I first heard of Rene on Twitter, where her handle is “reneengstrom“.  Today, she was taking random requests for quick sketches and then posting the results for everyone to see.  Some of the requests were pretty out there, but she came through imaginatively every time.  I requested an Optimus Prime sketch, and she sent over a picture of her work.  That’s some funny stuff; I laughed out loud.  Thanks, Rene! You made my day.

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.

Speaking of awesome, I’ve recorded every episode of “Ice Road Truckers“, but I haven’t watched the last episode yet. The Sword of Damocles on the ice road is that, eventually, the ice is gonna melt and someone is going in the drink. Every so often, someone dies out there. To emphasise this, they show a digital representation of a semi-truck falling through the ice every fifteen minutes of each episode.

So I’m almost certain that someone dies in the final episode, but they do their best to make you think that about every episode. I think that’s the draw of the show. I haven’t watched much of anything since BioShock started taking up the majority of my free time, but I do plan to watch the last episode of Ice Road Truckers soon.