Photo by motdin (Creative Commons License) via Flickr
By now you’ve no doubt heard about Amazon’s plan to put advertisements in some ebooks. (Click here and here to read the actual patent applications. They’re really hot reads!) Anybody with an iPhone can see how this might work: it’s already working for the popular Apple App store. Want the ebook for free? Get a version with Google-ad-like advertisements peppered throughout it. Don’t want the ads, pay full price (They also seem to be paving the way to put ads in POD books, harking back to a generation or two ago when a cheap paperback might subsidize itself with cigarette ads). Here in Los Angeles, the Arclight Cinema, the best movie theater in the world, charges a bit more for its movies than does the competition, and one of the reasons is the lack of ads for Coke or Vonage or Levis before the movie (you still get ads for future movies, but most people don’t mind a few of those).
But would this work for books? I don’t think so. To begin with, reading a book, even an ebook, is different from surfing the web. It is absorbing in a completely different way. The wonder of literature, for me at least, is how it can transport the reader into a consciousness other than his own. In order for this to occur, some absorption must take place. The reader must lose himself in the narrative. I imagine this would be significantly harder with an ad popping up every now and then, pulling back toward life.
Another problem with this is that “relevant ads” might not really exist for all books. Just because I wanted to read John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven doesn’t mean that I want more info on the Mormon Church or Ski resorts in Utah. We already see how these kind of ads are clunky and so often wrong on sites like Facebook (try mentioning something like herpes in your status update and see if a raft of pharmecuetical and dating ads don’t pop up in the sidebar), and at least on those sites, there’s a user, someone actively entering information. With a book, the subject matter is fixed. I can’t wait to read Ulysses and hear about “Great Prices on Flights to Dublin!” I pity the algorithm that has to deal with a book about consumerism like Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
Then there’s that whole “Some places should be free of advertisements” thing. I think this is the most important one of all. Reading is a refuge. To soil it with even the most briliant, unobtrusive and relevant ads would be wrong. Of course, I’m a guy who has slowly been trying to eliminate all ads from his life, adding adblocker to my web browser, watching TV only on DVD, not buying magazines or newspapers. If you want to advertise to me, you better make your ad seem like content (and I don’t mean those lame “special advertising sections” that look like fake articles). I guess I think books are sacred. Am I crazy?
What do you think? Could you deal with an ad in an ebook? What if it were a briliant ad, like the Volkswagen “Pink Moon” ad? And if you say no to these questions, would you be willing to spend the $10 to avoid them?
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I’m a new owner of a Kindle DX. I have a love-hate relationship with it, as it is, without adding ads.
I love the portability of the device, but I completely miss the bookstore experience: the clerks, the customers, the atmosphere, etc.
However, a good many bookstores sell non-book items as a way to make their rent and keep the business going. I’m not sure that’s all that different from what Amazon plans. Sometimes I feel I have to hunt for the book that I want within a display that sells non-book items that may or may not have anything to do with the book I want.
It’ll be interesting to see how Amazon actually intends to use this technology and until it does, I’m reluctant to jump to an opinion.
Assume for a moment I actually have an ebook reader. I would pay the extra for ad-free books. It’s possible I would think different if I was the sort who bought several books a week. It might be worth the savings to tolerate useless ads. Might, but I doubt it. Ads I would tolerate? Stuff about other books. If the ads were not scattered throughout the book, I’d be more tolerant of them, basically because they would not interfere with the reading experience, and that aspect is the most important.
Lee,
Thanks for the comment. As we sell a lot of non-book product (as an economic necessity and because our customers demand it), I definitely get what you’re saying. I will point out, though, that those non-book products aren’t actually in the book you’re reading. Once you’ve got the book and are hunkering down to read, the fact that the book was in a display with other merchandise seems irrelevant.
cheers to that. I will drop by your store sometime in the near future now that I work near Pasadena.
I think ads will be way too distracting to be tolerated while reading a book. It seems so ridiculous that we have come to this crazy advertising atmosphere. I have noticed lately that if you go to a website to look at clothing, then the ads for clothing stores show up in your browser on the right side. It reminds me of the movie where the actor switched eyes in order to get by a retinal scan. There were advertisements for the previous owner showing up in front of him as he walked along. I would pay more for a book with no ads.
Isn’t it interesting that the underlying assumption in these plans is that the book is perfect as it is, and a viable strategy to squeeze more dollars out of readers is to make a substandard product the new norm (book with ads) and make a traditional book (no ads) the premium product?
Many of Charles Dickens’s novels (the ones published in standalone parts, not the ones published in periodicals) featured pages of advertisements–not just for other books from the same publisher but also for things like cosmetics, various pills and pharmaceuticals, and plated silverware. (I wish I had my facsimile copy of the 1846 Oliver Twist with me so that I could give you more specific examples; they’re actually terrific for getting a glimpse into the nineteenth-century world.) If people had their part-numbers bound together into books later, they generally stripped out the illustrated covers and the “advertiser” section, leaving just the novel’s text–but I think it’s safe to say that the “advertiser” is part of what underwrote the business model that made his books affordable and turned him into a superstar. So, it’s also important to remember that “reading as ad-free zone” might be a historically specific phenomenon that isn’t always going to be economically viable–and that the debate over how visible the *business* of literature should be isn’t anything new.
When I watch television shows on Hulu, I figure that the least I can do is watch an ad or two; if people want to get books for free, they should probably get ready to do the same. So, yeah: if I had an ebook reader (which I don’t), I’d be willing to watch an ad in order to get my content without paying for it. And with things I actually cared about, I’d be willing to pay in order to avoid ads.
None of this is to say that I’d want an ad to pop up right in the middle of my reading experience–which is why I’m likely to keep my reading old-school, paper and ink, unless I’m working with something (like a GoogleBooked nineteenth-century novel) that I can’t get in print.