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.

Comments

oh boy

[Tablizer]

"It was a dark and stormy night.....in beautiful downtown Vegas!"

Re:oh boy

[MoonBuggy]

Cry 'havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war ...only at pets.com

Great.

[ScrewMaster]

So, is the idea to turn novels, anthologies and reference works into magazines?

Brilliant!

Re:Great.

[TheWanderingHermit]

Oh, so you've read the fine print in the Obamacare packages?

Actually, ads in ebooks is a natural progression, it's just returning to how literature used to be published. A lot of literary works have been published or serialized and published in magazines supported by ads.

Re:Great.

[cherokee158]

It always amazes me when people are looking for ethical or exotic behavioral explanation behind buisness decisions.

It saddens me that so many people think that by enshrining a human activity as 'business' automatically excuses unethical behavior. Business is a human activity, and no human activity should be exempt from human virtue. If morality is optional, then it is largely meaningless, and I might as well shoot you and take your money.

Re:Great.

[petermgreen]

heh, i'd preffer it to the current model where the only people who can access scientific literature are those in academia (who have access to most journals though bulk agreements with thier university) or those prepared to pay substantial subscriptions or per-paper fees.

In my experiance you don't really know if a paper will be useful/interesting until you have read a fair chunk of it. If you were paying by the paper you could easilly run up a bill of hundreds of pounds in a few hours of checking through papers to see which were relavent. That is a lot of money if you are just reading for interest or other noncommercial purposes.

So the general public is effectively excluded from reading the primary sources of our knowlage.

Good Grief

[sjames]

Are we not all surrounded with enough ads yet? About the only place they're not yet is tattooed on the inside of our eyelids.

To the advertisers: STFU already!

Re:Ewwww, imagine "can't skip" technology?

[niftydude]

Project Gutenberg is excellent - but if we extrapolate the current rate of copyright expansion, books published this century may never enter the public domain.

Re:DO NOT WANT!

[molnarcs]

Exactly my thoughts here - when it comes to price. I wrote that review specifically for Vietnamese students (tried to simplify the language as well as the issues I touch upon). The prices set by the publishers for the digital versions is just fucking ridiculous. The average salary around here is $300/month, but even if that was not the case, 13-15$ for a shitty novel by Danielle Steel? WTF?? Give me out of copyright classics for $1 (already freely available, but I would pay for the convenience of a one stop shop), $2-3 for contemporaries, $5 at most for real gems - and I wouldn't bother with piracy. Of course I know the reason for these (probably don't want to compete with their own established traditional distribution chains, ie dead tree book business), but that's besides the point.

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.

Reviving an old concept

[Reziac]

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.

Re:20 != The Answer

[Zumbs]

Given that the extensions of the copyright term were applied retroactively, I don't see the problem with retroactively applying a shorter copyright term. Particularly w.r.t. those works that has had their copyright term extended.