Kevin Kelly's Ad-Supported eBook

There's been a lot of speculation about whether advertising can create a viable revenue model for book publishing.  While it may be unlikely that an advertising-only model will work, I tend to believe it could be part of a multi-pronged approach that has potential (more in a moment).

Author Kevin Kelly is dabbling on this front with the latest edition of his True Films book.  He's created a PDF version of True Films 3.0 and when you open it with Acrobat version 8.0 you'll see it includes context sensitive advertising from Yahoo.  The ads don't seem to have a high level of relevance, perhaps because Yahoo is still building out their system.  I also would have thought that the ads would change as you scroll from page to page, assuming you're viewing on a computer with a live Internet connection, of course...but they don't.  Again, the model is young and likely to evolve to support this sort of dynamic functionality in the future.

The market for people interested in reading books on a computer screen is probably fairly small, especially for narratives.  On the reference side, however, I could see where this model could be very effective.  And how about this angle: Should Amazon consider a model like this for Kindle ebooks?  Pay one price for the book with no ads but get it for a lower price if you're willing to live with ads on each page; let the customer decide which price and model they prefer.  Some customers would be willing to take a risk on an unknown author or an offbeat title if the price is lower, even if that means they have to view some advertising.  That's the multi-pronged approach I mentioned at the start of this post, btw.

Comments

[Tyler Tichelaar]

I definitely think e-books are the way to go for those in academia. If I had had e-books when writing my doctoral dissertation, it would have made my life a lot easier. I could have done a search and find keystroke to find whatever word or quote I was looking for rather than paging through page after page skimming the text just to make sure I had a citation correct. As for reading for enjoyment, as long as I can sit in my lazy-boy with the kindle reader or other program, I have no problem with that either.