DailyLit inserting ads in books
People on the Net love “free.” And yet writers and artists and others need to be paid. How to reconcile this dilemma? For years I’ve been advocating ads in books under appropriate circumstances.
And now DailyLit, which offers both public domain and copyrighted books via e-mail and RSS, is doing just that. For at least several years, ads have appeared in e-textbooks; and decades ago, some paperbacks carried them.
DailyLit is bring e-advertising to recently published trade books and old classics.
Gallery Collections, a greeting and Christmas card company, was the first sponsor. Guess where the advertisement appeared? In A Christmas Carol. It’s in a public domain, Charles Dickens won’t be demanding royalties, and given the power of the Dickens “brand,” I can see the logic here.
The negatives
That said, I’d hate to see ad-supported classics replace the adless variety in places such as Project Gutenberg. Furthermore, in the case of copyrighted books under copyright, I want to see purchasing options remain for readers who hate ads.
Yet another issue is whether some publishers would view ad-supported editions as reducing the sales of books using the conventional business model. At least one large software company experimenting with ad-insertion capabilities for e-books has encountered resistance from publishers because of this.
(Via MediaBistro and Crain’s New York Business. Also see DailyLit Media Kit, with demographics and other information Fifty six percent of readers are women, and 31.5 percent make more than $80,000 a year.)
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