Amazon mulls in-book advertising on Kindle

by Elizabeth Clifford-Marsh, revolutionmagazine.com 06-Jul-09, 11:11

LONDON - Amazon is hoping to further monetise content on its Kindle ebook reader, revealing plans to place ads within the electronic books it publishes.

The ecommerce giant has filed a patent for technology that will place contextual ads within the content a consumer downloads to their reader.

Amazon has not indicated whether the move will result in a drop in cover price in exchange for advertising or when such ads may be rolled out.

According to the patent, ads will be served on an opt-in basis, but it is unclear whether Amazon interprets opt-in as a specific request or the simple act of downloading content.

Amazon released the second generation of the Kindle earlier this year, claiming faster download speeds, sleeker features and longer battery life. It is supported by a library of over 230,000 ebooks, and thousand of blogs, newspapers and magazines.

Hanning Zhou, manager of Amazon's Print-on-Demand Group, named as an inventor in the patent, said adding advertisements to ebooks will allow the publisher to make money from a wide variety of content, including out of print and rare documents in the same way online publishers are able to monetise fresh content.

The ads, which will be related to content in the book, such as ads for a restaurant when a character in a novel is dining out, may be in the form of one or a few descriptive advertising words, pictures, or symbols, which direct the reader to a website when an internet connection is available.

The patent also applies to adding ads to rare and out of print book and documents when they are printed on demand.

Amazon has remained silent on a launch date for eBooks in the UK and has cited some technical challenges to offering the Kindle throughout Europe.