I felt like entitling this post, “Reason #52,482 why I prefer paper books, and don’t plan to buy a Kindle,” but I thought that might be a tad too long. I might also have been tempted to entitle it with a bunch of unprintable words…but I think I’ll forgo that enjoyment until later. I’m sure that chance will come, though. Probably sooner than anyone would want.
Have a look at this post at Slashdot, “Amazon Wants Patent for Inserting Ads into Books,” by someone named theodp. And the two pertinent patents are On-Demand Generating E-Book Content With Advertising and Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content.
As theodp puts it,
“So what would a delightfully-tacky-yet-unrefined Hooters ad do for your Hemingway experience?”
To say this is an abomination of abominations is making it sound like a church picnic. This marketing-targetting-attacking-people-with-advertising is getting so out of hand, I doubt it will be long before they’re demanding the right to put advertisements on the insides of our eyelids so we can’t even escape their money-grubbing pocket-robbing shouting that way. What’s next — ads in the womb, to make sure they attack us with this crap from the very instant there’s any chance of registering their sell!sell!sell! in our brains?
This has got to stop. As I said to the friend who pointed this out to me, it’s deadly greedy money-sucking dehumanizing crap like this that makes me want the entire capitalist system to crash. If it means money is ALWAYS more important than human life or human values, if it means we never, ever, EVER are allowed to have peace from people who are trying to drag money out of our pockets — let it go. Let it crash. Time to start over.
hmmm…sounds to me like a sure way to make sure people stick with paper books longer.
I’m not interested in a kindle anyway, but OMG, this would make me throw it away if I did have one. Bad enough that TV, radio, newpapers, magazines, the internet, and the frickin’ shopping carts bombard me with advertising. I categorically refuse to read a book that does so as well.
Awww. Ads while reading your ebooks? That will really suck! Ugh. Moneymoneymoney… can’t they just leave booklovers alone.
I had been considering an electronic reader as a gift for somebody, but I can say without any doubt that if an ad pops up, the device would thereafter remain untouched by that person. And there are more than a few people I know who would feel the same.