Interfax China reports a book selling website that is giving away free books as long as the customer accepts a certain number of adverts placed inside them. The books are rebound with adverts placed strategically within them. We think there is an obvious better model. Give away free eBook readers (with some books), and have the ability to drop in advertisements for the devices’ lifetime.
It appears to us at Faultline that it is only a matter of time before books carry advertising because eBook readers are exactly the same as console games. The books take a few years to put together, and the devices are used for years. So it’s no good putting adverts in games or in books, because they are so difficult to change, except where they are attached to networks for update. eBook readers so far have really not taken off, but that flies in the face of how well regarded they are among the handful of people that have bought them.
iPods were slow to take off despite the iTunes software, until the iTunes store was launched. At the time Apple’s stock was at an all time low and now everyone has an iPod. Much the same is likely to be the case for eBooks.
It is so much more economic to download a book, giving more books a long tail as they rely less on shelf space, and preventing the plunder of thousands of miles of forest and in the end, as designs stabilize and flash memory becomes even cheaper, it will cost virtually nothing to store a book.
BookGG.com says that it can currently offer 1,700 titles and swap between 50 sponsors who want to place adverts in them. Why would this not be just a simple download of advertising within the books, or better still a dynamic wireless update, at the time the eBook is taken for a reading session.
And by making quality eBook readers free, (of course you can read eBooks on an iPod or iPhone) then they will begin to take off in the millions.