Dear Goodreads, you provide a service I’ve fallen in love with very quickly, and you also provide a great iPhone app that accompanies the service. Your app is free (as in beer), and I suppose everyone loves free apps. However, because it’s free, your app also serves ads.

I understand that, you need to be earning money somehow. But why isn’t there a ‘pro’ version of your app? Why can’t I actually pay you money? Why do I have to see the ads?

It’s not only a problem with you, Goodreads, there’s plenty of other nice apps in the app store that are free, and hence serve ads. I like free apps, but I hate ads, and if I’m to choose between paying some small amount of money for a ‘pro’ version of software or having ads, I choose to pay. Given, that is, you allow me.

(As a sidenote: yes, this is on of the problems of software for the linux desktop. If Digikam developers charged $25 for a copy of their software, we wouldn’t need Lightroom for linux).