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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.
Of course! And eventually they are going to want to put ads on your children to get rid of the cost of hospital bills.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Copyright expansion? What are you smoking? Given the current generations opinion of copyrights I'd expect them to go away by mid century at the latest. There haven't been any increases in recent years and the public opinion has been strongly for taking away creator's rights. Copyrights aren't all evil. Take them away and most writers are applying at Starbucks. Focus your ire at the corporate stooges that take away artist rights not the artists themselves. Without the artists there would be nothing to fight over. I'm fighting over creative rights as we speak. I'm sure everyone is tired of it but if you want to know what creative people go through check out what happened to me at
http://www.fftheuntoldstory.com/
On the other hand, folks who read something a little substantial would probably care. A lot. I can almost see someone advertising Glenn Beck and Palin to a Chomsky or Satre reader.
Yes, but can you give us examples of something "substantial"?