I've been following a couple of websites recently that are doing things with books. They look similar, but I don't think bear direct comparison to each other. Unbound Unbound.co.uk lets you pledge money to help fund a book. Patronage is nothing new of course. A pledge of the smallest amount - mostly £10 - gets you a copy of an ebook version and your name printed in it. Higher amounts get you different things, like paper editions, invites to a launch party and so on. You also get access to the author's "shed". I gave £10 for Robert Llewellyn's book News From Gardenia . He's the guy from Scrapheap Challenge. I hoped to hear about the writing process, but he never put much in his shed, and I got the impression that the book was mostly completed anyway, and just needed money to publish. (Not that the process of publishing is trivial.) I don't think I'll be pledging again. £10 is a lot for an ebook with your name in it. It's a good id...
Yeah, er.... stuff.