Good question:
What happens when there’s advertising in books?
“What happens when there’s advertising in books?”
“Is there any way to avoid advertising in books?”
“Will books with advertising take over?”
“Will books with advertising be sustainable?”
Read the post. It has some interesting propositions.
We’re totally used to ads in magazines and on TV. We’ve lived through the addition of ads and product placement in movies and TV shows. And, of course, e-books have the opportuity to intorduce ads that are colorful, animated, have sound, and can be customized and personalized to you based on your reading habits. Wow? Now, can ads be tolerated in books or is there a line?
Stephen
2 Responses
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I have a vague memory of buying a comic book (bound like a novel) in Italy that had ads in it. Somehow, ads seem to indicate that a work is less … literary. That being said, some middle-grade and young adult novels blur the line between story and advertising by feature product placement either with or without financial endorsement. As an example, see http://jezebel.com/#!358651/young-adult-novels-plumb-new-depths-of-product-placement or http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/business/media/12book.html
Which is “worse,” having a product embedded in the plot of a novel (which we may not recognize as being product placement) or having an ad stuck between two pages that is obviously advertising?
I’m sure that I’ve seen books with advertising in them, mostly early 20th century. This doesn’t include the publishers advertising their other books at the end of a book, which used to be a very common practice. And some scholarly journals carried advertising up to the 1960s.