Wednesday, May 9, 2007

I'm all for the free books. Are you?

So, I have discovered a website.
I hadn't planned to make a plug on my first post, but these guys are pretty amazing.

WOWIO

They have free books - eBooks, yes, but still books. It works like this: you sign up with a non anonymous email address (meaning no hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.) or with your credit card. Then you can download 5 free books each day. So far I have downloaded 35 books.
The selection is not excellent, but that is understandable given that this is a fledgling enterprise, not yet a year old. There is a pretty solid selection of political books, recent and otherwise, a growing selection of novels, and quite a bit of poetry (not my thing - I'll stick with prose, thanks). I personally found quite a bit to read in the way of fiction, because I am a fan of Vonnegut and P.K. Dick, whose books were well represented. I even found a new author, A. D. Nauman, who has a nice little Dystopian novel called Scorch
The books are nice, high quality PDF files. They have two full pages of ads at the beginning, and one more at the end. Right now Verizon appears to be their only sponsor, so expect to see a lot of black and red. Each book has your name on the very first page, and has a very small serial number on the bottom left of each page. They don't really mention this, but it's pretty easy to find if you look.
All in all, they've developed a system that is a pretty good deal for everybody. You get free books - five a day. That should do you, since even I can't manage five full sized books in one day. They make money (I assume) by selling ad space on these books. You have no real incentive to pirate, since your name is on everything, and you might as well just send your friends to the same link.

I've said a lot, but all you really need to know is "Free books!"