What’s the deal with buying an e-book before you get to flip through it? When books were purchase in bookstores (remember those days?), you could easily flip through a book cover-to-cover and see what it was all about prior to purchase. With e-books, the discovery stage is somewhat impossible. Or is it? A new company called Total Boox is trying to change the way that e-books are sold. A concept that is, if this writer does say so herself, an excellent idea.

Read Before You Buy

Total Boox allows you to flip through an entire e-book before you are charged for that book. Let’s say that you want to read Moby Dick, but aren’t sure if you want to comb through that mammoth volume or just read the Cliff’s Notes. With Total Boox, you could, hypothetically, flip through all of Moby Dick before you are charged a single cent. But, there is a catch. You only have six seconds to linger on a single page before you buy the book (or, rather, the price of the book is charged to your account). Why six seconds? That’s the amount of time Total Boox CEO, Yoav Lorch, believes that it takes a person to read a page.

The Israel-based company won’t charge you for the whole book, though. If you take thirty seconds to read through five pages, you will only be charged for pages read. How is this all calculated? You pay for the percentage of the book that you read. So, if you read 20% of the book, you will be charged for the 20% of the book that you’ve read. If you read through the whole book, you will have to pay for the whole thing. If this sounds like a fair deal to you, that’s exactly what Lorch and his team is aiming for.

A New Way To Read E-Books

Once a book, or portion of a book, has been purchased, you own that book forever. You can then read the book, or section of a book, that you’ve purchased offline or online at your discretion. You won’t be charged extra for books that you read offline, but you do have to keep your account balance topped off. You can sign up for a Total Boox account using PayPal or a credit card. If you sign up using an Android tablet now, the company will also place $2 in your account from the start.

Presently, there is no iPad app – how’s that for a change? But, the company is working on one right now, and the iPad app is expected to hit the Apple Store mid-February. One additional feature of Total Boox that’s especially great is the ‘