Books: Amazon.com Introducing Ads to Kindle

The London Book Fair is on this week and lots of interesting news filtering through but something happening over in the states caught my eye. From a direct marketing point of view (and as an ex-amazonian) I'm interested to see this news about amazon introducing ads to Kindle to lower entrance prices to their device (cutting by $25 dollars). Could Amazon have an eye on the kind of flexible advertising revenue as generated by Google Adwords?

For a number of reasons I've been pondering a bit the potential ways to push people towards Kindle sales. Unlike the majority of iTunes users (other than a small percentage of iphone users) people buy and browse directly from the device when it comes to the Kindle. Sure you can direct people from a web page to buy a kindle item from the amazon site and get it delivered next time you log onto your Kindle but its not really the most efficient way to grab sales and pretty counter intuitive. This means that the majority of the books charting on Kindle are those spiking due to offline influences or are already big sellers. How much browsing of the back catalogue is really going on? or "discovery"? Of course you do have the editorial bit (nice of them to bring back editorial as an idea) but how can you sell marketing packs to publishers like we used to do on the main site? Surely this new advertising would overcome this?

Then again.. it looks like the large marketing packs are for Procter & Gamble not HarperCollins (for now). And how does this work? Is this based on the same customer algorithms as on the main site (highly targetted)? What about targetted newsletters you can sign up for direct to the Kindle?

Like I say as a direct marketer I find it pretty fascinating. As a book lover (ebook and physical) I'm relieved that for now anyway, this ad funded version is an "option" in the states and not compulsory to all Kindles. You pay a bit more not to get the ads.

When will it will launch in the UK? As ever Amazon like to keep these things secret (you should see the NDAs they make you sign when you work there). But it will be on its way soon for sure.