TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Wowio’ Category

By David Rothman

Some wonderful, talented people are behind Wowio. It’s one more reason why I’m sorry to see traffic on the decline, following the controversial changes in the ad-supported site. In fact, Wowio is now actually a bit of a bookstore in disguise.

"I have influenced more then 1,000 people to stay away," one user writes in, "and I will continue to boycott." Verifiable or not, that statement shows the extent to which Wowio is in trouble. My biggest problems are with the obnoxious, intrusive ads, as well as charges for PDFs that were once free.

Granted, the Alexa traffic-tracker is imprecise, and you can’t confuse site popularity with profitability, but it’s clear that the reborn Wowio is far from a hit. If Wowio’s new owners can’t make a go of it, maybe they need to sell the site to a publisher, Amazon, Google or another company with enough resources to make the advertising model work in a user-friendly way.

Related: Wowio founder’s defense of the changes, my rebuttal and the latest on Wowio’s business difficulties.

By Chris Meadows

Wowio, which had such a promising start, is not looking so good anymore. After making significant (and much grumbled-about) changes in their contract structure earlier this year and being acquired by fellow media company Platinum, Wowio is now three weeks late paying its authors and artists what they are owed. This is the second quarter in a row that their author payments have been substantially late.

Not that most authors are necessarily owed very much anymore. T. Campbell, writer for webcomics "Penny and Aggie" and "Fans," stated that his revenue has dropped by 97.3% since the new contract terms went into effect; other creators are reporting similar fall-offs, and many are jumping ship. For authors whose only source of income is advertising and other revenues from their work, this delay in payment can come as a heavy financial blow.

Keeping Silent on Advertising

Wowio is also being mum about how much money it is taking in from advertising on its new "page preview" function, which forms part of the basis for that payment in the first place. According to an article in Comic Book Resources,

"When I asked my contact at Wowio about the current ad rate as recently as last week, she said that the final number is calculated at the end of the quarter," [Bill Williams of Lone Star Press] said. "I could not even get a hint at the CPM [advertising cost per thousand page impressions] for the ads on the pages viewed."

"I read the new contracts and immediately realized it was a bad deal for creators and authors not to know what rate their page views were generating," [writer] D.J. Coffman said. "Especially bad for the webcomic authors publishing collections there, because the preview idea was basically competing with their own archives and advertising on their own sites."

Even artists who were formerly among Platinum and Wowio’s biggest boosters are being turned off by their behavior. D.J. Coffman, who offered his work through Wowio and formerly helped promote it at conventions, has had plenty of bad things to say about its business practices lately—taking Wowio to task for such poor decisions as spending more money on fancy dinners than on artists’ booths at the Chicago Comicon.

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By David Rothman

No, E Ink can’t render manga and other comics in color, and other challenges remain. But the iPhone offers colorful viewing.

So what are the prospects of e-readers for comic viewing?

Laura Hudson, senior editor at the Comic Foundry and a writer for PW Comics Week, has a nice overview in PW.

Meanwhile I continue to hope that Wowio, a supplier of free and for-free comics, will heed my suggestion to tone down its intrusive advertising.

Related: ClickWheel’s comics viewing tech for the iPhone/Touch (screenshot). Check it out and share your thoughts!

By David Rothman

Looking on Wowio for a PDF freebie of Alice’s Adventure Under Ground, the Lewis Carroll classic? Forget it.

The new and not-so-improved Wowio will charge you $1.99 for what the company earlier offered for free under an ad model.

And the same holds true for the novels of Mark Twain and probably most other fiction writers on the site—even the dead ones in the public domain.

I’m not happy. Wowio’s slogan is "Free books, free minds," and founder William Lidwell’s just-posted reply makes me all the more frustrated with Wowio’s new incarnation as a property of Platinum Studios.

Point by point, matching those in the response Will kindly provided, here are my thoughts:

1. Yes, it’s laudable for Wowio to make books available internationally, and that might mean that free PDFs won’t be downloadable everywhere due to copyright agreements. But the Lewis Carroll book is a public domain classic published by Wowio. Why isn’t it free to me, even here in the U.S.? Furthermore, through IP addresses or cookies, isn’t there a way to distinguish American visitors from others—geographically, at least?

