happen without turning books into a circus by library standards, and without compromising the integrity of the books. Libraries don’t need books pimping to sponsors. We already see early evidence of this with Google, whose ad placement policies allegedlydiscriminate against newspapers doing controverial stories. Ads are no replacement for adequent library budgets.
Later this year dotReader, the first implementation of OpenReader, the e-book standard in which I’m involved, will include the ability to serve ads, as well as other features such as interactivity and improved DRM.
Author, not just entrepreneur
Detail: Among the Wowio books is The Thoughtful Leader: Leadership Wisdom for Inspiration and Reflection, written William Lidwell, founder of the company, based in York, Pennsylvania. A press release describes him as an “entrepreneur, author and comic book afficionado.” According to the release, he’s “contracted with numerous publishers to offer thousands of free, downloadable comic books by the end of this year.”
Also of interest: Yes, male authors and more-oriented titles seem to be disproportionately represented in the collection. I hope this will change. As romance publishers are discovering, men are the only ones who enjoy e-books. While the total e-book audience is tiny, thanks to hardware limits, the Tower of eBabel and the DRM mess, it isn’t as if women are missing. Just ask Jane and Jayne.
Vindicated: Ed Howdershelt and Roy Lewis, members of the eBook Community List who for years have been urging publishers to experiment with sponsored books. Significantly, Roy is a retired library automation specialist.
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Comments:
Hm. Privacy, credit card, PDF. If you don’t mind “giving up” the first two, and can live with the latter, it seems like a good idea. Let us know how you like the scheme in twelve months, David.
Heck, Branko, as I’ve written, I don’t see this as a panacea. There are issues you didn’t even mention such as the credibility of ad-supported books. Still, I doubt that GE or GM will insist on rewrites of Orwell. Perhaps we need book-by-book biz models rather than saying one is for every situation. Meanwhile I’m delighted that Wowio is around. If people don’t want to have to turn over credit card numbers, risk spam, etc., then they should fund their libraries adequately. Since that isn’t happening, then Wowio-style services will spring up to address legitimate needs. Thanks. David
Wowio isn’t the first to offer ad-supported ebook reading. Waaaay back in the nineties, one of the very first handful of ebook merchants (which was subsequently gobbled up by Alexlit, another such merchant, then went off-line and vanished entirely—to my annoyance since I had bought some stories from them and hadn’t bothered to save them, so they’re gone for good) had a “you can read our ebooks if you view an ad every so often” scheme. They also pioneered “anti-ad-blocker” technology, to detect when an ad-blocker was in use and then refuse to serve the content if so. I only wish I could remember their name, so I could see if the Internet Archive had a cached version of their front page.
Years ago the website BiblioBytes attempted to provide ebooks “free” using advertisements as a financing mechanism. They began by primarily providing excerpts and chapters instead of entire works, but eventually they provided entire books without charge. The archived pages of the website claim that “BiblioBytes was founded in January 1993 by Glenn Hauman, Todd Masco, and Andrew Bressen with the purpose of selling electronic publications over the Internet.”
The Internet Archive WaybackMachine records pages from the Bibliobytes website starting in 1998. Here is an excerpt from the front page:
“We give up! You’ve convinced us– you’ll take the time to download books, you’ll spend hours reading them on screen or printing them out– you just don’t want to pay for them! So we’ll give them to you– for free! We’re giving away hundreds of free books, and hope to add hundreds more in the next few weeks!”
Perhaps this is the company Robotech_Master mentions above.
Robotech_master and Garson: What great stories. Meanwhile I note with interest the fact that the company’s content just up and vanished. Kinda like Blackmask, eh—at least if you lack easy access to the old Blackmask CDs. As for the power of “free,” I’m a believer. Like Bingle, I don’t want it abused. So, while I heartily approve of Freeload’s expermentation, given the current stinginess in government toward the urgent needs of students, I encourage people keep up the discussion. – David
I don’t think it is. I’m pretty sure the name was something else. But I could be wrong.
Perhaps “Mind’s Eye Fiction” is the company that Robotech_Master discusses. Their website was located at tale.com and the WaybackMachine does have some archived copies. There is a CNN article from 1999 here about anti-ad-blocking software developed by “Mind’s Eye Fiction”.
I went through the signup process and it was painless, no problems.
The copy of Vonnegut’s Player Piano that I downloaded had six ads. I interview WOWIO’s founder, who told me that their goal is to keep the ad page to content page ratio to 1:3 (below that of many magazines).
It’s a bit of a surprise when you come across an ad. The ad pages are larger than the text pages, so you get this minor *whomp* effect. I think readers can get accustomed to the ads. (There’s a linked advertiser index at the end of the book.)
The DRM system includes a lengthy serial number in the lower-left margin of every other page.
–Mike
Thanks, Mike. I also notice that Wowio inserts the reader’s name on the cover–at the bottom–along with the warning that “Unauthorized reproduction of distribution of this ebook is illegal.” – David
Bibliobytes actually conducted some of the first automated paid file transactions on the net. In 1994, customers could use a front end to select a book, pay for it, and download it.
By late 1996, Bressen and Masco had left Bibliobytes to focus on their credit card processing software startup (Hell’s Kitchen Systems), while Hauman continued with Bibliobytes, eventually converting to an ad-based model.
re: Vindicated: Ed Howdershelt
Thanks for the mention!
Ed
My “3rd World Products, Book 1″ on Fictionwise Top 50 page:
http://www.fictionwise.com/top50.htm (middle of page