Ethics of in-app transactions and Enhanced E-books

For this week's journal entry, I decided to think about the most likely way that someone would be exposed to the enhanced e-books without searching them out. I am a huge reader and I read a variety of genres and styles: I read e-books in the form of epubs, pdfs, and even word docs. I read manga translated and published in print, and I read manga and comic books translated or not, by fans online. It is not far out of the realm of possibility that a reader similar to me would likely search out enhanced e-books or come across them while searching out new stories to read. I don't think this a likely situation for a casual reader.

Trying to think from another perspective of how Average Person could run across enhanced e-books, I thought back to my one tangential comment in class about some enhanced ebooks being promoted as "chose your own path games" on social networking platforms. As we discussed in class this week, our websites learn from us, and since I am a big reader these could have popped up on my Facebook wall under "suggested apps" for that reason. However, from the number of users, I believe that I have good support to assert that many people are being exposed to their first type of enhanced e-book hybrid through these applications pictured below.

I have played around with a few of these applications enough to figure out that really your choices are within a confined web, where you may have three options for an interlude in the narrative, but each choice comes back to one conclusion. The graphics aren't great, more like a middle ground between an anime and a manga, and it isn't quite what I have in mind when I am thinking about enhanced ebooks, but they are interactive: you can click options and you have choices. 

However, I think that in a sense these applications/games/enhanced ebooks are scams. Here is why: I mentioned above that it isn't hard to figure out that the web of choices is not vastly complicated, and there usually is a fixed ending you come to no matter what choice you make, BUT the applications make you pay an in-application fee to advance to the "next chapter" and see where your choices are lead. But really you would just be paying to advance within the overall narrative and not for your personalized game/narrative journey. 

I don't like this. I don't think that it's fair to put readers in a position where they essentially pay way more than what the product is worth to get the full story. An argument can be made that you pay for books in series to move onto the next installment in an arch-narrative, say from book 1 to 2 in the series and so on. The same for computer and video games. However, moving through one chapter of these applications took about 5 minutes and then you are prompted to pay $0.99-$2.99 to advance your character through a very predicable story. I don't think they are worth the price. 

So I was brought to the question of: how ethical is this practice? Obviously the reader has the choice to pay to progress or set the narrative aside, but I still feel a bit icky thinking about how you're 'hooking' the target market (say of teenage girls for the applications pictured above) into paying to advance through a story, making the reader they think they have choices, and their story is unique and therefore worth paying for, when in reality it is pretty transparently not. 

I'm interested to bring this to the classroom and discuss tomorrow. 

Thanks!

Jones