Freemium, Ad-Supported Books?

The time for ads in books has come, according to an editorial in yesterday’s WSJ. Why now?

In short, physical books can’t compete with other print media for advertisers. Digital books can. With an integrated system, an advertiser or publisher can place ads across multiple titles to generate a sufficient volume. Timeliness is also possible, since digital readers require users to log in to a central system periodically.

For consumers, the free samples of digital books now available would surely include ads… Seeing ads in the sample may also convince a reader to pay for a premium, non-ad version of the full-length book. The old market segmentation of paperbacks and hardcovers will be replaced by ad-supported or ad-free books.

So books will be ad-supported and freemium. By the way, those two things go together. Why Ben Parr at Mashable thinks that ad-supported and freemium should be pitted against each other is beyond me, unless he was on a really tight deadline for a “web faceoff” post.

I don’t like the idea of ads in my books. But I am used to paying in order to make them my books, so I’d probably pay to get books without ads. And, come to think of it, if I can put up with DRM in books, I can put up with a lot.

The argument that advertisers like ebooks more than pbooks (or whatever we call physical/paper books) is a strong one. But as usual, if you want to see the future, you can go back in time: see Galleycat’s brief history shows that ads in books aren’t new.