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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.
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As to movies and TVs, there are different formats there too, not to mention the Great Divide between film and video. Lots of different hardware for watching movies. There's been ads from the beginning in both.
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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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Yet there are plenty of web ads-including on this very site. There are PDF ads too.
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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.
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Books are read by millions of people as well : why wouldn't the same work for books as for TVs? And magazines have always have ads. Games are meant to be shared around?The game I'm familiar with - Jumblr2- is an Ios game which can't be shared around. Despite MR beliefs, lots of games are DRMed , too. As for music, the very successful freemium model music service Spotify is streaming only. No sharing there.
And , oh yeah, I haven't even mentioned freemium in shareware.
I think, Elfwreck, you are viscerally opposed to ads in books and I sympathize. But what you and I like may not be what happens.
The logic of the freemium model is that there are people who value free/cheap over no ads. Alternatively, there are people who can be enticed into trying an ad-supported product who would gladly pay to remove the ads if they find the product worthwhile. (I suspect you fall into category two).
The success of KSO hints that there are a lot of folk out there that don't mind ads- despite the confident predictions on this forum that KSO was DOA. (Maybe I'm overdoing TLAs?
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