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By William Lidwell, WOWIO Founder

Moderator: I’m still grumpy about Wowio’s new site. But meanwhile I thank William Lidwell, founder of Wowio, for taking time to present his side. - D.R.

A favorite quote of mine has always been, "He who knows only his side of the case, knows little of that." So, in the spirit of J.S. Mill, I would like to offer the following seven points for TeleRead readers’ consideration regarding David Rothman’s recent article, "Ad-cluttered Wowio e-book site: The uglier side of globalization—minus those classy free PDF downloads":

1. WOWIO’s mission has always been to make books available for free to everyone in the world—not just to people in the United States—while ensuring fair compensation for authors and publishers. The previous model could not achieve this mission for two reasons: (1) many publishers have rights restrictions that prevent international distribution, and (2) we could not realistically have local sponsor sales in every country in the world. The new model addresses these challenges by giving publishers the power to selectively distribute their files on a country-by-country basis, and by giving everyone on the planet the ability, at minimum, to read our books for free online.

2. The "classy free downloads" that David refers to in his title have not been discontinued. When sponsors are available, users can still download books for free just as in the previous model. When sponsors are not available, users can buy e-books ad-free at a price set by the publisher. Since sponsors can target by demographic profile, region, and book category, not all readers will see all sponsorships all of the time. Additionally, we have dedicated the Articles & Essays section of the site to be a permanently sponsored category for a worldwide audience. The sponsors for this category will be worthy non-profit organizations seeking to increase awareness for their causes.

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By David Rothman

The word from Scott Christian Sava is that Wowio wants major publishers involved. And he says these companies don’t want ads in their precious books—hence a change in the Wowio site and business model. No more free PDFs with a tolerable number of ads.

Recently bought by Platinum Studios, Wowio is now just a bookstore with rude, blinking ads and reader-hostile way to try out the books online. I can’t fit the pages on my screen without shrinking the type to the point where I have trouble seeing it.

Back to the old way, please

Scott, himself a former Wowio pubisher, joins me in hoping that Platinum will reconsider. Wowio brought him $40,000 last year “and it cost my readers nothing,” a fact for large publishers to ponder.

I thank Scott for writing in and would love to hear from the big houses giving their views. At least one pretty good-sized company, Oxford University Press, actually did provide a number of Wowio books, including a memorable Mencken biography. OUP will be pleased to know that, yes, I associate the company’s name with the free books—not just the authors’. Talk about goodwill! And keep in mind that, as you just heard from Scott, publishers and thus writers and artists are actually being paid.

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By David Rothman

Wowio, the ad-supported book site, once worried me. I didn’t see enough ads in the free PDF files.

Someone had to pay for this feast.

Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn—those were among the distinguished writers whose works you could download for free. Wowio catered to comic fans, but it offered plenty else, in keeping with its slogan of "Free books, free minds."

And so I was delighted to learn that Platinum Studios had bought Wowio and would open up the books to visitors outside the United States.

Retraction! Huckster alert

May I retract that for now? So far, the new Wowio model is to tease you with books viewable online, then see if you’ll download a PDF file and pay $9 or whatever. The ads must be part of the plan. Just torture you with them until you buy the books. The problem is that the ads are beyond mildly obnoxious. Believe it or not, I don’t want repeated software pitches to pop up at the top of the pages of The Great Santini.

The old Wowio gave us ads at the starts of books and in various places, but not in a constant, in-your-face way that the new online viewer does. Unlike me, Vonnegut (photo) seems to have hated even restrained advertising. Imagine how he’d feel about Slaughterhouse-Five as a vehicle for huckstery ad nauseam.

Conspiracy to discredit ad-supported books?

Again, I’m rather pro-ad; and in fact the TeleBlog runs Google, Amazon and Powell’s advertising even though it would be wonderful if we didn’t have do. But we try not to let the ads constantly interrupt the main flow of the blog.

By contrast, Platinum’s advertising is so intrusive that I almost wonder if it’s part of a conspiracy to discredit ad-supported books.

Meanwhile here are a few of the companies you might want to complain to: Bomgar software (especially!), Vonnage, Hewlett Packard, Volkswagen, and Google, the latter of which should be ashamed of itself for cooperating with Platinum. Tell ‘em you want ads in Wowio  books to keep ‘em free, but not quite so often. Is an ad almost always in sight when you watch television?

