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Originally Posted by stonetools
Well, I was thinking of the banner ads at the bottom of video games. Maybe it isn't translatable to ebooks-yet. Sure they're working on it, though.
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They've been working on it for a decade. The formats keep changing; the hardware for reading them keeps changing. There are *no* standards in the ebook industry. There are three major commercial formats right now -- mobi, ePub, and PDF -- half a dozen commercial formats popular within the last five years, and over a dozen more over the last ten. And then there's the noncommercial formats that some people use--html, rtf, txt.
Any kind of ad rendering is going to depend on format, reading software, and hardware. Anything on an e-ink device is going to lose animation & color. Anything converted to txt will be lacking everything but text. Anything read on a web browser will have problems with ad placement, unless it's so code-heavy it can't be read in any other format. PDFs that have good color, well-placed, entertaining ads that don't annoy people--won't get read by anyone with a 6" ereader.
These aren't trivial problems; companies & individuals have been working on them for years. Companies keep trying to figure out how to put effective ads on web pages, where they have a lot more control of layout & presentation options, and most of what that's resulted in is reader blind spots and a proliferation of adblock software.
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Of course, you might ask the question " Why is worth advertisers to pay for tv shows if the commercials are only shown during the breaks?" They do, though- have for decades.
Are you saying a freemium model could NOT work for ebooks, the way it does for games and music?
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Yep. "Freemium" has problems in ebooks that don't exist in other media.
Advertisers pay for TV because a TV show is watched by millions of people; if 1% of them buy as a result of the ad, they've made a profit. If they have to pay $1 per ebook sold to include the ads, and only 1% of readers buys a $10 product, they're losing money. Ebooks, unlike games & music, aren't presumed to be shared around; the ad is supposedly only going to be seen by the buyer. If it's not to his or her tastes, the ad money was wasted.
Companies can (and probably will) have free ebooks as advertisements, the way that some companies give away books, comics or magazines as promos. But like those, it'll be sheer advertising costs, not a symbiotic relationship with consumers, where the cost is shifted from the book itself to the product it supports.