A friend in publishing from London sent me a link to Bookhabit today. This was extremely kind of her, as I have an expensive reading habit, and I can see this site providing many gems.

Bookhabit is an online forum where authors upload their books, and readers pay a small fee to download and read them.

The more popular your book becomes, the more people pay to download it, but the price tops out at $5.00, so we’re talking significantly cheaper than buying a traditionally published book.

The founders of the site say “the world of unpublished writing is vastly larger and richer than that of the published. The publishers mine it to find their gems, but it is also a world that you, as a reader, can now mine yourself online. In it you may find the next bestseller, the obscure and unexpected, the new style or flavor, the new subject. In this online world you can research your passions and access books on topics that are too niche-specific for mainstream publication”.

I was so taken by this idea that I wanted to find out more about the people behind this great site, and discovered that Bookhabit is run by a pair of creative Kiwis, based in Wellington NZ. Which was doubly nice, as not only did it give me something cool to tell you all about, it also gave me a nice glow of patriotic pride in another example of Kiwi ingenuity enhancing the world’s creative industries.

Posted by Elizabeth, seasonal dish of the day

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