American Gods - online for free reading
Written by Tim on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 in Books, Business, Technology, The Internet.
Neil Gaiman’s publisher Harper Collins has put his magnificent novel American Gods online for free reading as an experiment to see free digital copies sell print books.
This is a great idea — it’s really exciting to see publishers trying to get actual data about the market, rather than simply condemning all copying as piracy and hoping that the Internet just goes away.
However, I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They’ve put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book — but that’s only because practically no one is going to read this version, period. (more…)