[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Format C:

IMHO, the future will bring us different kinds of ads in ebooks.

Perhaps in DRM'd ebooks. Annoying ads in non-DRM'd ebooks will be stripped out.

Ads of the first kind: best seller fiction will always make explicit the brand of every item appearing in the book (like, "Capt. Kirk gave the order to ignite his brand new Mercedes antimatter reactor, which he just received with a special Fed-Ex shuttle directly from Earth...")

That's a matter of trademark contract between the author & the product owner; they'll want to control how the product is displayed in the book. Also, that's not likely to sell a lot of Mercedes antimatter reactors, or even Mercedes cars. It'd have to be a top-line bestseller for Mercedes to think it'll reach enough readers to bother with the contract negotiations.

Ads of the second kind: regular ads at the beginning and at the end of the ebook, no difference with the "from the same author" page we see now.

These, I expect to see more of, although I'm not sure what products other than books would find them effective. Maybe food & drink.

Ads of the third kind: small ads in the body of the ebook, maybe in headers, footers or between chapters.

If they're tiny, they're forgettable; if they're not tiny, they'll be removed.

Ads of the fourth kind: they will appear - unskippable - while turning on and off the device, when changing the ebook, when opening menus when changing confgiuration and while downloading something...

There's no way to put an "unskippable" ad into my PRS-505. Nor, I think, into Kindles as they exist now. Ads that depend on a wireless connection and special programming in the device, especially *annoying* ads with those limitations, will just fuel the sales of "ad-free" devices.

The second and fourth kind will be personalized basing on customer profiling, like Apple, Google and Facebook usually do.

So... they'll make the book cost *more*, because extra programming is required to deliver it?

Where are they going to get this customer profiling... from my nonexistent Facebook page? From my Amazon profile--I think I've spent $60 at Amazon over the last ten years or so. Half of that was a gift card. From Google, perhaps? While I'm sure Google has plenty of info about me, I have doubts that much of it's useful to advertisers; what I talk about online doesn't have a lot of connection to what I buy. (This is because Pagan religious supply shops are crammed with kitsch and jewelry instead of actual religious supplies, and because there are no commercial products associated with copyfight activism. I suppose the fanfic could be taken as an interest in buying movies/books of the original source--except I usually already have those; that's how I got into the fanfic.)

And they won't be free.

My devotion to non-DRM'd ebooks from small and indie publishers grows.

Books aren't like television, where production costs are high and absolutely won't be directly met by the receivers. Books don't *need* ads; there's several hundred years of history showing this. Ads are an alternative method of partial funding--but they'll only work if people don't just buy the competition, or find ways to make them not show up.