Have eBooks Peaked? 323
An anonymous reader writes "At Rough Type, Nicholas Carr examines the surprisingly sharp drop in the growth rate for e-book sales. In the U.S., the biggest e-book market, annual sales growth dropped to just 5% in the first quarter of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, while the worldwide e-book market actually shrank slightly, according to Nielsen. E-books now account for about 25% of total U.S. book sales — still a long way from the dominance most people expected. Carr speculates about various reasons e-books may be losing steam. He wonders in particular about 'the possible link between the decline in dedicated e-readers (as multitasking tablets take over) and the softening of e-book sales. Are tablets less conducive to book buying and reading than e-readers were?' He suggests that the e-book may end up playing a role more like the audiobook — a complement to printed books rather than a replacement."
Economics -- a pricing failure (Score:5, Interesting)
With paperbacks, my typical behavior is to buy the book, read it, and then donate it to charity (at a retail used-book valuation) for a tax write-off. Given my marginal tax rate (state and federal combined), the net cost of the book is about 65% of face-value.
With E-books, I can't do that "donate to charity", so the face-value is the net cost, which seems to be about 10% under the paperback price.
E-book prices need to come down by at least 25% in order to become economically competitive for me.
Re:Disappearance of E-Ink (Score:5, Interesting)
eBooks are an easy sell to the uninformed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Economics -- a pricing failure (Score:4, Interesting)
E-book prices need to come down by at least 25% in order to become economically competitive for me.
Except publishers do not want to sell e-books. Let me rephrase that. Publishers want to price e-books so high that people continue to buy paper books. Why? That's their business. They cannot conceive of a business with different distribution channels. The collusion between publishers was not to make more money off of e-books. It was to make sure that the prices are so high that it will not eat into their traditional sales. Something will come along to change the business, but not until a few rich fucks die or are bought out.
Re:Piracy! (Score:1, Interesting)
Not really, alcohol consumption is suspected to have dropped by 30% due to prohibition (citation needed).
Prohibition lead to all sorts of problems for society, and alcohol really wasn't that bad. Certainly not bad enough that cutting its consumption by 30% had any notable impact.
Re:More buck for the bang? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd mod you up if I had the points. eBooks were growing like mad up until Apple caused prices to triple. When prices went above those of dead trees most people that looked at eBooks decided the value wasn't there and the they stopped selling them to new people (people that made the investment on a reader kept buying eBooks).
If prices come back down now that the Apple price fixing is over the market will likely rebound but this is the damage Apple and the publishers did. They set the market back probably a decade by driving cost conscious purchasers away, and it's going to be a long time before those people look at ebooks again.
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
Why should I pay $9.99 for an ebook that can be taken away from me anytime Amazon wants, can't be lent out or given away, and can't be resold? When I buy a real book, it's an investment. I can resell it, donate it to my local library, or buy other real books from used book sellers for $0.99. My wife's grandmother just passed away, and her family let me take a wealth of old books from her collection. All the money she spent on those books over her lifetime has transferred to her children and grandchildren. When I die, the hundreds--maybe thousands--of dollars spent on my ebook collection dies with me.
I love my kindle. I love reading ebooks. I love highlighting, clipping, and making notes in them, but there's a very tough tradeoff here. Real books are a material investment, ebooks are ephemeral.
Re:Piracy! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's because ebooks are a piss poor substitute for paper books. They're underpowered, lack 2D acceleration relevant to font-rendering, tend to store data in flash that's connected via the slowest and least-random-access-agile means possible, and basically suck as a reading experience. I have lots of ebooks, most of which have never really been read because the readers piss me off and distract me too badly from the actual task of reading.
Flipping pages feels like wading through wet concrete, and a computer-literate high school student circa 1990 probably did a better job laying out school papers in Pagemaker than most ebooks. Even pdf versions feel half-baked... like they just let some automated algorithm rip through the layout for the real book, and nobody bothered to make sure that the output actually looked good. I've seen ebooks from big-name technical publishers render with weird pdf errors (a random mangled unicode character, maybe a few characters where the kerning engine just vomited something vaguely resembling mashed-together text onto a page, etc).
Epub tends to not have the mangled kerning and wacky rendering problems, but THOSE ebooks tend to just look like someone blindly converted the professionally-typeset book to html-like layout and let it land wherever random luck happened to reflow it.
Then, there's Kindle... where even on a fast PC, flipping to random pages inexplicably brings the whole program to its knees for a second or two while it seemingly struggles to get its act together, and it just plain *intolerably* slow and laggy for random-access tech book reading.
There's really no nicer way to say it... ebooks, in their current form, are a miserable failure for anything besides reading novels from start to finish. Much of it is just due to underpowered hardware. 2D text isn't sexy like photorealistic rendered 3D, but realtime font rendering at high quality is a demanding (and unappreciated) task in its own right. OpenGL desperately needs hardware-level support for spline acceleration, smoothing, hinting, and everything else. There are some interesting ways you can use OpenGL to render individual glyphs, but with all the ram and T&L processing they have, it's still not enough to pre-define complete triangle-based definitions for 3 font families in 4 styles (normal, bold, italic, bold+italic with even a single UTF-8 codepage, like the one corresponding to ISO-8859-1, let alone even a tiny subset of a language like Chinese.
In a way, triangle-based high-quality font rendering vs photorealistic 3D is kind of like 720p60 vs 1080i60. People who don't understand what's going on behind the scenes tend to think the latter is a harder task, but when you do the real math, you quickly discover that it's actually the FIRST item in the pair that's the truly *demanding* task, simply because unlike the second item in the pair, the first generally doesn't allow you to cut corners and hide your sins... they get splattered in full public view for everyone to see, and there's nowhere to hide them.