I learned about this new app from LaceyBookLovers on Youtube. This is a growing trend to produce these apps that charge you for stories in short increments. My main issue with this one is that they are offering chapters of books on this site that has the entire book for sale at $4.99 on book retailer websites.
Hopefully, the gullible public sees this scam for what it is and rejects this money grab. However, the bigger issue is the growing trend to deliver short length stories for a price. Short stories have been around since the beginning of storytelling. The difference is, we used to read them in magazines or newspapers, etc. where we were paying for more than just the short story.
With the rise of self publishing, this creates opportunities for entrepreneurs, looking to capitalize off of the booming industry, to overcharge unfastidious customers, leaving them paying four times the price for a book they could have purchased–in its entirety–on one of the book retailer sites.
The emergence of virtual coins for stories concept, has become popular online. It’s seemingly innocuous idea gives the impression that this pay to read option is cheap. The Scream app has coins that can be purchased in bundles:
60 coins $2.99, 100 coins $4.99, 300 coins $14.99. There are more purchase options for you to buy. I’m not sure how much each chapter cost in coins but, for example, there are a lot of self published books on here. Most of the self published are sold on retailer sites such as Google and Amazon for 4.99. That’s the whole book. I imagine–since you would be reading a few chapters at a time–it will cost you more than five dollars in the end, if you purchased the whole book, in chapters, on this app.
Scream reading app is currently offered to I-phone users. It is owned by Crazy Maple Studio. The app came out this month and has eleven reviews in the Apple store so far. On Linkedin.com Joey Jia is listed as the CEO of Crazy Maple Studio. This is the same company that owns Chapters: Interactive Stories.
Junkie 4 A Story 