Advertisements in Ebooks-Good Idea?

[BearMountainBooks]

I agree with some of the above posters: Like it or not, it will be tried and to some degree, especially at first it will work. I also agree that there isn't likely to be two versions. If publishers buy into ads as a revenue stream, even if they say there will be two versions, that won't last.

Do I think ads will work? I think they are here to stay and will be tested up to and including placement, ads in the middle of the book and so on. It's going to be tried. And I think the generation behind me...er, younger than me, will tolerate it better than I do for the most part. The generation of now is very into free things. And if you tell them they can get it for free, they will tolerate the ads and continue along the lines of expecting content for free.

This is not because they are young. It is because with each successive generation ads have become more prevalent. It's expected and more accepted.

That said, I think my space is largely gone because they tried too hard to make it on ads. I think free internet that was ad supported is largely gone because the model did not work in the long run.

Whether or not ads in books works in the long run...remains to be seen. I still don't want to write that way, even though I do write for money and try to support myself through my writing. I don't *want* to write to placement ads or put ads in my books and I'm far from ready to even try it (no one has come knocking so it's an easy decision!) I'm not going looking for trouble.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Ebooks are different though. Advertising can be inserted at the time of sale, or even at the time of reading.

Last needs a reader that remains connected - another argument against it.
o'er my dead body chap.

And hey, you can link together a readers' purchase history to target your advertising even better.

In a closed reading 'ecosystem' like amazon's or apples - no thanks.
another argument for a generic usb-storage-like loadable reader.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Ebooks are different though. Advertising can be inserted at the time of sale, or even at the time of reading.

Only if the sales are limited to those devices that support the ads.

Advertisers can pay according to the actual circulation, number of views, or even click-throughs.

Views are generally "one per purchase." Clickthroughs are lower; a lot of people don't read with wifi enabled to save battery life, and some have no clickthrough ability at all.

And hey, you can link together a readers' purchase history to target your advertising even better.

Again: only if you're willing to sharply limit your sales pool. Also, since DRM'd ebooks can be shared between people on an account, you can't tell if the book is being bought by Mom, the romance reader, Dad, the action fan, or Teenage Kid the science fiction geek. You don't have a way of knowing if those are three different people or not one person of broad tastes. You *might* have a way of pegging ads to all three of those genres, but when a nonfic-humor book is bought on the account, you've got nothing to work from.

That being said, I don't know if it's enough to bring down the price of books. Even if the readers of ebooks are worth more, the average reader would have to spend several times more on the advertised product than they are saving on the book.

This, THIS is the key point: it's not whether the tech problems are insurmountable (they're not, even though they can't be handwaved past), or whether the readers will accept ads (they will), but whether it's *worth the money* for advertisers to pay a noticeable part of the purchase price.

If a current popular novel is $9.99, how many ads would it take to bring that down to $5.99, and what advertisers would pay for them? Would it still be worth reading at that point, or would the advert-filled version be so awful that people just bootleg it? (Even if they buy the ad version, so's to pay the author, and bootleg an ad-free one... the advertisers lose out.)

[Kevin8or]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

This, THIS is the key point: it's not whether the tech problems are insurmountable [...], or whether the readers will accept ads (they will), but whether it's *worth the money* for advertisers to pay a noticeable part of the purchase price.

Exactly correct. I must place my hope in the possibility that in-book ads aren't worth advertisers' money. Only that, or piracy of epic proportions, or both, can keep ad-free ebooks alive in the long run.

[Arithonne]

I can easily see ads in ebooks (assuming there is a way to significantly lower the cost to the consumer without turning a book into more-ad-content-than-story-content nightmare) becoming a logistical disaster.

Unless you limit yourself to ads for global companies, you're going to need a whole different set of ads for ebooks bought in different countries. Unless you limit yourself to non time sensitive ads, you're going to need to change the ads periodically (not to mention a company may not want to purchase an ad for the lifetime of the copyright). Managing the ads would very quickly turn into a full time job, which will lead to either higher prices for consumers or even more ads to compensate.

Sure you can compensate for location of buyer and time of sale by having the ads added at time of sale, but are book sellers going to want to do that without getting a cut of the profit? So it's going to be compensated for by higher book prices or yet more ads.

Overall, I don't see how that would benefit most authors. Sure a big name that sells millions of books might get a nice amount of money out of it, but they probably need the extra money a lot less than someone who only sells tens of thousands of book (or less). If the whole point is to get more money into the author's hands, then the money they get for an ebook with ads would have to be more than what they currently get for an ebook without ads.

If I could write a book in X hours and get $1 per sale, or I could spend X hours writing the same book and Y hours getting ads to put in the book and still earn $1 per sale, I know what I'd choose to do. YMMV.

[bucsie]

I for one wouldn't mind ads in ebooks, but I would prefer they be one-page size, so that I could just click next page and be done with it, instead of robbing me of inches of the already tiny reader screen. Money talks, so I would love to pay less (hopefully 0).

[LaurelRusswurm]

What I find most interesting through this discussion are the assumptions.

First, that revenues generated from internal eBook advertisements in eBooks published by mainstream publishing houses would actually get to the author.

Second, that the costs of reproducing an eBook has any correlation with the actual cost of generating the copy.

And finally, that eBook advertising is somehow necessary to bring the cost of eBooks down.

Originally Posted by stonetools

This may surprise you, but there may be folks who may not view ads as that big of a break in the action that would ruin their reading experience. Such people may welcome an ad-supported version, if brings them lower prices and the possibility of a good bargain. Again, I think most ad haters can't concieve of such people, but they exist.
It willo depend also on the kind of ads. Most people who object to ads think at once of the worst kind of web ads, but there are other, less obstrusive types of ads,. Again, its hard forme to understand why the ad haters resist the possibility of an ad-supported option, if an ad-free option remains available. I'd like some feedback on that.

If you aren't a reader, you will never be able to understand it. Readers of fiction enter into "a willing suspension of disbelief" which would be too easily shattered by the insertion of advertisements in the text.

First and foremost, as a reader I don't want ads in my novels.

But as a self publishing author, I most assuredly do not want ads ruining the reading experience for *my* readers.

Printed copies of books do have substantial real costs to duplicate. Yet somehow they have managed without the insertion of advertising in the text.

Why is this revenue stream perceived as being so necessary for eBooks?

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by LaurelRusswurm

Why is this revenue stream perceived as being so necessary for eBooks?

They are struggling to justify higher costs of ebooks, all the while attempting to shore up a failing business model that has been left firmly behind in the last century.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by sabredog

They are struggling to justify higher costs of ebooks, all the while attempting to shore up a failing business model that has been left firmly behind in the last century.

Exactly. The only way is to let it go. Embrace the technology, change the business model and move into the future.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Ebooks are different though. Advertising can be inserted at the time of sale, or even at the time of reading. Advertisers can pay according to the actual circulation, number of views, or even click-throughs. And hey, you can link together a readers' purchase history to target your advertising even better.

I think that it could be done with books in the cloud. Google is probably working on that.

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

That said, I think my space is largely gone because they tried too hard to make it on ads. I think free internet that was ad supported is largely gone because the model did not work in the long run.

Most webcomics have ads on the site. You read the comic for free and maybe buy a T-shirt or a plushy or the art-book, and there are also links to other comics that you might like.


Also I see that many have a bad opinion about ads but the truth is that people post ads on YouTube because they like the ads or they are making fun of how a product is advertised in another country.

[stonetools]

Here is an interesting NYT article on the issue:

But books haven’t always been an ad-free zone, as this 2007 essay by Paul Collins from the Book Review shows. Back in the mid-19th century, readers of Dickens serials were bombarded with paeans to Freeman’s Spermazine Wax Lights and Dr. Lucock’s Pulmonic Wafers. And in the 1960s and 1970s, you could hardly open a mass-market paperback without encountering a pitch for Q-Tips, Sanka or Canadian Club.

