[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

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.

There are ads on TV, which had been in one format for decades, and has now shifted to a second format. There had been ads at beginnings & ends of movies in theatres, and I'm not sure any of those were used to lower the cost of the movies.

Yet there are plenty of web ads-including on this very site. There are PDF ads too.

I don't see any ads on this site. (I'm logged in, and I have adblock plus.) If advertisers are expecting my attention, they're not getting their money's worth.

Ads in PDFs will be stripped out by whatever program is used to make the PDF readable on a 6" screen. Or they'll be left in, read on reflow, and considered a nuisance--and that person is less likely to get the next issue of that magazine.

Books are read by millions of people as well : why wouldn't the same work for books as for TVs?

A "successful" book, according to the Authors' Guild, sells 5,000 copies. A handful of top bestsellers sell millions... Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, the biggest initial print run ever, sold 12 million copies in the US. That's plenty--but the *average* prime-time TV show in the US has 15-20 million viewers. Deathly Hallows is noteworthy as a book; compared to TV, it reached less people than the average episode of Friends.

I think, Elfwreck, you are viscerally opposed to ads in books and I sympathize.

I'm not philosophically opposed to them; I just know I won't put up with interference when I read. And I'm not in a small crowd there. Plenty of us will deal with splash page ads at the beginning or end of a book; those aren't likely to be useful enough for advertisers to pay for them. They can't count on them being seen & paid attention to like magazine ads. (Magazines are made of many small pieces; there are breaks built into the reading. Single-narrative books don't have those same kinds of breaks; chapter endings aren the same as article endings.) Advertisers can't count on their ad formatting being useful, because they don't know how the book will be read. (On a computer screen/tablet that allows color & animation, vs on an e-ink screen, with no color, and no support for some image types. Or on a phone that allows color, but shrinks the picture to fit a 3" screen.)

Ads in book-ish apps are common, and will stick around like ads in magazines--because the creators know how those ads are viewed. Ads in text ebooks designed to read on a number of devices are less controllable, and there's little incentive to offset the cost of the book for them.

The logic of the freemium model is that there are people who value free/cheap over no ads.

Sure. Always will be. I'm often one of them. But that doesn't mean I buy the advertised product--and the less I see of the ads, the less likely I am to buy.

I read on an e-ink device, and when I get ebooks incompatible formats, including most PDFs, I convert them first. I'm not in the main buying group for that trait, but I'm not an extreme outlier either; a lot of people throw everything they buy into Calibre to manage their collection, and export-to-device in whatever format works best for them.

I expect to see a growing number of attempts to put ads in ebooks, starting with splash pages at the front; I don't expect them to ever reach the ubiquity of ads in TV shows or magazines. I don't expect them to ever manage to subsidize the price of the ebook for the end consumer, except for the rare cases where an advertiser takes on the entire price as a promotion--"Download the free romance ebook Mostly Pure, sponsored by Ivory soap"--and I expect most of those promotions to be from publishers, not other products.