Advertisements in ebooks revisited

Publishers are tearing their hair out over ebooks. How do they make money when ebook prices are being pushed so low? One idea that has been thrown around is to subsidize ebook with in-book ads. Yes, the idea is controversial and probably makes traditional book lovers cringe. Heck, it makes me cringe a little too.

I’ve already visited this subject twice on Brad’s Reader. The first was back in 2007 in my post Advertising in Books: Will it Work? and again in 2009 Ads in ebooks – Coming to an eReader near you. Notice that my thinking on this does shift from post to post.

According to this Mediabistro post, the Wall Street Journal is already speculating that ads just might help publishers get some of their mojo back when publishing ebooks:

The Wall Street Journal reports: “In short, physical books can’t compete with other print media for advertisers. Digital books can. With an integrated system, an advertiser or publisher can place ads across multiple titles to generate a sufficient volume. Timeliness is also possible, since digital readers require users to log in to a central system periodically.”

The article continues:

The Wall Street Journal reports on what these ads might look like: “For consumers, the free samples of digital books now available would surely include ads. Because not every consumer who reads a sample chapter will buy the book, it’s reasonable for the publisher to extract some additional value. Seeing ads in the sample may also convince a reader to pay for a premium, non-ad version of the full-length book. The old market segmentation of paperbacks and hardcovers will be replaced by ad-supported or ad-free books.”

I will say that if publishers do start inserting ads into ebooks, the ebook prices better remain lower than $10. Otherwise, they’ll just be shooting themselves in the foot, again.

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