Advertising to bookworms

I’ve written several posts on this blog about things like urban spam. And there's always talk on the blogosphere about just how intrusive advertising can be.

Well I’ve just discovered an advertising medium that is no longer with us. A medium I’d never even heard of - paperback books.


In the late fifties adman Roy Benjamin started a company to sell advertising to book publishers.

That’s advertising in books, not for books. Weird huh?

Apparently it was a popular medium in its day. And I’m pretty sure old Roy did quite nicely out of it.

But like all ‘good’ things, it eventually came to an end.

Seems authors were not consulted about the ads that were inserted into their books.

They didn’t they receive a cut of the ad revenue either. So they sued.

And slowly but surely in-book advertising died out.

Thank goodness.

NYT