Google have made a bucket-load of money from targeted ads. And, a really, really, really big bucket at that.
By matching your search requests with related advertising they’ve made billions – one click at a time.
Now, Amazon wants to walk down a similar path. Fast Company has reported that Amazon has filed a number of patents potentially allowing them to offer Google-like ads on their Kindle reader.
This raises some interesting questions.
Books generally don’t have ads. To add ads to books could make them like magazines in format. We’d have articles down the middle and ads to the side.
The magazine page layout is the typical design model for web pages.
Does this mean Books and Websites are merging?
From a design point of view, the answer is probably ‘yes’.
Now, remember Amazon’s Kindle provides print books electronically. They’re effectively books designed for print and merely delivered electronically.
Compare them to the books that have been scanned into Google Books to see what I mean about their page layout. In this case, they are the original book design, simply digitally scanned or copied.
In contrast, if you were designing an electronic book from first principles, you would do this a little differently.
Here’s a couple of the key elements you’d include:
Do these four design elements of an electronic book sound familiar?
Yep. They’re all features of a typical web page.
When we add advertisements, we have a fifth element that suggests books and websites are merging.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
For the purists, no change is welcome.
For the early adopters, if it means the ads subsidize the books so they are free or close-to-free, then maybe they’ll catch on.
This brings us back to the free debate discussed in our previous post.
Mmm… is that where we’re all heading? Does digital mean ads will be everywhere? That’s if they’re not already.
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