Who's doing this to my internet?

Re:Who's doing this to my internet? by icebraining on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @12:56PM (#9962920)

I'm willing to pay for good content. But I also live in a place where a good software developer (net) salary is €14k/year, and that's still much higher than the average national salary, so I'm wary of these subscription services. They usually end up with a single price (since geo restrictions work poorly on the web), which the invisible hand pushes up to accommodate the disposable income of wealthier places.

As bad as advertisement is, it still helped subsidize my reading when I couldn't afford to pay for it, while the subscription model would create a tiered Internet for the more and less well-off.

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Re:Who's doing this to my internet? by eevilspock on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @02:02PM (#9963364)

So would you be in favor of the advertising business model for books? All books would be free, but there would be ads on the cover and interspersed throughout the book, sometimes on separate pages, sometimes in boxes between paragraphs. There would be product placements, as well as “native ads” which appear to be integral chapters of the book.

What if authors who refused ads just couldn’t compete against the deluge of free books?

What if books had a way of tracking who read them, and this previously private information was sold on the information markets?

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Re:Who's doing this to my internet? by icebraining on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @02:26PM (#9963541)

No, I wouldn't. But I wouldn't like if most authors published in "book subscription services" either - ads might actually be less bad.

Thankfully, they don't.

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