I would heartily suggest that the advertising community shun Wowio unless it promises more humane treatment of visitors in the future. As it happens there don’t seem to be that many advertisers, or at least as viewed by me. It’s just that I keep seeing some of the same ones again and again. Sad. Is it partly because smart companies are already avoiding the reborn Wowio—preferring to see their products presented in a less cluttered environment?

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By David Rothman

Wowio, the U.S. provider of ad-supported books, recently announced plans to go global.

Now here’s some possibly related news—Platinum Studios‘ talks to buy Wowio.

The big issue where is, Will freebies continue, not just of comics but of regular books?

“Regular” can include anything from software manuals and other how-to books to Kurt Vonnegut novels and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

Some hope in Platinum President Brian Altounian’s comments

I see some hope in a quote from Brian Altounian, president and COO of Platinum, which licenses thousands of comic-book characters:

“WOWIO’s commitment to its motto, ‘free books + free minds,’ has driven the WOWIO team to create a national digital publishing distribution network, both in the comics and traditional publishing world, that brings together creators, publishers and sponsors in a way that allows authors and publishers to be paid, while providing readers access to free books. We feel that WOWIO’s unique business model has positioned them to be at the forefront of change in the publishing world during this challenging time for the entire industry.”

So, gang, what do you think?

Related: Google news roundup and Wikipedia item on Platinum.

By David Rothman

"Once, there was a cabal of merchants and scientists whose purpose was to make money and improve the lot of humankind. They invented Time Travel and Immortality. Now, I was taught that they invented Time Travel first and developed Immortals so they could send people safely back through the years. In reality it was the other way around. The process for Immortality was developed first. In order to test it, they had to invent Time Travel." - Kage Baker’s In the Garden of Iden: A Novel of the Company, latest Tor freebie.

…And a Wowio freebie: The Day the World Stopped, by the late Stanton A. Coblentz, whose style, according to a Wikipedia contributor, "seems ever new." Agree?

By David Rothman

The Wind in the Willows—a great children’s lit classic, also appealing to many adults and packed with lovable, humanlike animals—appeared in 1908 without illustrations.

Over the years many have taken a stab at accompanying art, and here’s a new freebie from Wowio with Colin Throm’s amazing work. Yes, he is very much alive strikes me as well worth the attention of other publishers, E and P.

More wrinkles 

Wowio’s new edition of Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece also “incorporates updates in punctuation (e.g., changing arm-chair to armchair) and converting words that utilized British spelling into their American counterpart (e.g., humour to humor).

“Additionally, editor’s notes are incorporated to help clarify certain areas of the text. The editor’s notes are placed between brackets.”

Related: Manybooks.net editon—without all the extras but in more formats than PDF.

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By David Rothman

If you like your  plagues depicted more stylishly than does Michael Crichton, you might check out The Pisstown Chaos by David Ohle, a freebie from the ad-supported Wowio service. I’ve just run across it, but the start makes me want to read on:

“Victims of the Pisstown parasite were thought of as dead, but not enough to bury. Gray, haggard, poorly dressed, they lay in gutters, sat rigidly on public benches, floated along canals and drank from rain-filled gutters. City Moon, the Pisstown paper, dubbed them “stinkers.” Had you walked through Hooker Park, where groups of them congregated, you would have been wise to hold your breath as long as possible.”

“Advance orders for The Pisstown Chaos were so low last year, I canceled the original May 2007 publication, and tried again, this time for July 2008,” writes Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull Press. And to pull out more stops, this preview eBook.”

Related: Amazon page for the new Ohle book. Also see PW writeup, concluding: “Ohle’s creation of a vivid world, both familiar and foreign, dark and slyly humorous, makes the book a grim delight.”

(Via book critic Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading.)

By David Rothman

Just the other day, I told how Wowio is making progress with free, ad-supported books. Now check out Wired editor Chris Anderson’s writings and video on the topic of “free.” He’s also known for his Long Tail book and related blog.

Reminder: Free isn’t for everyone or everything. But remember, if you don’t do “free” first, your rival might beat you to it.

Related: Anderson blog entry on “Free.”