Forbes is reporting that the iPhone has become the country’s top eBook reader.

Toldja so.  Well, not you, exactly.  But other people I know and work with.

How did I know?  Because the first fan to read the first draft of HUNGER: a Gone Novel, all 700 manuscript pages of it, was my son Jake.  On his iPhone.  And this was before there were any book-reading apps for the phone.

Kids are early adapters.  They are devoid of loyalty to the past.  No loyalty to paper.  So all that effort by Amazon and others to create book readers that duplicate the paper experience are beside the point when it comes to kids.  And not just beside the point, but actually impediments.  Kids like the new.  Old people like old.   Kids like to experiment and investigate.  They like to take possession and redefine.  

Also, they aren’t all that excited by spending hundreds of dollars on a book reader, they’d much rather have an iPhone.  Seriously, do a survey of the kids you know:  Sony book reader or iPhone?

Real books — you know, with pages and all — will continue to be important, even in kidlit, but publishers who ignore e-books are making a big mistake.  This is doubly, trebly true for YA lit where we should already be deep into this new paradigm.  

But how to monetize the free, paperless book?  Advertising.  Specifically product placement.

Excuse me?  Was that a howl of outrage?  

Sorry, I didn’t invent the internet.  (That was Al Gore.)  But the internets exist, and the internet has defeated DRM and other protective measures for music, and it will continue to defeat similar efforts to control the flow of data.  We are going to be giving books away free online.  It’s already happening, it’s going to keep happening, and now the only question is:  how do we all go on making a living as writers and editors and agents?  

A few points:

1) The internet has decided it will be an ad-supported medium.  We didn’t decide, it decided.  See Google?  Ad-supported.  See the subscriber-only New York Times online?  No, you don’t.  Not anymore.

2) Technology is making it easier to subtract non-integral advertising from TV and from web pages.  You can already use your DVR to skip TV ads.  And you can use your browser to kill banner ads, Flash ads and so on.

3) Technology is making it easier and, this is crucial, more attractive to consumers, to build advertising into a movie, DVD, TV show or book; to make it integral.  Ads won’t be something before or after:  advertising will be part and parcel of the entertainment.

4) Audiences won’t just tolerate this, they will prefer it.  They will demand it.  Because the net result will be an enhanced experience, a value-added piece of media.

How does this relate specifically to books?  The “enhanced book.”  Online and free, this book would include multiple outlinks from the text — enhancements.  You can link from a character description to artwork of that character.  You can link from a difficult word to its definition.  Link to an online discussion group.  Link to backstory you don’t want to have cluttering up the text.  Link to author commentary.  Link to the Old Navy shirt the character is wearing, on-sale for just $17.95, a special rate for readers.

Say what?  You were kind of almost with me until that last part, right?  Definitions, backstory, author commentary, sure.  Why not?  But a commercial link?  Product placement?  Oh, horrors.

And yet, do you think Meg Cabot’s readers, or Carol Snow’s, or mine might kind of enjoy knowing exactly what the character is wearing?  Yeah, I think they would.  And I think if they like the look they might like to buy it themselves.  Why not?  

Why would it be so terrible?  Why is it a good thing for a reader to pay $17.95 for a hardcover book, but a bad thing for them to pay  $17.95 for a t-shirt they learned about while reading a book they got for free?  From where I sit it looks like they got a book and a t-shirt for just $17.95.

Readers could have access to an unlimited supply of absolutely free books.  Free.  As many as they wanted.  No need to budget, hey, read all the books you want.  Anywhere, anytime. Until your battery runs out.  And if you want to buy that t-shirt? 

Let’s try a slightly different example.  A book’s lead character is listening to music.  Why shouldn’t the reader enjoy a free soundtrack?  Click the hyperlink and there the reader is on MySpace music hearing the song the character is listening to.  And if the reader chooses to download that song . . .

Finally, there’s this:  Summer.  (Or whatever they’ve renamed it.  Something involving bikinis.)  It’s a series Katherine and I wrote back at the dawn of time that has been re-released.  The packager updated some of the cultural and commercial references before re-releasing.  A free, online e-book version could have been updated effortlessly.  And those already-inserted references could have been linked to purchasing opportunities.  

In other words, many backlist titles that are just sitting on publishers hard drives could be reissued at almost no cost online, and made at least marginally profitable by enhancing the text with all the aforementioned types of links — art, backstory, commentary, definitions — as well as some sponsored links.  Cost to publisher?  Far less than printing, shipping and etc…

Books will be digitized, they will end up being free online, and I believe those online books will end up being monetized by integral advertising.  The results, if it becomes the enhanced book, will be larger numbers of books available to larger numbers of readers for far lower printing, shipping (and environmental) cost.  And readers will very quickly come to prefer, and finally to demand, the enhanced book experience.

I’m 54 years old.  Not exactly a youth.  My whole life I read paper newspapers.  In the last two years I’ve gone completely online, no physical newspapers.  Why?  Because although paper newspapers are great to fold and hold and stick under your arm, a free, an up-to-the-minute, hyperlinked, “enhanced” newspaper is better.  Publishers would do well not to count on kids being set in their ways.