Imagine opening up your favorite novel and finding an advertisement splashed across the page. Well, that might be exactly what’s happening in the publishing industry. Amazon.com has sold over one million of its Kindle devices since it launched two years ago, and the company recently filed patents for applications that would allow advertising on the increasingly popular portable e-readers. Books remain one of the few forms of media that haven’t become inundated with advertising. Does that mean that access to books will become, like basic television, “free”? Not necessarily. Recent trends indicate that even if you pay for something outright–like, say, a movie–that doesn’t mean you won’t get slammed with commercials and marketing placements. How current Kindle users and prospective new customers will react to seeing ads in the middle of reading the latest J.K. Rowling tome remains to be seen, but like everything else, they’ll probably just grin and bear it.