There is something really special about a 1-hour loan period for a digital book, and I'm grateful to IA for letting me experience it.

Personally if I'm interested in a book, especially if it's on sale, I prefer to add it to a short-term wish list and then put it away for a while, giving some time to consider whether it's more of a passing interest, a possible new interest, or more of a core interest and worth considering because its content will likely help improve my fundamental energy levels in some way, or something like that.

Some book services make this process of mine a total PITA. Like with Google Play Books, I really like the responsiveness of the their app compared to the Kindle app, but sometimes you put a book that's on sale on your wish list so you can check it out later, only to find that the price immediately reverts to pre-sale. It's hard to not see that as a predatory pricing change, bug or no.

Switching over to IA, the one-hour loan really helps me figure out WTF I'm liking/disliking in a safer, less-mercantile context (:-)) and a lot of the time what's needed here subjectively is more like a dip into an unfamiliar world for a few minutes, nothing worth spending money on.

To me this is a massive improvement over more typical sampling models like the first-chapter-sample which a lot of the time is more like a waste. In a physical bookstore I always got a lot more buying-impetus if I could just skim the entire thing, and again about an hour was all I'd need for that.

So this has been really cool to experience, just as a me-sized data point, and a good reminder to donate to IA.

It seems like they can barely keep the site running as it is. To avoid giving it the HN hug of death, is there a mirror we can change the link to?