[Arithonne]

I can easily see ads in ebooks (assuming there is a way to significantly lower the cost to the consumer without turning a book into more-ad-content-than-story-content nightmare) becoming a logistical disaster.

Unless you limit yourself to ads for global companies, you're going to need a whole different set of ads for ebooks bought in different countries. Unless you limit yourself to non time sensitive ads, you're going to need to change the ads periodically (not to mention a company may not want to purchase an ad for the lifetime of the copyright). Managing the ads would very quickly turn into a full time job, which will lead to either higher prices for consumers or even more ads to compensate.

Sure you can compensate for location of buyer and time of sale by having the ads added at time of sale, but are book sellers going to want to do that without getting a cut of the profit? So it's going to be compensated for by higher book prices or yet more ads.

Overall, I don't see how that would benefit most authors. Sure a big name that sells millions of books might get a nice amount of money out of it, but they probably need the extra money a lot less than someone who only sells tens of thousands of book (or less). If the whole point is to get more money into the author's hands, then the money they get for an ebook with ads would have to be more than what they currently get for an ebook without ads.

If I could write a book in X hours and get $1 per sale, or I could spend X hours writing the same book and Y hours getting ads to put in the book and still earn $1 per sale, I know what I'd choose to do. YMMV.