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Free E-Books, With a Catch — Advertising
Velcroman1 writes "Barnes & Noble may kick off a fresh price war today for digital book readers, with its new Nook news. But the real news in digital publishing is a novel approach to the e-books themselves: Free books — with advertising. The basic idea is to offer publishers another way to reach readers and to give readers the chance to try more books — books that perhaps they wouldn't normally peruse if they had to pay more for them. Initially, Wowio specialized in offering digital versions of comic books and graphic novels, usually formatted as Adobe PDFs. So it was a natural step for the company to offer graphic ads that are inserted in e-books. 'We think we're creating a broader audience for some of these titles,' Wowio's CEO Brian Altounian told me. 'I think folks are going to download more books because they're saving the costs' of having to drive to the store or pay more for them. Would ads stop you from reading?" The new color Nook goes for $249, and comes with a browser, games, Quickoffice, streaming music via Pandora, and an SDK; reader itwbennett links to an analysis of how well it stacks up as a tablet.
I suppose now is a good time as any to mention Project Gutenber.
http://manybooks.net/ and http://feedbooks.com/ are also excellent sources of free ebooks, providing published, unpublished and public domain titles.
FWIW, personally I abhor ads and would seek to locate an ad-free copy of a given book before purchasing an ad-embedded copy.
Gutenberg's great, but what we need is e-lending from Libraries. In the UK, this is sort of possible via Overdrive - if you have an "approved" device then you can borrow eBooks from UK libraries. For some reason they seem to be keeping this a secret despite having done it in some form since 2004.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/26/libraries-ebook-restrictions
Only works on some devices, like the Sony readers.
To me, this is the killer app and I'd buy an eReader that allowed easy borrowing (i.e. time-expired downloads ) of current fiction in a heartbeat...