In addition to my love of technology and love of things for free, I also have a love for books. Today I found a site that in a way combines all three (link via the excellent entertainment blog Pop Candy). The site is called Wowio, and they offer free legal book downloads (.pdf format). These books include ones that aren’t in public domain.
For example, several of author Kurt Vonnegut’s novels are available on Wowio. In fact, I signed up for the site today and downloaded his book Slaugherhouse Five, which I’m enjoying already.
You may be wondering how they can offer books for free on the site. I was. According to the site, “WOWIO is a new kind of online bookstore that enables readers to download ebooks for free, using commercial sponsorships to compensate authors and publishers”. In other words, advertising.
Signing up for the site is pretty simple, though you do have to give them some information. You can either give them a non-anonymous email address, a credit card, or a scan of an ID (driver’s license or whatever). I opted for the email address option, though I couldn’t use my gmail address. It had to be a non-anonymous email address.
Once registered, you simply add the books you want to your queue and download them. There is a limit of three book downloads per day, but that isn’t a big deal for me. I can’t envision myself reading more than three novels in one day.
This really makes me wish there were an affordable e-book reader 
available. A pda is an option, but the screen size is just to small. Reading on a laptop isn’t too bad, but not the same as reading a paperback in bed. The Sony Reader seems pretty cool, but at $299 it has a little too much proprietary crap going on for my tastes. Supposedly Amazon is planning an e-book reader, but those are supposedly going to be in the $300-400 range. I guess I’ll have to live with reading on the laptop for now.
Anyhow, if you want some good, free, reading check out Wowio. It’s a pretty cool idea.