[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Ebooks are different though. Advertising can be inserted at the time of sale, or even at the time of reading.

Only if the sales are limited to those devices that support the ads.

Advertisers can pay according to the actual circulation, number of views, or even click-throughs.

Views are generally "one per purchase." Clickthroughs are lower; a lot of people don't read with wifi enabled to save battery life, and some have no clickthrough ability at all.

And hey, you can link together a readers' purchase history to target your advertising even better.

Again: only if you're willing to sharply limit your sales pool. Also, since DRM'd ebooks can be shared between people on an account, you can't tell if the book is being bought by Mom, the romance reader, Dad, the action fan, or Teenage Kid the science fiction geek. You don't have a way of knowing if those are three different people or not one person of broad tastes. You *might* have a way of pegging ads to all three of those genres, but when a nonfic-humor book is bought on the account, you've got nothing to work from.

That being said, I don't know if it's enough to bring down the price of books. Even if the readers of ebooks are worth more, the average reader would have to spend several times more on the advertised product than they are saving on the book.

This, THIS is the key point: it's not whether the tech problems are insurmountable (they're not, even though they can't be handwaved past), or whether the readers will accept ads (they will), but whether it's *worth the money* for advertisers to pay a noticeable part of the purchase price.

If a current popular novel is $9.99, how many ads would it take to bring that down to $5.99, and what advertisers would pay for them? Would it still be worth reading at that point, or would the advert-filled version be so awful that people just bootleg it? (Even if they buy the ad version, so's to pay the author, and bootleg an ad-free one... the advertisers lose out.)