For streaming music on demand, Rhapsody reigned supreme for a long time.  That time, I believe, is now over.  For one thing, Rhapsody has no downloadable client for Mac.  You must stream from their site.  But the biggest letdown is the cash money it costs.  Sure, it is a richer experience with artist bios and reviews and navigating from tune to tune, but why pay when you don’t have to.

Enter:

• Just Hear It
• GrooveShark
• SeeqPod
• Songza
• Last.fm
• Pandora
• Lala

I haven’t done extensive testing on any of the newer services, but the more established Last.fm and Pandora while not exactly set up like Rhapsody still offer free tunes.

Last.fm is geared more toward a social experience with the ability to play some music.

Pandora takes a different approach — more like a radio.  Choose an artist, song, album or genre and a custom station is created related to this choice.

It looks as if seeqpod and songza may scrape for music that already resides on various websites.  Just Hear It, GrooveShark and Lala implement a more polished interface for searching and playback.

Neil Gaiman Reads Chapter One of The Graveyard Book from The Graveyard Book Tour on Vimeo.

Watch Neil Gaiman Read Chapter Two of The Graveyard Book from The Graveyard Book Tour on Vimeo.

Neil Gaiman — according to Boing Boing and his blog — is currently on a book tour and reading a chapter per stop from his new book, “The Graveyard Book”.  The readings are filmed and uploaded to Vimeo.  Embedded above are the first two chapters.

The following is a “product description” from Amazon:

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy.

He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead.

There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy-an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer.

But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod’s family. . . .

Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his New York Times bestselling modern classic coraline. Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, the graveyard book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages.

Wowio.com offers up free Ebooks in the PDF form.  I heard about this site from the I Read Comics podcast.  And rightly so because Wowio serves a good number of comics and graphic novels from scores of publishers.  The absence of DC and Marvel proves not much of a surprise.  But many indie publishers have signed up.

The sign up process could potentially hold you back.  With three ways to sign up, I chose to enter my email.  Wait, what?  What’s so hard about entering in a email?  Well, Wowio won’t take free email address like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.  But this is most likely the way to go if you have one.  Otherwise you have to enter a credit card — albeit for authentication purposes only — or send them a scan of an ID!

After signing up the download process is simple and painless.  I was quickly reading the current most popular comic on the site: Singularity 7.

Singularity 7, as described on the publisher’s site:

With the Earth laid waste by an assault from microscopic nanites, humanity hides in underground cities. But those cities are being destroyed by the “Gosiodo” -machine beings engineered to convert the remnants of humanity to the will of the nanites. It’s up to seven men and women, seemingly immune to the nanotechnology, to fight back… before there’s nothing left to fight for.

THIS JUST IN:  Wowio, apparently overnight, shut down the site and announced they are “going global”, retooling the site and will be back mid-July.  The site now looks like this: