Quote:
Originally Posted by queentess
No. Just no. I read the free ebook version of a Doctorow book (I believe it was Little Brother) where each chapter started with an ad for a bookstore. It disrupted the flow of the book, jolting me out of the story every time. Now, as a free book, I'm forgiving of it. But if I pay for a book, there better not be ads interrupting the text.
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Looks like the print versions don't have that; the googlebook at
http://books.google.com/books?id=x1Q...page&q&f=false doesn't show the bookstore notes at the beginnings of the chapters.
They didn't bother me at all; I read them like "quote at front of chapter;" something to skim over on first reading and potentially go back for later if the details were interesting.
I could deal with small, unobtrusive ads at chapter breaks. (I considered those unobtrusive.) But I don't imagine advertisers would be happy with the results... of all the bookstores he mentioned, I've shopped at exactly one, and that's not likely to change, because the rest aren't local to me.
The core issue isn't "can ads be made non-disruptive in ebooks?" Sure they can. Might take some creativity, but there's plenty of that going around.
The issue is, "how much will advertisers subsidize the cost of an ebook for non-intrusive ads?" Not, "how can someone make the ads not-annoying enough to let the book still sell (or be given away for free)," but "how can ads in books sell products?" And that's a much bigger jump.
Ads in magazines are seen by potentially many people. People thumb through them at the checkout stand; they share the magazine with family & friends; it sits at the doctor's office and gets read by customers. Ads in ebooks get read by--theoretically--ONE person. How much is an advertiser going to pay to reach that one person? (Or that one account... yeah, you can share kindle books with a handful of people, as long as they all have access to the same purchasing window.)
Ads in ebooks have much the same problems as ads on websites, with the extra issue that clickable ads are meaningless on some devices.