The announcement that a cheaper Kindle will be subsidized by advertising brings up the issue of the history of ads in books. The MobyLives blog sorts it out, and we won't repeat them here (they reference a couple of other pieces). But I have to say I remember these paperback book ads well, and I remember fighting against them in my earliest days in publishing (long before I joined Reader's Digest). Not surprisingly, I was against them. Ads on a Kindle? I don't know. We're so used to ad-supported software these days, at least software that is otherwise "free." Maybe it's not so bad? It's a tough, tough call.
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