Legal Research

How many ads do you want with your eBook?

I went a bunch of movies over the holiday break and loved every one of them. I was, however, amazed at the amount of ads before the movie which seemed to average almost thirty minutes! Now we've had ads at the movies for years that were beyond the usual trailers but I was still annoyed at the excessive amount this year.

It got me thinking. We've become acclimatized to a lot of advertising everywhere today - from product placement (like E.T.'s Reese's Pieces), pop up and popunder ads, to stickers on poles and bus stops all over town and everywhere else. Apparently part of the Mad Men revenue model is a lot of product placement too.

Now read this clever little analysis over at the Kindle Review blog:

The Value Stack for eReaders

So, you're OK with ads in your Google hits and ads in the newspaper and ads on TV and Ads in Magazines and ads on websites. Right? That keeps the costs lower.

Now, are you OK with ads sprinkled throughout that fiction book you're reading? How about a textbook? (University and K-12?) Are you OK with targeted ads such as the company that you bought the eBook from knowing your reading preferences, credit rating, or gender? How about ads that are contextual to the page you're reading?

How about eBooks borrowed from libraries? Ads...? Do we treat them differently than websites, magazines, or newspapers? Can we?

This decade will be very interesting.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).