Will the iPad Spark Affiliate Links in eBooks? tagged: , , , , , , ,

Will the iPad Spark Affiliate Links in eBooks?

Posted by Kupr in media, tracking

This week, the tech news has been dominated by the long anticipated and much rumoured launch of the Apple iPad. Many believe the introduction of this product will kick-start the whole tablet market. However, there seems to be some disappointment with the iPad with a lot of people commenting that Apple have missed a huge opportunity with the product by not including multi-tasking, no camera and no support for Flash media. In many ways it looks like it’s a large ebook reader aimed at the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader market, especially as Apple have also announced their online book store iBooks.

The iPad will be perfect for browsing websites, and watching Steve Jobs on the iPad keynote videos, visiting an online news site, is going to be a very intuitive experience akin to sitting down with a real newspaper. A lot has been said in the advertising world about the decline in revenues these sites have seen with many news sites toying with introducing pay walls to gain revenue from charging readers to pay to access some articles. The iPad looks like a great device to increase traffic to news sites, and hopefully for the owners a return to the advertising revenue they need to run a profitable online presence.

But what of books? With a real book, it is very likely that you will have paid for it, or perhaps are borrowing it from someone else. Therefore the advertising in a book is negligible, save for a couple of pages promoting the authors or publishers other titles. However with an ebook, there is a huge opportunity to make this a far more interactive experience. At the end of the book where you might still see suggested titles by the other, you will be able to embed links that take you straight to the online book store (in Apple’s case iBoooks). Of course iBooks itself will be able to show you other books by the other, or publisher, or titles in the same genre. This however, is only an incremental change. What if products mentioned in the books were given a hyperlink through to a site allowing you to purchase that product, or by flights to a destination. All of course attached with a tracking link allowing the publisher to earn commissions on the products sold.

Of course the nature of reading a book would mean that clicking on links and opening a web browser would be a highly disruptive experience, but I’m sure there are ways around this like adding the links as footnotes that can be refereed back to at a more convenient time to the reader.

This might seem like a controversial idea, but if you think about it product placement has been rife in films, and some TV programs for a number of years, think of the latter James Bond films if you need a reminder. For those that have read American Psycho, you might recall that the use of product names and brands features heavily in the text, that was a huge marketing opportunity that an ebook would have been able to address.

This is certainly an opportunity that publishers and those in the ebook industry should explore, whether or not it’s a suitable thing to do should should be at least be tested with focus groups etc, but one thing is for sure, with the launch of the iPad, comes an increased opportunity for advertisers to place more messages literally in the hands of the target audience, and that could be a very welcome shot in the arm for many businesses right now.