In the U.S., some mass paperbacks carried ads—partly because of distribution via magazine rack-jobbers. This channel was much better paced for time-dependent ad-supported publications than bookstores and libraries. But will ads work in e-books?
Adobe has experimented with enabling dynamic contextual ads including in offline-readable publications, most recently with an “Ads for Adobe PDF” Labs pilot. This remains of interest to us, but to date we have seen little interest from book publishers. Across the spectrum, from trade to academic to textbook, there has been a lot of concern about diluting the value proposition of their premium content for which consumers are accustomed to paying.
Ad project kept separate from e-book efforts
With e-books still early in terms of mass-market awareness and acceptance, there are concerns about not alarming to confusing consumers by mixing in an “e-books = ad-larded” message. So we ended up focusing our latest ads pilot on other segments, working hard in fact to keep it separate from our work on e-books per se.
I do expect this to evolve over time as digital reading takes off. Digital books can have timely contextually-relevant actionable ads inserted for close to zero marginal cost which is simply not true of paper. Some segments/publishers will want to leverage this as part of future business models. One example is public library lending, something some major trade publishers have resisted authorizing for e-books. A model that provided ongoing recurring revenue to publishers could be part of helping to get past the obstacles, and potentially not repugnant to consumers who aren’t paying out of pocket nor expecting a permanent ownership model from their library loans.
And of course publishers can use ads in digital books to market their own lists and related products, arguably much better than the AdSense style contextual ads. Again in the print world, it’s challenging to put an ad in book A for book B that is two years away from publication (although in genre/series publishers jump through hoops to do just this). But with dynamic ads this is trivial.
(Adapted with Bill’s permission from Peter Brantley private Reading 2.0 list.)
