What bothers me about the site is that the owner does not acknowledge the sources of the books anywhere but in a single line buried in the "about us" section, and is happily basking in the praise of users who think that she digitized all those books personally, instead of just scraping Project Gutenberg. All references to PG have been stripped from the books. She responds to readers' comments and requests as if she, not PG and thousands of contributors, were doing the work -- and, in fact, has the ... ovaries? ... to
solicit donations for herself. That is shameful.
It definitely attracts a different audience than, say, MobileRead. This reader comment caught my eye:
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hi..wat a novel yaar..i jus lov reading it..it was my non detail in class 10..its been 6 years..from tat day till today i hav not crossed any other novel like tis..any 1 who visit tis..pls dont go without reading..if you r not goin to do..then you r really goin to MISS something in your life
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So much for my apparently erroneous belief that reading improves one's writing.
There's also the sexism aspect of it. I can't see her (or any of us, for that matter) approving of a website that would reject a book because a woman wrote it; how can she then turn around and do the same thing? There is no "reverse sexism" any more than there is "reverse racism"; it's either sexism or it isn't, and excluding books because of the sex of their authors is a Bad Thing.
But that's minor compared to the fact that she's pretending that all of these books are the product of her own efforts, and soliciting money from users on that basis, while turning her back on the decades-long project and the thousands of volunteers that made her business possible. That is just low.