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Comment by shoo | Hacker News Reader

Okay, let's try an obviously ridiculous thought experiment:

Can we apply the same argument to physical books?

I bought a book a few weeks ago for about $20, from a physical book shop. It is a non-fiction book. It is pretty good. I am about 2/3rds of the way through it. The book contains no advertisements. Shock! Why is this?

I suspect the argument is glossing over a few details!

Maybe we could get a firmer idea by trying to quantify things. E.g. estimating how much people would pay, and how much that would be worth to potential advertisers, etc.

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>The book contains no advertisements.

I think the blog post is poorly thought out and I understand your point. Nevertheless, many books have "ads" in the sense of "read more books by this author" on the inside dust jacket of a hardback, or placed in the last few pages of a paperback. Sometimes when I buy a book directly from the publisher, they will include in the box some brochures/catalogs for similar books. The theme for all the situations is the same -- they already have your eyeballs tuned in to their wares to some extent -- so they try to take advantage of it.

It's just that the ads are not wedged in between the middle of the book to interrupt the reading experience.

> It's just that the ads are not wedged in between the middle of the book to interrupt the reading experience.

Absolutely, the annoyance-factor of some types of advertisement are within acceptable bounds. It also helps that those ads may very well be for things you're actually interested in; if you liked the book you just read, knowing what other books are available from the same author at the end actually helps you. This is in stark contrast to, for example, the ads at the end of articles on some pages that masquerade as other articles, but just take you to another page filled with more ads for things you have no interest in.

Originally part of the pitch for cable television was that it was ad free. The networks discovered they could make more money by adding the ads back in. People were already paying for cable so they continued.

There's no way to add ads to a book you physically have; you can't compare physical products to electronic products.

If you make money selling a product there is a price point where you will make more by adding ads. It really is just a matter of finding the pricing.

But that works for movies. When you go to the cinema, you pay, yet you get ads before the movie and sneaky product placements during the movie.

"Sneaky"...

Maddox reviews "I Robot" http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=i_robot

Cinema attendance has been plummeting for 20 years. For, among other reasons, the value added by advertisements isn't realized by the cinema patrons who are paying their time and money to see them.

There are adverts in books too. A friend told me to read a new Bond or a Bourne book (can't remember) and it was one long series of product placements.

That was "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", which was full of paid product placements.

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Many paperback books contain ads at the end for other books from the same publisher in the same genre. Sometimes they include short excerpts. Occasionally there are longer excerpts from the next book by the same author.

A few publishers tried inserting actual non-book advertising in paperbacks. That died out fairly quickly.

Hardcover books are likely to contain a microbibliography of the author, in the front matter.

Paperbacks used to have order forms in the back to order other books you might like as well. They still have excerpts of the next book in the series, and the front matter usually also has other books by the author (often only the ones from the same publisher).

Obviously they can't change a physical book.

Ebooks are a different story. Eventually (5 years) you will see ebooks include products mentioned in the body of the text. These products will change from one reading to another depending on revenue and contract with the advertiser.

Now, obviously, this depends on the platform used to present the ebook, but I am quite sure this will find its way into Kindle and iBooks.

But why does it still hold for magazines?

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