Amazon has applied for two patents: On-Demand Generating E-Book Content With Advertising and Incorporating Advertising In On-Demand Generated Content. Essentially, the patents are for adding content-generated ads to Kindle products, in a manner similar to Google’s AdSense program.
The patents specify a number of hypothetical advertising practices that seem like many readers’ worst fears. One example: “If a restaurant is described on page 12… [then] page 11 or page 13, may include advertisements about restaurants, wine, food, etc., which are related to restaurants and dining.” In addition to full page ads, the patents also describe adding ads to the margins of a book and fitting in extra ads if the book has larger margins.
It’s interesting to imagine what long-term goals of Amazon this may reveal. Since the Kindle and the books read on it are already purchased up front, I can’t imagine very many consumers would be happy about ads. It seems unlikely that ads will be added anytime soon, as Amazon is already getting bad press for this and wouldn’t want to lose its customer base.
One possibility, actually mentioned in the first patent, is for Amazon to create some sort of two tiered bookstore in the future. In addition to the current, ad-free books, Amazon could start offering discounted, or even free books that rely on advertising revenue. Another thing to consider is the use in newspapers and periodicals. Papers are already primarily ad-supported anyway; Amazon could be hoping to license their ad service as news makes the transition away from traditional print media. Any paper being published to an eReader format could mostly shop between Amazon, Google, and others to choose an advertising provider.
Another possibility is that these patents are defensive move meant to keep Google with their successful ad-based revenue model out of digital books while Amazon itself has no immediate intention of putting ads into books.
Predictably, I hate the ad inside a book idea. BAD idea. Not even if the book was cheaper. BAD idea.
Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. Would pretty much brick the kindle as far as I’m concerned.
I own a Kindle and love it, but advertising would send me right back to regular books. Jeez… is there no escape from this bombardment of Western Civilization’s obsession with money and advertising? Reading is one of the last pure escapes from this nonsense.
Unless books with ads are free to the public (unlikely), I would never buy such a book. More and more, it looks like my Kindle(s) will not be used for purchasing books from Amazon, but instead, for reading publicly available content and PDFs, and to be replaced with a freer ereader device the moment such becomes available.
Bad Amazon. Bad.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon is well aware of the fact that people hate ads. That’s why I would bet they will keep 9.99 priced books ad-free. They would only put ads in heavily discounted books or just don’t do it at all. It’s pretty hard for me to imagine how ads in a books would generate enough revenue to match sale price.
This is a TERRIBLE idea. I think that this will cause people to start to move toward other sources for reading material.
The whole time I read your post I was thinking exactly what Rick already stated so well above – “…is there no escape from this bombardment of Western Civilization’s obsession with money and advertising? Reading is one of the last pure escapes from this nonsense.” Very true and well-said, Rick.
What a great blog BK is. Keep up the great work!
I might consider having Ad in the kindle if the kindle hardware itself is heavily discounted like the cell phones from the carrier.