Slashdot Mirror
Free E-Books, With a Catch — Advertising
Velcroman1 writes "Barnes & Noble may kick off a fresh price war today for digital book readers, with its new Nook news. But the real news in digital publishing is a novel approach to the e-books themselves: Free books — with advertising. The basic idea is to offer publishers another way to reach readers and to give readers the chance to try more books — books that perhaps they wouldn't normally peruse if they had to pay more for them. Initially, Wowio specialized in offering digital versions of comic books and graphic novels, usually formatted as Adobe PDFs. So it was a natural step for the company to offer graphic ads that are inserted in e-books. 'We think we're creating a broader audience for some of these titles,' Wowio's CEO Brian Altounian told me. 'I think folks are going to download more books because they're saving the costs' of having to drive to the store or pay more for them. Would ads stop you from reading?" The new color Nook goes for $249, and comes with a browser, games, Quickoffice, streaming music via Pandora, and an SDK; reader itwbennett links to an analysis of how well it stacks up as a tablet.
So, is the idea to turn novels, anthologies and reference works into magazines?
Brilliant!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
~$250 for a color e-book?
What am I gunna do with it, read "Go dog, go" and "wheres waldo"?
For $250, there better be a happy ending, and I dont mean a kids happy ending, I mean a massage parlor happy ending
Dont spend your money on crap, the Dollar is still worth something!
Also, the stuff I wrote about e-ink vs. LCD - I know that many would find no difference between the two technologies, in other words, some people can read just fine on an LCD. I'm not one of them. For me, e-ink is far more pleasant to look at. Moreover, I started to go out for reading to breath a bit of fresh air and just be outside - sitting on the terrace of a cafe, in a park, on the beach beneath a shade... and that's where e-ink readers really shine and LCDs, including the iPAD, sucks balls. Indoors, in dim light/no light LCDs have an advantage, but I still find it better to use my Sony Reader with a lamp than reading on a screen with backlight.
I know I found Robin Hobb's Assassin's apprentice and it's subsequent trilogies after it was put up for free on the publishers website. So for giving me 1 free book I bought 8 more and am still reading her latest stuff to come out since then. If I'd not of seen that free book I'd of never bought the rest.
Quite agreed. Unfortunately, many people are morons, and will thus respond to adverts of that type. Not only will they respond, their aforementioned idiocy makes them more likely to be talked into buying inferior, overpriced products that they quite possibly don't even need.
What surprises me more is not the bad adverts, but just how much our economy is based on advertising. TV, newspapers, sports & the majority of the internet all basically run on the assumption that the marketing is actually working. The advertisers keep paying with little tangible method to measure results, and I can never quite bring myself to believe the payoff is as good as they seem to think. Maybe I'm wrong - they're the millionaires, after all - I don't know, it just doesn't seem plausible that advertising can actually have enough impact to justify that kind of outlay.
You young whippersnappers wouldn't remember this, but back in the Olden Days most deadtree books contained advertising. Paperbacks typically had a glossy insert in the middle (most often a cigarette ad), and hardbacks had several pages of ads in the back, usually something at least vaguely relevant to the book's content, and also sometimes ads for other books (and not only from that book's publisher).
It occurs to me that if ads were placed at the end of the ebook (much as ads in hardbacks used to be at the back of the book) there's incentive to improve content, to get the average reader to finish the book and see the ads.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Or they could try producing things people would actually pay for and foster an economy where people have enough money to do so...
It seems most folks here are pretty disgusted at the idea of advertising in books, but how would you feel about direct corporate sponsorships conducted in a tasteful manner? Let's say your favorite sci-fi author's books were all released as Intel Presents or AMD Presents, similar to the old anthology shows from the '50s & '60s such as The Alcoa Hour, Kraft Television Theater, and the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse; would that inspire the same level of disgust?
I'm very interested in finding a way to distribute fiction for free without DRM, thus maximizing the value to readers, while at the same time raising some profit for the writer. Advertising seems to be the optimal way to get it done. The other leading contender would be the Ransom Model, but that has some inherent weaknesses that are rather difficult to work around. If you have other ideas, I'm absolutely all ears.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
When I read the Superman comics back in the 60s the ads were for x-ray glasses and muscle building courses. So what's new?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
To the buyers: stop buying things with ads already!