Last month I wrote about eBookPlus, a startup that wanted to make books free, with ads. To say I wasn't thrilled would be an understatement. Most of you who commented on the post agreed with me. Forbes had an article today on another startup, HitBliss, that might actually have it right. From Forbes: The Lexington, Mass. company, run by husband and wife team Andrew Prihodko and Sharon Peyer, operates a Netflix-like app for iOS and Android that gives users access to a whole slew of TV shows and movies. But all that’s a sideshow; the payment method is what’s interesting here. Customers can...

I just saw this press release from EbookPlus, which wants to make books legally free. Sounds good, right? But wait, there's more. That's free, with advertising. eBookPlus.com offers any company the opportunity to create publicity to place in an eBook, whether it is a video, an image or a HTML page. The advertising is unobtrusive, placed only at the beginning of each chapter, volume or part of a particular title. This advertising is presented to readers for a few seconds, after which they can read the eBook normally without interruption during the whole of the chapter. Payment is only debited to...

The Internet has a love-hate relationship with advertising. Many users of the web consider web ads obnoxious. Many publishers of content on the web consider them vital. And as a result, there’s been an arms race between ad purveyors and ad blockers for as long as ads have been around, despite content publishers’ insistence that the lost revenue could cripple them. The latest shot fired in the war is a Kickstarter project for a device called AdTrap, Intended to retail for $150, available for $120 to early kickers, the AdTrap is a little open-source box with two Ethernet ports...

Earlier this month I mentioned a blog post by self-publishing writer Penelope Trunk on how clueless she found her traditional publisher when it came to marketing her work on-line. The blog post was later carried by The Guardian in edited form. Since then, John Self has written on the Guardian’s Book blog about the (largely unsympathetic) comments posted in reaction to it, and whether it was possible to promote a book effectively on-line. To experiment with how effective on-line promotion could be, Self seized onto an about-to-be-published book he quite liked, Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway, and decided...

On Lit Reactor, Richard Thomas has a primer discussing the tools that exist for self-promotion, that writers can use to get the word out about their books and projects. The article covers Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Amazon, blogs and websites, forums, promoting others, printed matter, readings, and publishing widely. Thomas has decent advice for how to play to each platform’s strengths: use Facebook for fan pages and getting in touch with other people in the writing community. Twitter is best for short posts and links. Goodreads will let you hold book giveaways, which is another good way for getting attention....

GalleyCat has a piece about a Kickstarter campaign that originally came to my attention a week ago from my friend Eric A. Burns’s blog Websnark. This campaign, founded by Gabe and Tycho, the artists behind popular gaming culture comic strip Penny Arcade, aims to raise as much money as it can in order to allow the site to remove ads. The site has a number of graduated stretch goals, involving removal of some or all ads from the front page, or even (at $999,999) removal of all ads everywhere on the site for a year. There are a number of...

It can be hard to get enough funding for libraries. Troy, Michigan recently tried three times to get a tax increase passed to give the library sufficient funding to stay open. The vote failed twice, and had only one last shot on the ballot, days before the library would have to close. But as with two previous attempts, it was facing well-organized opposition who had managed to make the issue all about opposition to new taxes with no mention of the library at all. So the library approached ad agency Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide Detroit and asked what they could...

On Reuters, Jack Shafer ponders the question of who was the first company to abandon ship when the newspaper industry first began to founder. As far back as 1991, Warren Buffett had warned that newspapers were no longer the value proposition they had been, and he would not be buying any more of them. But all through the ‘90s and the early ‘00s, companies continued snapping up newspapers, and newspaper companies continued expanding their facilities. For there to be buyers, of course, there have to be sellers, but Shafer doesn’t think any of those sellers were looking ahead to...

On the Harvard Business Review blog, Justin Fox take a look at the 3-day-a-week downsizing of papers in Huntsville, Alabama and New Orleans, making those the first two major metropolitan areas without an actual “daily” newspaper—but not, Fox predicts, the last. Fox believes that local newspapers were always doomed—not because the Internet is better at reporting news, or even solely because of the Internet at all, but because papers’ advertising revenue stream has been superseded by other advertising streams. Newspapers flourished in the second half of the 20th century, Fox writes, because they had a monopoly on “the delivery...

The experiment is over. On article-reformatting utility Readability’s blog, CEO Rich Zlade announced that Readability is ending its 15-month-old reader fees for publisher payment program, in which it collected donations from subscribers to pay out to publishers of sites that Readability users reformatted to skip ads.  Why end the program? Zlade explains that, although “thousands of [readers] agreed to spend $5 a month (and sometimes more)” on the project, relatively few publishers signed up. Out of the “millions—yes, millions—of domains” whose content was reformatted, only about 2,000 bothered to sign up to claim their share of the...

Might an ad-supported Kindle Fire be in the offing? Ad Age reports that Amazon has been soliciting ads to appear on the Fire’s welcome screen, according to an executive at an agency Amazon pitched. The ad packages would start at $600,000 and include both Kindle Fire and Kindle with Special Offers ads, going up to $1 million for additional ad perks. The current Kindle Fire has no advertcising, but Amazon has been reported to have a new model of the tablet in the offing for July and may be looking to start the program then. An interesting note is...

Why is it that so many methods of driving traffic and, hence, ad views to news web sites have the side effect of annoying readers? On SF Weekly, Dan Mitchell talks about a recent statement by the president of the Washington Post that awards don’t matter, and he wants more slide shows. Slide shows are a cheap way of driving up the number of page views on your website, as they basically make the reader click through ten, twenty, however many slides there are, pages at a time, with a new ad displayed on each page. ...