Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
You underestimate the desire of readers to have their books permanently........
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Oh, I don't underestimate their desire or expectations. I just recognize that a) many people lack the facility and/or knowledge and/or forethought to strip DRM; and b) unless Amazon forces ads into literally every book they sell, there won't be much motivation.
I can't tell you how many people don't do something as basic as back up the data on their computer (
), let alone on all of their various portable devices. In fact, one of the beneficial aspects of the Kindle for those who are not technically inclined is that if they lose the device, they can typically re-download what they've purchased.
As to
Ralph Sir Edward, I agree with a few aspects of your analysis, but not necessarily your tone or characterization -- even though I clearly despise the idea of putting dynamic ads into books.
Fortunately, the more I think about it, and at the risk of indulging in wishful thinking
, the less likely Amazon is to actually use implement it, at least on a large scale. Why not?
• Revenues will be very low. If each ad got 50¢ per 1,000 impressions, each book would need 1,000 ads to generate that 50¢. They certainly aren't going to make $10 or $20 in ad revenue for each book.
• The ads would likely need to be static in design, which further reduces its value to advertisers and therefore revenue.
• Low revenues will discourage any sort of revenue sharing agreement, which is probably enough to make many publishers refuse to allow ads in their books (except, I presume, ads for their own publications).
• Web browsing isn't good enough on the Kindle to make click-through rates very high. (iPhone or other mobile devices will be better targets in this respect.)
• Advertising subsidies don't always work. Anyone remember Juno or NetZero?
• Most importantly, advertisers will demand data that Amazon has traditionally refused to divulge, such as book sales figures, numbers of Kindle Reader and application users, and demographic data. Advertisers won't tolerate black holes, and Amazon hates giving out exactly this kind of info.
It's still possible they may still inject ads into books, but it may not wind up being worse than what you currently get with paper books -- e.g. a few dynamic book ads at the end of a title.