Amazon Could Transform Kindle Into Advertising Platform

In a move that could help Amazon to capitalise on its popular Kindle e-book reader, the online retailer is planning to integrate adverts in the e-books for the device, and paperbacks sold via its on-demand book publishing service.

The online retail giant has reportedly filed a couple of patent applications for the technology that would help placing contextual adverts within the content a user downloads to the Kindle e-book reader device.

The patents are tagged as “Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content” and “On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising”, in which, the company claims that while users gain access to a huge variety of content through on-demand publishing services, the e-books don’t include adverts, and even if they do, the adverts are “out of date and inapplicable”.

The patent went on to state that while on-demand printing services haven’t adapted to modern marketing, a large number of free websites are able gain profits by dishing up adverts on their content.

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However, Amazon hasn’t pointed out whether the step will result in fall in cover prices in exchange of adverts, or when such ads are expected to be rolled out.

Hanning Zhou, Amazon’s Print-on-Demand group’s manager, touted the move by saying that embedding adverts to e-books will enable the publisher to monetise from a broad range of content, including rare documents as well as out of print, in the similar manner online publishers are making money from fresh content.

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