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I was just catching up on this week's emails when I found this from author David Farland/Wolverton:

David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—How E-books Will Destroy the World
Okay, so the headline is a little over the top, but I want to give you fair warning—e-books are not books, or at least they won’t be for long.

You heard it about Twilight. You heard it about Eregon. You’ve gone to movies a hundred times and seen a movie based upon a book. Afterward, as you leave, you or someone nearby complains, “It wasn’t as good as the book.” The sentiment is so cliché, in fact, that in the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, one character complains, “the movie was nowhere near as good as the comic.”

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of talk about “enhanced multimedia content” for e-books. It’s talked about as a good thing. On the plus side, I as an author will be able to develop e-books that contain things like author interviews where the readers will get to see and hear me if they desire, or add color maps, character sketches, and other cool features. At the end of a novel, I might create a cool ad clip for some of my other novels, related video games. It opens the novel to a lot of interesting possibilities.

But some things that will be done won’t be cool. Can you imagine reading a romance novel, and when you flip to page 3, up pops a video ad for breast enhancements? And when you get to page 5, in comes a commercial for Viagra? You won’t be able to read on until the commercial finishes. And on page 7, maybe Jet Blue will advertise ads for romantic getaways. . . .

You get the idea, and it’s coming soon to e-books everywhere. For many entertainment companies, a movie, television show, magazine or a book is nothing more than a forum for advertisements. It is a medium for delivering ads, and the company will bombard readers with ads until the readers just say, “Ah, to hell with it.”

Let me give you an example. Years ago, I worked for a company called Novell. Our company tied together computer networks so that software could all run off of one server, saving the customers millions in hardware. We had three little magazines for techies that did quite well. The company magazines made a couple of million dollars per year, and restricted ads to only those that were intimately tied to the industry.

However, the head of Novell decided that “we’re not a publisher,” and so he sold the magazines to a major publisher. Instantly, the pages became cluttered with ads for cigars, alcohol, cigarettes, and other crap. The articles were then chopped up so that ads could be spliced between them. You had to go from page 3 to 24, just so that you could see the tequila ad. Customers complained. Reading an article became so convoluted and circuitous that I quit reading altogether. Within months the circulation plummeted. Within a couple of years, as I recall, the magazines were all out of business.

I began watching and noticed that this publisher had a nice track record of buying magazines, turning them into forums for advertising, destroying the magazines, and then moving on.

Guess what? This same major publisher will be adding “enhanced content” to your e-books soon—or someone like them will be doing it. The makers of the Kindle, the iPad, and so on have all filed patents on the processes that will allow them to do so. In fact, it is suspected that the iAd will be far more profitable than the iPad.

The power of the medium of the novel over movies and television is that a novel can be far more immersive. Much of what I’ve written about in these articles has to do with giving tips on how to engross your reader, so that you control their thoughts and emotions from moment to moment and thus create a compelling and overwhelming experience.

As advertisers screw with your novel, they will undoubtedly look for those most engrossing moments so that they can pop in an advertisement. And the readers who are trying to enjoy the book will get so pissed, many of them will stop reading.

Yesterday, I read an article in which Ray Bradbury reported that he is refusing to sell the rights to his work in e-books. They made Ray sound like an eccentric old kook. Ten years from now, I suspect that people will look back and realize that he is a visionary.

For more on this topic, go to -http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/advertisements_coming_soon_to_ebooks.php