Will Amazon Put Advertisements In eBooks? 226
destinyland writes "A book editor at Houghton Mifflin argues ebook advertising is 'coming soon to a book near you.' (Paywalled unless you go through Google.) Amazon has filed a patent for advertisements on the Kindle, and the book editor joins with a business professor in the Wall Street Journal to make the case for advertisements in ebooks. Book sales haven't increased over the last decade, and profits are being squeezed even lower by ebooks. According to another industry analyst, Amazon is being pressured to make ebook sales more profitable for publishers, partly because Apple offers them more lucrative terms in Apple's iBookstore. One technology blog notes that Amazon's preference seems to be keeping book prices low, and wonders whether consumers would accept advertising if it meant that new ebooks were then free. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren has confused the issue even more by publishing a 'shoppable' children's storybook online, prompting a fierce reaction from one blog: 'I hope it's the last. Books are one of the last refuges in our world from the constant cry by advertisers to spend money and fill our lives with unnecessary things.'"
Old ads. (Score:3, Informative)
Books have had advertisements in them for a long time. Magazines too. Usually the book advertisements were for more books, but the advertisements in magazines could be for anything.
A guitar lessons ad from a 1930 Astounding Stories.
http://ia311203.us.archive.org/2/items/Astounding_Stories_of_Super_Science_1930/asf193001006a.png [archive.org]
Re:Get the fuck outta here. (Score:5, Informative)
Can you borrow eBooks from libraries now?
Yup yup! [nytimes.com] It generally uses ePub, which my nook accepts natively. To my knoweledge, most ereaders out there now can read ePub as well.
NYTimes ebook pricing rundown (Score:3, Informative)
NYTimes gives a decent rundown of what goes in to ebook pricing [nytimes.com], showing that they make about as much profit on a $10 ebook as they do on a $26 hardcover.
They don't give pricing on paperbacks, but going off the numbers they give I'd guess a $10 ebook will give them around double the profit that a $7 mass-market paperback does.
The full article [nytimes.com] goes on to say the reason for obscenely high ebook prices is quite simple: publishers are set up for dead tree books right now. They could face problems scaling down their current model too quickly, so they're biding time and slowing down ebook adoption by increasing prices.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Book sales haven't increased over the last decade, and profits are being squeezed even lower by ebooks
That makes no sense at all. Ebooks cost the same as paper books, yet there's no transportation, storage, inventory, or other costs associated with publishing them. How could ebooks be bringing profits down?
Baen, a publishing house that specializes in fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a militaristic bent, says that they've found that e-books significantly increase profits, even though they sell their (DRM-free) e-books for substantially less than they sell dead-tree versions.
That, obviously, is exactly what logic would tell you. Nice to see there are some publishers who are honest.
Re:Get the fuck outta here. (Score:3, Informative)
Probably true. This crowd would say "Cervantes? Why is Mexican beer on this list?"
Or, "Why are you talking about a Soul Calibur character?"
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Informative)
Those physical costs aren't as much as you might think. Something like 3.50 a book:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html?_r=1