The website Paidbooks.com offers new incentives for reading classical literature.

Visitors of the site can choose from about a hundred books available online, which add up to 7000+ pages of text. These are mostly classical books – Treasure Island, Jungle Book, Pride and Prejudice, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, War and Peace, but the site also includes personal development books like Think and Grow Rich, and some special publications like the original bitcoin white paper.

To register, the readers must provide their personal information and bitcoin addresses. If they do not have a bitcoin address, they are provided with one by Xapo. The reader gets 250 satoshis for every page that is read in ten minutes. The money earned is paid into the reader’s bitcoin wallet every Friday, if the current balance exceeds 5500 satoshis. It does not seem like much, as noted by a Reddit user Kareem Elbadry,

Nevetherless, many Reddit users were thrilled with the opportunity of earning a little money for something they already enjoy doing. Some of them offered titles that should be added to the library (e. g. Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason). Others jokingly remarked they would love to get paid to read Japanese comics or erotic novels.

The creator of the site, Reddit user bitcoinalien, says he did it to combine his two passions – bitcoin and reading/self-education. He thinks it can become a profitable business thanks to Google advertising if the site attracts enough customers. Currently, more than 3500 people have registered on the web site.

CoinFox already wrote about an app created by Chaotic Moon Studios that paid people for workouts, measuring the length and intensity of their physical activities. Similarly to bitcoinalien, Ben Lamm of Chaotic Moon said the idea was to combine “looking good and making money”.

Alexey Tereshchenko