Are you ready for ad-supported books?

It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.

Especially if you’re in publishing and coming to terms with the wave of mergers and rationalizations and technology shakedowns about to hit your house.

The electrification of publishing and books has seen a flood of stories come alive on screens and tablets.

One cultural imperative of screens that most people don’t realize is the acceptance of them primarily as advertising mediums. When you go to the cinema, you happily watch a series of trailers before the main feature. On television you’re happy to watch around 20 minutes of advertising for every hour of programing. Online every spare pixel is vying for your attention with an ad or two (or three or four or five.)

Now advertisers want to start making inroads into your favorite ebooks. Ahhh, yes, 50 shades of advertising.

A Big Think piece by Dominic Basulto reveals companies like Amazon will forever change how we think about books by using advertisements to pull down the costs of ebooks.

Publishers are quickly warming to the idea mainly because they have no other choice if they want to stay in business.

The next step is to go beyond just ad-supported ereaders, and that’s to put the ads right smack inside of the ebooks themselves.

Seems we’ve reached the point where readers are actually ready for ad-supported books. Big tech companies like Google are on board because they realize the same technology that can be used to target readers as they move from website to website across the web can also be used to target readers as they move from page to page within a book.

Or even sentence to sentence.

And word to word.