Advertising in eBooks

You knew it had to come - RWW:

It won't be long before we start seeing ads in e-books, a business professor and a former book editor wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial today.

Growing e-book sales and the opportunity for targeted advertising mean space in e-books is ripe for corporate messages. Add rapidly falling e-reader prices and the planned Google e-book store and the pressure is on for publishers and retailers to increase revenue from digital books.

Apparently the only reason there have never been Ads in books before is that the books may not sell, but now all will be wonderful:

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.

Well, I'd hate it - but given that many people seeem perfectly happy to pay the same price for eBooks as paper books (despite no production costs) and pay £300+ for a (hard-to-) reader to read them, I suspect they wouldn't care if a few quid were knocked off for the right to put Ads all over the book.

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of the crowds........

Update - Terence Eden responds that we've had advertising in "real" books for ages. Check the back of any Penguin paperback. Good point, I should make it clear I am talking about the sort of intrusiveness we see on the web or TV (which is in my view what advertisers will be shooting for) rather than a few flyers for similar books/same author at the back of an eBook.

Another update - I actually suspect the ecomomics will work in such a way that magazines read on eBooks will carry Ads (as they do in Real Media) but the combination of low hit rates and a poor user experience (wrong time, wrong place) will limit Ad acceptance for books.