The artist of an online comic that I read occaisionally posted a link to a book that he illustrated, Teddy Bear Dreams, on a web site called Wowio. I figured that I would check out the pictures of cute Teddy Bears, maybe send a link to Chrissy, and be done with it. But then I saw that Wowio allows you to download the book for free. Apparently, there are hundreds of books available for free download from Wowio. I signed up for a free account and easily downloaded a copy of Teddy Bear Dreams.
I’ll be interested to see if the business model succeeds here. You get the books for free and the author gets a kickback of some sort for each download. There is no advertising on the site itself, which is rather spartan in a black and white theme. Each book is downloaded in PDF format, but the first two pages and last page of the book are full-page color advertisements for a site sponsor. The ad pages are nicely done, and generated dynamically, as the first page says, “Ernst and Young proudly sponsors this ebook for… Michael Wilson.”
I was surprised to find advertising here of all places, but I just turned the page and quickly found the cover of the book. You actually get the front and back covers as well. The downside is that Adobe Acrobat doesn’t allow for “book mode”, so you can’t see the two pages side-by-side as you would if you were reading a regular book, which makes a picture book like Teddy Bear Dreams difficult to take in. I guess this wouldn’t matter for a regular book with no pictures.
But I like pictures. I checked out their “graphic novel” section, and there are a lot of Indie artists represented. The whole collection of “Hellraiser” comics from the early 90’s is there, as well as collections of “Star Trek” comics that were originally released in the 70’s. You’re only allowed three downloads per day though, so you’re forced to take it slow. Wowio has a few management books that I’d like to check out too, but these might compete with my paper-based book reading.
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