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Free E-Books, With a Catch — Advertising

Posted by timothy on from the I'd-take-that-deal dept.

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.

2 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Hope it's better than the Cruz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This sounds alot like the Cruz reader at Borders. The device isn't even beta quality and shouldn't even be on the shelves. No access to the Android market. Crazy limited Cruz market with nonfunctioning search. Downloaded books errored out when trying to read at times. Turning the unit off and back on would reset my email prefs for sound and how often to check. Touch screen missed almost half my presses. Unable to install android apps using SD card. It complained no mem was available when the 4gb internal was largely untouched. I could go on. I even updated it to a very current firmware. You can't even create a borders account using the built in borders app without errors. I want to like android. I don't know if this is typical for these new android tablets or android in general. The iPad costs more, but if a trouble free user experience is what the user is after then it's worth it.

  2. Re:Great. by c6gunner · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Wow. I knew Chomski fanboys were fairly rabid, but you just go above and beyond.

    Thanks for proving my point, btw.