Chris Anderson…talk[s] about the possibility of giving away online his next book – which he fittingly intends to title “Free” – to readers who were willing to read it with advertisements interspersed throughout its pages. (He still intends to sell the book traditionally to readers who’d rather get their text without the ads.)
Here is the longer story. I love free books. I would find it easy to skip the ads (if you are good at skipping text, you can be good at skipping ads), though perhaps I am naively unaware of the publisher’s counterstrategies in this war. In another direction, I recall hearing of free long distance service, at least provided you are willing to have your call interrupted periodically with advertisements. If we are willing to pay people to hear or watch ads, why stop there? How about "free life"? Corporations subsidize or create extra babies, under the proviso that the guardians agree to have their little ones doused with particular ads. What if you could addict your kid to Coca-Cola, or some other product, before birth, what sort of market would arise? What if you could stamp a permanent tattoo on Jimmy’s forehead?
It is rumored here in Italy that Totti, one of Italy’s most talented soccer players, was paid a few million euro to name his daughter Chanel, presumably after the fragrance. Who knows? All I can say is that it’s a good thing Frito-Lay didn’t offer him more.
A great deal of the benefit from having kids is expected to be enjoyed when the kids are grown and the parents are older. Assuming that social norms and morals don’t change radically, I don’t think that many expectant parents would choose to turn their kids into human billboards (at least at a price that would be worthwhile to the companies) because the kids would almost certainly resent it when grew up. It would be at least as bad as naming your boy Sue, like in the Johny Cash song. However, if parents could make a sponsorship deal at any time up until the child turned 18, things might be different. Then it would be like giving the parents a put option on a partial interest in the child. The value of the put would decrease with time. If things weren’t working out so well with the child and the expected future benefits to the child fell, then the parents might want to exercise the put and at least avoid a portion of the remaining costs of raising the child.
Fun to think about, but I would never consider it myself. I’m one of those myopic parents who is crazy about my child now and am 100% sure that I’ll be more crazy about her later and that she won’t make the same mistakes that other people’s kids do (at least the bad mistakes).
Of course, one could also note that giving books away for free is a profitable business even without ads. Anderson isn’t doing himself any favors.
I use the Sony Reader e-book widget for about half of my reading these days, and it’s made me very conscious of the state of online books. Publishers like O’Reilly (using the “free books build brand recognition” model) and Baen (using the “free books are a loss leader” model for book series) and individuals like Cory Doctorow (using both, plus his own “free books help me be a ravenous publicicty-hound” model) are really getting on board with the notion that free online books, because they cost next to nothing to the publisher, need only realize a very small return to be profitable.
This all boiled to a head recently, when the outgoing president of the Science Fiction Writers Association called authors who post free work online “scabs” — fighting words for a lot of these folks. Google “pixel-stained techopeasant” for the whole sordid story, which has fascinating and often weird economic implications.
Making a child addicted to a substance before birth would just be one more marketing strategy, no different than addicting products in our present time. I don’t think society would change dramatically.
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