Ads in ebooks – coming to an eReader near you
Imagine this for a moment: You download a book onto your ereading device (lets use the Kindle) because the ebook was either free or pretty darn cheap. As you begin reading, you notice more than just text fills each page. There are ads in the ebook! They are non-intrusive, but still, books are generally thought to be sacred ground from any type of ad placement. How would you react?
If you think this is too far fetched to be worthy of your attention, think again. According to this article in Fast Company, Amazon has filed for a patent that would do just that – place ads in your ebooks:
The patents are titled “On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising” and “Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content,” and they’re designed in part to tackle that irritating little problem that “out of print or rare books … typically do not include advertisements” and their content is thus fixed, and not at all “adapted to modern marketing.”
Like the article says, however, I usually don’t see ads in books as it is, so I’m not sure what Amazon is referring to here. But the article continues:
What the patents set out is that downloaded text content for the Kindle could be spotted with contextually-sensitive advertisements: Mention of a restaurant on a particular page could result in a dynamic-embed for a nearby restaurant to the user on the opposing page. It kind of makes sense as a more dynamic version of the way typical magazines work–after all, when you buy an interior decor magazine, you expect to find ads for furniture or sleek kitchen equipment, not for the latest computer games.
Having dynamic ads, that are relevant to the content you are reading (the whole basis of Google’s ad program) makes sense. I think this could work, as long as the ads are non-intrusive and don’t take away from the reading experience. Whether or not this is possible, I don’t know.
Yet the whole idea of placing ads in ebooks raises a bunch of other questions. Who would benefit from the ad revenue? The author? The publisher? The distributor, like Amazon? And would these ads serve to subsidize the price of ebooks (maybe even to the point of being free), or would they subsidize the cost of the reading device? Or both?
I think right now ads in books is such a radical idea (though not a new one, people have been kicking it around for a while now), that the economics of it haven’t really been worked out. Surely the author should benefit from any ad revenue, since it is his/her work that is being turned into a marketing machine.
At the same time, publishers and distributors are going to want a piece of the pie as well. My only hope is that their remains some flexibility in the system for everyone involved – including the reader. If ads turned out to be a big distraction for me, then maybe I’d pay a little more for an ad-free version of an ebook.
What is your reaction to ads in books? Would you be open to it if it meant paying lower prices? Or do you think books should remain pure and ad-free? Give us your thoughts in the comments below.
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