Q. What is Wowio and how is it going to change the e-book business?
A. WOWIO has proprietary technology that allows eBooks to be sponsored, which ultimately means free eBooks. Advertisers subsidize or buy the book for the reader. The reader tells their friends about their cool, new free eBook. The friends download their cool, new free eBooks. The advertisers expand their reach with a closer, one-to-one relationship with consumers. The authors and publishers have an increased audience that stretches far across the globe. Everyone’s happy. Adding sound and motion to text also tells the story in a more interesting and compelling fashion.
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Q. Your business model is based on selling advertising in books. Is this modeled at all after commercials at movie theaters? Is the expectation that people will just accept them, especially if it means getting something free?
A. The model is nothing like ads in movie theaters, advertisers buy books for less than $2.00 and provide them free to targeted audiences likely to buy their products. WOWIO also has high traffic Web sites visited by 18-34 year old comic fans.
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Q. How does the basic business model work? How is the revenue split between the publisher and the ad seller or are they one in the same? Obviously we’re just interested in approximate percentages and not hard numbers.
A. Book prices are set by publishers, who receive 100% of the sale price. WOWIO will continue to offer e-books for free supported by sponsorships and promotions intended to drive consumer traffic to the site in order to sell other e-books. More traffic means more commerce on the site from sponsorship/promotional deals with IMG Financial Group, Pepsi, MTV, Fandango, Verizon, and others. In addition, through its BookShare technology, WOWIO offers another targeted promotion that allows sponsors to place a book on their Web sites in order to give their customers free access to it as a reward.
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Q. Currently your books are available just as PDFs. What does that mean for the eBook illiterate? Are PDFs readable on devices like the Nook?
A. PDF’s are readable on virtually every device, but some don’t support rich media that provides sound and motion video as in http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4261091/KISS_4K.pdf
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Q. Clarify your arrangement with Ingram titles. Are its 50,000 titles only available as paid e-books currently through Wowio? Will they eventually become free?Â
A. WOWIO has hundreds of thousands of titles available through various sources as ad supported vehicles to reach a targeted audience.
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Q. Does Wowio see itself getting into the hardware business eventually?
No. Instant Incentives (www.Instant-Incentives.com) is an agency for firms delivering various promotional items at the speed of light. Electronic incentives require no warehousing, processing or shipping expense and instant delivery makes for a more compelling incentive. We provide gift certificates to maintain subscriptions and to catalog firms that reduce their cost of returns and chargebacks by half. We work with advertisers to use eBooks as promotional items and offer online self help courses that are proven effective to help people quit smoking, manage diabetes, stress and alcohol.
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