Of course ebooks will have ads

I don’t know why I keep seeing these articles feigning shock, or those that question the new philosophy or acceptance of putting ads in books. Of course ebooks will have ads. It’s been done for over a hundred years in books and it might even bring prices down, or to zero. And it will also not be all that problematic for many of us. Some of us won’t mind and the rest of us know where there are ads, there are ad blockers. And the more sophisticated advertising gets, the easier it will be to block.

Let me state what I mean. In order to help pay me, a struggling author, more, I can get an ad contract from a company. I make the deal, get the sponsorship money, put the ads in as part of the book maybe in the margins, maybe as a footer message on ever chapter front page, and a few pages at the back (just like every high school sports tournament book you’ve ever seen). This set of ads comes as part of the text, doesn’t change, isn’t all that intrusive and has that home grown feeling.  Those who bought my book don’t get too bothered, and at some level connect with it.  I’m probably even thanking my advertisers in the preface. The ads are absorbed or ignores as advertising goes. In the end, it doesn’t effect public opinion of my book.

Then you have the latest massive best seller, the head of the long tail.  It is published under Big Pub, with ads from Big Pharma, Big Oil, etc. The ads are ever changing, they of course have to stand out, they deploy overlays, begging you to ‘touch’ them. You know, anything to catch your eye, because who gives a damn that you’re reading or what you’re reading.

Then something happens. It begins with some frustration a few blog posts, some bad press about a popular book. People expressing distaste. Then plugins start coming out designed to disable these ads, hosted at a snarky website that you can download instantly. Because the Big Pub ad code is  standardized by the partner of Big Pub it just takes a few strokes of code and the dynamic ever-changing ads are routed by the blocker plugins to fizzle out, to turn invisible or are auto-overlayed, display:none whatever technique needed.

How am I able to forecast this? Because I know of the existence of greed. Greed causes people to act irrationally, to force their desires on others.  And where one strong emotion like greed is born, on the other side of the universe, there is born the anti-matter of said emotion. The balancing force. Whitehat hackers, or just industrious people who have had enough. They have the distaste for greed.  And they will focus their weekend spare time on blocking the bigger annoying ad networks because THEY CHOOSE TO. Because where there are vampires, you need vampire hunters.

While this goes on, others will be distributing the open versions of those texts more readily. And where the ads get too ridiculous, the rational, freedom lovers, commonists, and people who just miss the good ole days, will rally against the greed.  And like DRM has in some parts of the spectrum has been beaten down, so will the wrong kinds of ads.

But ads are OK.  And they will be OK, until they are NOT OK. And you’ll all know when that happens if you are paying attention. So stop acting so surprised about it. Books are predominantly niche products and many are written by intelligent people who care about their outcome. Which means there’s a chance that you actually will read books with ads you kinda like. Because the author had some say about it. I wouldn’t bet my farm on it, but I’m optimistic.