AD SUPPORTED BOOKS HIT THE NET
...you knew it had to happen sooner or later with a big publisher taking the lead and digitizing books so that you can simply click and read FREE!. Yes, HarperCollins appears to get first mover advantage in launching an ad-supported book. Sure some self-published books include ads online but this is HarperCollins -- a major publisher so it's getting lots of attention. 
The book is "GO IT ALONE!: The Secret to Building a Successful Business On Your Own" which was named one of the best business books by LIBRARY JOURNAL and originally published in hardback in 2004 and just published in December,2005 in trade paper. Below in this blog there is a link to one of the best articles I've seen on this new venture in an feature written by Paula Berinstein in infotoday.com.
ADS courtesy of YAHOO -- not Google...note when you click on the link to the book at www.brucejudson.com -- the author's website you'll find that the ads are courtesy of Yahoo classifieds, not Google. As Berinstein notes in her article the system is a bit cumbersome because it is in HTML not PDF which means it is readable, searchable and printable but would be hard to download (unless I'm missing something). Here's a quick screengrab of how the book pages look online with the ads in the left hand column on this page: 
click on thumbnail to see how ads support this book -- a new venture rolled out by HarperCollins and one of its authors. They split the revenue 50/50 according to reports we've read.
MORE INDEPTH ARTICLE -- click here to this link: Ad-Supported Free Books Arrive
Some self-published authors also offer ad-supported books online, but HarperCollins’ move is the first by a major publisher. ... |
Thanks for highlighting my piece on ad-supported books, Joyce! It's an interesting experiment. Whether or not it will transform publishing remains to be seen, but with or without ad-supported books, the industry is undergoing major upheaval.
I just turned in a piece for my column in Searcher magazine on new rights and business models for books. Developments include the following: Amazon has announced programs that will let you buy electronic books by the slice and get digital copies of printed books for a nominal fee; O'Reilly's Safari lets you read digital books for a fixed monthly fee; Random House will be making books available on a pay-per-view basis; and more. I just hope that authors fare better under the new models than we've been doing. In order to make that happen, we need to be aware and move quickly.
Posted by: Paula Berinstein | February 20, 2006 at 02:45 PM