But Amazon’s partners in its new Kindle venture may take comfort from the fact that the ads seemed to work. According to one 1972 study, while readers claimed to dislike the idea of advertising in books, after actual exposure their negative feelings declined while brand awareness climbed.

LINK

[stonetools]

This, THIS is the key point: it's not whether the tech problems are insurmountable (they're not, even though they can't be handwaved past), or whether the readers will accept ads (they will), but whether it's *worth the money* for advertisers to pay a noticeable part of the purchase price.

I agree that this is the key point. Now I have no background in marketing, and possibly, EW, you do. I wonder how you can be so sure that ad support could not noticeably lower prices. After all, it does so for games, TV shows, and apps, not to mention hardware like the KSO. Are you really trying to say that the ebook is the unique type of medium that ad support WOULDN'T lower prices for? That sounds perilously close to wishful thinking to me. You need to argue for this in more detailed fashion than you have done so far.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I agree that this is the key point. Now I have no background in marketing, and possibly, EW, you do. I wonder how you can be so sure that ad support could not noticeably lower prices. After all, it does so for games, TV shows, and apps, not to mention hardware like the KSO. Are you really trying to say that the ebook is the unique type of medium that ad support WOULDN'T lower prices for? That sounds perilously close to wishful thinking to me. You need to argue for this in more detailed fashion than you have done so far.

Actually ads tend to lower prices for products TO START. Look at TV. Ads just to cover the cost of bringing TV into your home. But now we not only have MORE ads--we are all paying providers to receive TV signals.

Radio is still broadly free and supported by ads, but there are a lot more ads.

Some other services started out free (email, facebook) because they were ad supported. But if you look at where those companies go (google) they have to start "selling" something to keep making enough money. Yet the ads never go away.

I think the same would be true of books. You put in ads under the guise of making it cheaper, but over time the price of the book would revert back to a pay product. The ads would never disappear.

And no, I don't think that an ad revenue stream would necessarily make it to the author, not if the publishers put ads in. They would likely pay the author on number of books moved as they do now, at least to start. Since I don't think ads could completely support books, eventually I think there would be a sales price AND ads.

But I'm biased. I don't like ads.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by LaurelRusswurm

What I find most interesting through this discussion are the assumptions.

First, that revenues generated from internal eBook advertisements in eBooks published by mainstream publishing houses would actually get to the author.

Second, that the costs of reproducing an eBook has any correlation with the actual cost of generating the copy.

And finally, that eBook advertising is somehow necessary to bring the cost of eBooks down.



If you aren't a reader, you will never be able to understand it. Readers of fiction enter into "a willing suspension of disbelief" which would be too easily shattered by the insertion of advertisements in the text.

First and foremost, as a reader I don't want ads in my novels.

But as a self publishing author, I most assuredly do not want ads ruining the reading experience for *my* readers.

Printed copies of books do have substantial real costs to duplicate. Yet somehow they have managed without the insertion of advertising in the text.

Why is this revenue stream perceived as being so necessary for eBooks?

Reading your posts, I get the feeling that you think book reading is a kind of holy thing that has never and should never be sullied by the filthy taint of commerce. I understand that many people feel this way.
My examination of the history of books indicate that this has never been so.
High fallutin literary publications such as the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's have published literary fiction-including long pieces-with ads in them. Indeed , I recommend to you The Atlantic's recent Fiction issue- you will find pretty good work, interspersed as it is with ads).
Novels like "Crime and Punishment ", "David Copperfield" and " A Study in Scarlet" were originally serialized in ad-filled magazines.
Readers were in the past and even in the present able to enjoy fiction, even with ads present .
Now as an author you can make the decision that you never want ads in your novels, and that's great. However, I think that if another author decides differently, he should get the choice to put ads in his novel. That author may just need the extra income to feed his family. There's room for both approaches, I think.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks

But now we not only have MORE ads--we are all paying providers to receive TV signals.

I do pay for TV in the UK, but at least it's for ad-free TV and radio from the BBC. (£145.50 at the moment, which is about £12.13/$20 per month.)

I do also get loads of ad-supported channels for 'free'.