One of the difficulties we’ve noticed with “Thanks for Ungluing” is that the “Ask” comes at the wrong time. When you click the “Read It Now” button on the Unglue.it website, we let rights holders request your support for their work. You can go ahead and download the book anyway, but even if you don’t contribute, the hope has been that you’ll like the book and return later with to thank the creators.

The best time to ask you for support is probably after you’ve read and loved the book, and then you might have forgotten where it came from. Or maybe a friend sent you the book, or maybe you downloaded it from a library repository. In that case, a “thanks” link at the front or back of the book would be really handy!

What we’ve found, though, is that many authors and publishers find it difficult to provide such links. The big booksellers, like Apple and Amazon, don’t permit links like that in their bookstores, even when the book is free. Many of the pdf creation tools don’t export formatted hyperlinks. So we decided to help our rights holders do it, with software in the Unglue.it webserver. The author’s “ask” is in the front of the ebook.

So go ahead and download these books- you don’t have to worry about thanking the rights holders until the books have proven their worth, and you can make a contribution that’s commensurate with that value.