Ads in culture are sort of jarring (image via www.studiolo.org)
You know what my favorite part of Moby Dick was? The part where I realized I wanted a Klondike bar. That experience may be expedited in the future, courtesy of an Amazon patent for a technology which would dynamically insert ads into e-books. And get this: the ads would be context sensitive. “For instance, if a restaurant is described on page 12, [then the advertising page], either on page 11 or page 13, may include advertisements about restaurants, wine, food, etc., which are related to restaurants and dining.”
What’s so annoying about this is that Amazon presumably wants to put ads into books to be read on the Kindle, as that is the e-book market they’re desperately trying to push right now. We can probably all agree that ads in stuff we’ve paid for is quite annoying, and doubly so when we’ve gotten use to experiencing whatever it is without ads.
But Amazon isn’t stupid. It could be that Amazon is trying to use advertisements to profit off of books they would allow users to read on the Kindle for free. If they let you download a full book in Kindle format under public domain, for example, they could monetize serving up that content by inserting an ad. Though it would definitely make the reading experience somewhat annoying, ads would be a negligible price to pay for millions of free reads at one’s fingertips.
