[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I think you may be overestimating the technical challenges here: advertisers have ALWAYS tailored their ads to different formats and devices. There are different AT&T ads for TVs, magazines and the Web.Its what advertisers DO.

And with ebooks, they can't. They don't know if the person will be reading on a Kindle, a PC, a Blackberry, an iPad, or a Kobo. If they restrict the ads to ebooks that only work on one type of hardware, they cut out a huge portion of their market. (Some who use other hardware will get the ebook anyway--and run it through DRM stripper & converters, so the ads will possibly be removed, and definitely no longer arranged as originally planned.)

The only ebook market locked to a single device is the iBookstore, and there's no indication that it's managing to compete well.

Meanwhile, I'm leafing through my high-toned literary magazine(The Atlantic) and I'm seeing ads before, after, and in the middle of long-form articles about presidential politics and other Very Important Topics.

How many digital subscriptions to The Atlantic are there? How many are read on portable ebook readers?

Ads in pbooks might work (although attempts in the past are not encouraging); ads in ebooks are facing problems that no print edition deals with.

Meanwhile, this is being tried HERE, where they are doing both freemium and subscription. We will soon see what works.

I notice they don't have a list of books available. Or that will be available. Nor a list of publishers whose books they'll be offering. Nor any info about the software--will the social aspects only be for ebooks it provides? Will access to the ebooks stick around forever, or will books be phased in & out of the service?

You argue, often, that publishers shouldn't be willing to sell ebooks without DRM because it's an untested practice and they might go broke on it (despite the success of several companies who've done so), but you expect to be taken seriously when you point to an advertisement for a service that doesn't exist yet and isn't even defined? This is your evidence that ads in ebooks are economically viable?

You've completely dodged the issues of pricing:

If a publisher wants $10 for the sale of a book, of which 30% goes to the ebookstore, it'll take $10 coming from advertisers to make that a free book for the reader. It'll take $5 from advertisers to make it a $5 book.

Which advertiser/s do you think will pay $5 for *every person* who buys that ebook? Or do you think publishers will take less than their currently desired list price for advert-laden ebooks?

Ebooks-with-advertising could work--if publishers were willing to accept less than trade paperback price for the books. If publishers were willing to accept $1 from a group of 4 different publishers per ebook sold (so each is paying $.25 to include their ads, of whatever type), and sell those books at $3, they'd work great. But mainstream publishers seem to believe that ebooks need to cost between $7 (for low-popularity backlist genre titles) to $15, and any ads that could greatly affect those prices would be too invasive for most customers.