Its been that way for years, the ad is on the lockscreen, and its an ad for other books. The version with no advertisement is 20$ more, I don't see the problem if someone wants to get a discount for looking at ads.
As far as problems go, I understand it's been a constant and this specific implementation is pretty low on the list, but generally, greed leading to ads intruding every aspect of our lives and people thinking up with new spots to place ads is a problem.
Creating a different experience around reading books for those who have and those who have not is also a problem, given how important literacy and the printing press are to the development of our society.
I'd love to see most advertising simply banned, but in the case of books there's precedent from back when people used to actually read enough to be worth advertising to: mid-century pulp novels often had a couple pages of glossy ads right in the middle, usually including one or more cigarette ads.
The first or last pages of books are still frequently used to sell other books from the same author or from the same publisher. Not that long ago they'd come with cut-out cards to mail in for your order for more of the publisher's books from the partial catalog printed in your book (nobody orders by mail any more, is the only reason the stopped that, I assume). Some of my books when I was a kid would have the first chapter of another book from the same anthology series at the end, to sell it (Goosebumps did this, for example).
Isn’t it strictly worse if they only offer the $130 no ads version? Why is choice a bad idea in this context? All it means is more people can afford it.
dfxm12|1 year ago
Creating a different experience around reading books for those who have and those who have not is also a problem, given how important literacy and the printing press are to the development of our society.
vundercind|1 year ago
The first or last pages of books are still frequently used to sell other books from the same author or from the same publisher. Not that long ago they'd come with cut-out cards to mail in for your order for more of the publisher's books from the partial catalog printed in your book (nobody orders by mail any more, is the only reason the stopped that, I assume). Some of my books when I was a kid would have the first chapter of another book from the same anthology series at the end, to sell it (Goosebumps did this, for example).
zeroonetwothree|1 year ago
wkat4242|1 year ago
As much as I hate advertising, this is as good as it gets