WOWIO is a recently launched online service where you can download eBooks for no cost whatsoever. And unlike Project Gutengerg (which is a also great site) the selection isn't limited to classics and books that are in the public domain. Several deals between WOWIO and houses like Rosetta Books and Oxford University Press are making titles from those publishers available too.
The catch? Okay, there's a catch: the big one is that the eBooks have ads in them. The thesis of WOWIO is to make freely downloadable eBooks profitable through advertising. The system is that they stick a few ads (not nearly as many as I expected, actually) throughout your eBooks, and every time an ad gets downloaded, the advertiser pays WOWIO a few cents, depending on placement. You also have to prove US residency (not hard at all, considering they allow you to do this by providing a .edu e-mail address, or credit card number if it comes to it), and you are limited to downloading 5 eBooks per day.
If you're not sold already, let me explain why this is a good thing.
Up to this point, no publisher has been able to make eBooks popular, mainly because their format makes reading boring and tiresome, and none of the portable eBook readers released to-date have been any good. It's not that eBooks are a bad idea; it's just that nobody wants to pay five or six bucks for them with all the hassles attached.
Making a multitude of titles available for free could help alleviate this. Before WOWIO, the only place giving away commercial eBooks for free was sci-fi publisher Baen, and let's face it, their list isn't everyone's cup of tea.
WOWIO is a different story. I encourage everyone who reads this to look for your textbooks and required readings there before buying hard copies. Besides its more mainstream appeal and academic potential, the eBooks you get there are in unencrypted .pdf format, which makes them relatively attractive.
This is something worth checking out, no matter what your reading interests are. Downloads take, at most, a few minutes (and that's mainly for comics and graphic novels; if you have a broadband connection, some books download in a few seconds). Not only because it's lots of fun, but because it's this kind of innovative thinking that may help fields like publishing—and especially e-publishing—out of the muck they're in.
Yesterday I downloaded John Wyndam's The Midwich Cuckoos, which was the basis for the film Village of the Damned. The novel is maddeningly hard to find in book form. I am very excited.
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