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Ever see an online ad you enjoyed—and what does this mean for e-books?
December 17, 2009 | 4:20 am
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By David Rothman
I fired away just now at GE Capital–with its horrid Web ads inflicting unwanted video and sound on you. No wonder people are fed up with the mainstream media. And no wonder I’m worried about obnoxious ads showing up in e-books.
Well, I may have an ally of sorts, at the very company whose multimedia technology might be used to deliver the GE ads: Adobe.
“Like me, I’m sure most of you occasionally buy a magazine because you want to check out the advertising,” PaidContent quotes Nick Bogaty, director of Adobe’s Digital Publishing Group, who appeared at the eBook Summit conference. “But I’ve never—and I’ve never heard anyone else—go to a website to look at the ads. As soon as we can replicate the values that make people seek out ad info in print, we’ll really have something. But until that point, it won’t work too well.”
You can find out more here about the issue of ads in e-books, which may become especially common if publishers maintain their unhappiness with Amazon’s $9.95 price for bestsellers. Let’s just hope that books don’t become like cable television: fees and ads galore. I see a place for ads in appropriate e-books but fear there’ll be too many GE Capitals out there.
More eBook Summit coverage: Here.
Technorati Tags: Nick Bogaty,GE Capital
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Comments:
hm. i will hope for full disclosure on the presence of ads in any e-book so that i can pass on it.
i have a unitasker e-reader on purpose. i don’t want anyone who wants to talk to me to be able to make my e-reader ring. i don’t want the temptation of tetris. i don’t want calendar reminders to peep at me. i only play music on it to drown out cell-phone guy so i can read.
when i’m reading a long-form text, i don’t want *any* interruptions. we don’t have ads in print books (beyond product-placement — something of a separate issue, as it involves the author’s creative work); i don’t want ads in e-books.
what author would want their readers snapped out of the world they’ve created by: “HEY, HEY YOU! WE GOT SUNGLASSES CHEAP!” or, when we’re using the integrated dictionary would we see a link to: “Buy ‘aglets’” before we can even learn what an aglet is?
isn’t long-form reading supposedly on the decline? can publishers possibly think that this kind of interruption will improve the situation? i’ve been saying for ages that publishers are stupid; but if so, they’re even stupider than i thought. publishers, of anyone, should be doing the work of learning how people read. by cultivating the retailer as customer they’ve built a house of cards which will collapse if they don’t start paying attention to who is actually using their product, why, and perhaps most of all, how.
Let me clear some inaccuracies in this reporting. First, on the panel, Matt Shatz emphasized that advertising wasn’t a major part of trade book publishing except for some minor exceptions. He pointed to some reference material which did include advertising, but this was clearly an exception to his business.
The particular topical discussion that was cited in this article centered around the panel discussing digital newspapers and magazines, not eBooks. Therefore, the title of this piece, “Advertising Is Coming To E-Books” quite inaccurately summarizes the actual conversation that the panel had. No one on the panel foresaw a future with considerable advertising in electronic books, the panel foresaw a future with considerable advertising in digital newspapers and magazines.