Why no ads?

Magazines and newspapers can have more ads than articles. Television interrupts every show every few minutes with several minutes of commercials. Even supposedly ad-free public television throws in ads at the beginning and end of programing. When you go to the movies, you must sit through several minutes worth of commercials before the movie finally starts. On the web, you can't watch YouTube videos, do a Google search or do much of anything else (reading this blog being an exception) without encountering ads.

So how have books survived all these years without advertising?

To be sure, each book's publisher probably promotes other books they publish, especially those by the same author, somewhere in each volume. But you don't find Pepsi ads between chapters. You never find a State Farm ad on the back cover. How can this be?

Other media survive thanks to advertising, but not books. Advertising makes mass communication free, or at least relatively cheap. Somebody has to pay for "free" television programs. Somebody has to pay for web searches. Film producers and movie theaters need extra income to stay afloat.

Yet publishers keep publishing books, more and more each year, without putting advertising between the covers. What gives?

First, many people like to see their words in print, meaning they are willing to write books for little financial return. For publishers, books are relatively inexpensive to print, but they are not inexpensive to purchase. We readers are the ones who pay the freight. Books might actually be less expensive if they contained advertising. We must now pay about $30, sometimes a lot more, for a hardback book and nearly $20 for a paperback. Perhaps some advertising would help publishers, authors and readers, at least financially.

We are spared advertising in books, in part, because most books aren't all that popular. Most books, in fact, sell only a few thousand copies, if that. Even bestsellers don't necessarily sell enough copies to make authors — or potential advertisers — rich. Thus advertising in books doesn't make much sense in the book business. Why buy advertising in a book that may sell relatively few copies? And if publishers ever became dependent on advertising, fewer books might be published.

The ad-free tradition helps. It's how books have always been. We don't want our books "sponsored" because advertisers may try to influence content. Sometimes, for example, we see certain products in films because the manufacturers of those products have invested money in the productions. We might possibly see something similar if books contained advertising.

Quite piossibly the future of book publishing depends upon the industry keeping books ad-free.