Startup Offers Pay-Per-Page E-Books

judgecorp writes "TotalBoox, a startup from Tel Aviv, plans to sell pay-as-you-read eBooks, charging for each page read. 'We are trying to rid the world from outdated, expensive ritual of buying a book before you read it,' says founder ~Yoarv Lorch, saying that readers can save money and move on if they start a best-seller on the spur of the moment and it turns out to be a turkey. But what about slow-burning classics that you have to 'get into'? What about reference books? And all the bits of a reference book that you don't actually need? The company has a beta app on Google Play for Android tablets."

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[SJHillman]

I would be all over this. I have tons of reference ebooks that I only use a few chapters out of. If it's $40 for a 600 page book, I would gladly pay $10 for the 100 pages I would actually use even though the unit price (per page) would be higher. As it stands now, there are a lot of books I shy away from buying because a good chunk of it is irrelevant to me and the total purchase price is above my budget.

Re:BUT

[RabidReindeer]

But Amazon lets you return ebooks!

Sometimes even when you didn't want to!

Re:The Plant

[smooth wombat]

Actually, he cut it short because it WAS working well

False. This is the Wired article wherein his assistant, Marsha Defillipo states:

By part four, only 46 percent of the people who downloaded the book paid for it, DeFillipo said.

As I always say when these stories come up, and routinely get modded down, people are lazy and cheap. If they can get something for nothing, they will, regardless if it hurts the person producing the work. They feel they are entitled to take someone else's work without compensation and will use every excuse and twist of language to justify their actions.