E-Book Mingles Love and Product Placement
Sweet’N Low appears several times in the 356-page story, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. In one scene, Mags, a Sweet’N Low devotee, shows off her nails, which she has painted to resemble the product’s pink packets. In another, she gets teased by a co-worker for putting Sweet’N Low in her coffee.
“Hellooo, isn’t it bad for you?” the friend asks. Mags replies that she has researched the claims online and found studies showing that the product is safe: “They fed lab rats twenty-five hundred packets of Sweet’N Low a day … And still the F.D.A. or E.P.A., or whatevs agency, couldn’t connect the dots from any kind of cancer in humans to my party in a packet.”
The scene was brought to you by the Cumberland Packing Corporation, the Brooklyn-based company that makes Sweet’N Low. Cumberland Packing invested about $1.3 million in “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Product placement in a novel might strike some as unseemly. But “Find Me, I’m Yours” is not like most novels. It’s an e-book, a series of websites and web TV shows, and a vehicle for content sponsored by companies. And if it succeeds, it could usher in a new business model for publishers, one that blurs the lines between art and commerce in ways that are routine in TV shows and movies but rare in books.
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
You fucking whores.
And:
But RosettaBooks is also trying to bridge the digital and physical divide by marketing the $6.99 e-book with postcard-size cards marked with codes that readers can use to download the book. The cards allow e-book creators to market and sell digital books in physical retail stores, hand them out at promotional events and give them away to readers.
The cards are also a way for authors to attract corporate sponsors. Since publishers can print different batches with special codes, a company could buy 10,000 cards to give away, with brand-specific sponsored content that would be bundled with an e-book. RosettaBooks is printing an initial batch of 15,000 cards for “Find Me I’m Yours.”
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
Awwww, ain’t you so clevar!
No.
Welcome to my 2008: eBook Signings: The Postcard Solution?
But these money whores pervert even that:
And because the e-book cards are marked with individual download codes, they offer access to detailed information on how readers engage with the book, including how much time they spend immersed in it, how far into the story they read and whether they reread certain passages. “It delivers high-power analytics, which is much more valuable to advertisers,” said Arthur Klebanoff, the RosettaBooks chief executive.
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams… FOR WHAT? So you can swim and dance and play.
Destroy a form of art so you can cash in.
You fucking money whores.
Previously at a prior blog:
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
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