My new business venture.

[ki4jgt]

I thought hard about what you guys said the other day (DRM thread). I used to be that way myself, but somewhere along the line, I just got tired of trusting people.

I've been working on a site though for ereading. It's basically a site which allows authors to submit their content and readers to read the content for $1 (or maybe a little more) for 2 weeks. It's all in the browser (which would allow multimedia embedding and it to be ported from machine to machine with ease.). I'm wanting to provide a means for users who can't afford to buy books the chance to use the service too. I'm not advertising as the service is set to go public in the Summer of 2012. Haven't even picked a name for it yet (officially). I am currently hacking away at PHP, HTML and manipulating MySQL databases (currently have the database up and running) to manage the site. but I would love to hear you guy's input as I do value this community's opinions and the open source community tends to put VERY different spin on things.

Note: I do have an intro page to it with a possible name but do not want to advertise as this would violate ToS.

[Copper Bezel]

Input on which things?

I'll go ahead and say that, for me to consider such a service as a consumer, it must have an offline reading mode. Even with the assurance that my purchases will remain accessible on every platform ever, I still wouldn't consider buying a book I can't access when off WiFi. This was the dealunbreaker for Kindle, in fact - I started using the service when the Cloud Reader got an offline cache.

[ki4jgt]

Input on which things?

I'll go ahead and say that, for me to consider such a service as a consumer, it must have an offline reading mode. Even with the assurance that my purchases will remain accessible on every platform ever, I still wouldn't consider buying a book I can't access when off WiFi. This was the dealunbreaker for Kindle, in fact - I started using the service when the Cloud Reader got an offline cache.

That's what I was wanting input on. What would make this service better. I mean honestly, there's no way to block you from fishing out the file yourself (from your own cache). So the browser would allow you to view offline (if you fished it out) then again, maybe some html5 for offline mode is needed. Thanks. comment noted.