Slashdot Mirror
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.
"It was a dark and stormy night.....in beautiful downtown Vegas!"
Table-ized A.I.
So, is the idea to turn novels, anthologies and reference works into magazines?
Brilliant!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
And obviously I'm a fucking retard as well, the first article cites the "speculated price" but the second one actually links to the real nook. Maybe I should apply for a job as a slashdot editor.
Monstar L
Are we not all surrounded with enough ads yet? About the only place they're not yet is tattooed on the inside of our eyelids.
To the advertisers: STFU already!
I suppose now is a good time as any to mention Project Gutenber.
Project Gutenberg is excellent - but if we extrapolate the current rate of copyright expansion, books published this century may never enter the public domain.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Also, the stuff I wrote about e-ink vs. LCD - I know that many would find no difference between the two technologies, in other words, some people can read just fine on an LCD. I'm not one of them. For me, e-ink is far more pleasant to look at. Moreover, I started to go out for reading to breath a bit of fresh air and just be outside - sitting on the terrace of a cafe, in a park, on the beach beneath a shade... and that's where e-ink readers really shine and LCDs, including the iPAD, sucks balls. Indoors, in dim light/no light LCDs have an advantage, but I still find it better to use my Sony Reader with a lamp than reading on a screen with backlight.
I know I found Robin Hobb's Assassin's apprentice and it's subsequent trilogies after it was put up for free on the publishers website. So for giving me 1 free book I bought 8 more and am still reading her latest stuff to come out since then. If I'd not of seen that free book I'd of never bought the rest.
You young whippersnappers wouldn't remember this, but back in the Olden Days most deadtree books contained advertising. Paperbacks typically had a glossy insert in the middle (most often a cigarette ad), and hardbacks had several pages of ads in the back, usually something at least vaguely relevant to the book's content, and also sometimes ads for other books (and not only from that book's publisher).
It occurs to me that if ads were placed at the end of the ebook (much as ads in hardbacks used to be at the back of the book) there's incentive to improve content, to get the average reader to finish the book and see the ads.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
Your idea has merit. It's much better than the more invasive ads that take up space and cause the reader to shift away from reading to looking at the ad because it just flashed or changed. I personally detest ads. The constant bombardment of ads for every imaginable product is annoying to say the least. Google has done a pretty decent job with the text ads that take up little space and are non-flashing. However, I much rather pay for a book than to have to suffer through advertising. Even watching Hulu annoys me with the ads that are placed in the shows. Although, that's better than regular TV, which not only has more advertising, but ads that blare at a volume much louder than the show that I'm watching. It drives me nuts and stirs feelings of wishing physical harm on those that perpetrate such underhanded, devious, and annoying tatics just to get their products noticed (or ignored because the volume is immediately turned down or muted). I guess it really has become a pet peave of mine. I personally feel that there needs to be more restrictions on what is and is not allowed with advertising. I'm positive that if any such measure were attempted that they would immediately scream about freedom of speech rights. I have seen the legislature efforts requiring the volume of television ads to be the same as the programming it accompanies, which I highly applaud - a nice step in the right direction. I guess I'm saying (albeit, in a round about way) that I would be willing to give something like you suggest a try. The less invasive it is, the better. It comes down to weighing pros and cons of being annoyed by ads but getting something without monetary cost vs paying for the product to be free from the pain of ads. If it's a toss up, then sure, I'd go for it. If the ads are too annoying, then no, I'd rather buy the book straight up.
Given that the extensions of the copyright term were applied retroactively, I don't see the problem with retroactively applying a shorter copyright term. Particularly w.r.t. those works that has had their copyright term extended.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
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...
When I read the Superman comics back in the 60s the ads were for x-ray glasses and muscle building courses. So what's new?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?