Regarding some of the questions about Platinum Studios, I’d suggest a read of this transcript of a Publisher’s Weekly interview with Platinum President and COO Brian Altounian, conducted shortly before the WOWIO acquisition:

http://blog.platinumstudios.com/?p=3

It was a great thing for everyone.

The new Wowio, I hope, is transitional.
What made it great was the free books with sponsorship.

I’m still in talks with them. And hope they’ll go back to their old ways. But the comic industry isn’t all they’re trying to capture.

They want major book publishers. And major book publishers…for some ungodly reason…don’t want ads in their books.

So they needed to go to pay per download.

I have NO idea what their thinking is…other than maybe it’s some backwards “we’ve never had ads in REAL books” type of thinking.

Either way. With 100,000 page views and over 7,000,000 readers a day just for my site alone…and I’m not even CLOSE to the most popular webcomic out there…I would hope there’s room for both “real books” and webcomics/comics at Wowio.

Bring us back the sponsored downloads and now with the whole world being able to get them…watch how big it grows!

I’m sorry to hear about WOWIO’s decline. The service had everything going for it when it launched.

Can I point you to another of my favorite bloggers, Jeff Jarvis? He just initiated a discussion of ads in books that could benefit from your input.

Robin

There are dozens of “read online/pay to download” e-book businesses. This was the only “read offline with discreet ads” e-book business that I knew of. Why should I pay $9 for a PDF when I can get an e-book in an accessible format for less?

I’m glad that the online editions are still there, but I agree that the ads are incredibly intrusive.

I’m very sad to see this change; I was a supporter of Wowio, directing other readers to it. But not in the future, unless they revise their current business model.

Obviously, the advertising model works famously for some kinds of content. But publishers are kidding themselves if they think that advertising will replace the revenue generated by current book sales. Current CPM (cost per thousand) rates for advertising range from $1 (the vast majority) to $20 at the high end, very targeted, high-value audiences.

This quote is excerpted from the blog post Bad Math Among eBook Enthusiasts. If the ad rates given are accurate then a publisher or author who is trying to raise one dollar per e-book must afflict a beleaguered reader with one-thousand advertisements while he or she is perusing a single book.

If the reader is from a highly-valued audience and the publisher wishes to raise ten dollars per e-book (the typical cost of an Amazon Kindle edition) then the reader must be tormented with five-hundred advertisements while scanning the text.

Of course revenue can be much higher for a “click-through” instead of a simple “impression”. The “click-through” payment can be remarkably high for certain search terms at Google as a New York Times article from 2007 revealed:

“Christmas recipes,” for instance, was going for 54 cents per click the other day. “Britney Spears” cost 36 cents, and “Britney Spears nude” only 21 cents. But “Oakland personal injury lawyer” cost $58.03. “Asbestos attorney” cost $51.68. And “mesothelioma attorney Texas” — mesothelioma is a kind of cancer caused by inhaling asbestos — cost $65.21.

This data implies that advertisement packages masquerading as e-books will be created for certain lucrative topics. Indeed a variety of pseudo-e-books and promotional vehicles already do exist.

What about the non-targeted audience? Perhaps publishers attempting to use this model will somehow obtain higher ad rates, or will accept less revenue per book, or will effectively up-sell.

One participating publisher, with whom I have discussed WOWIO at length, is VERRRRy unhappy with the changes.

He, at least, is hopeful that they will reconsider some of the “improvements.”

Keep in mind that some of their classics are free at other sites, such as Project Gutenberg. I’d rather give a donation to PG than pay WOWIO.

The so-called zoom function is a joke. I can’t and won’t try to read the miniscule print that WOWIO is using now.

I do know that a couple of old sponsors are in $$ trouble, and getting less interested in sponsoring books.

For those of you who are true readaholics, the NY Public Library has a pretty good collection, fairly heavily weighted toward audiobooks, but much to read.
Free to NY state residents. $100/yr to others. They do seem to be amenable to taking acquisition suggestions from their users. I’d like to see a concerted round of patrons requesting more e and less audio.

I’m still looking for other state libraries with similar setups for which I can buy a nonresident card, but no luck so far.

Elle