Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Print Sales In UK 207
twoheadedboy writes "Book lovers are increasingly turning to e-books, and in the UK Amazon has announced it now sells more e-books than physical copies on Amazon.co.uk. Kindle books surpassed sales of hardbacks in the UK back in May 2011 at a rate of two to one and now they have leapfrogged the combined totals of both hardbacks and paperbacks."
kindle...? (Score:4, Interesting)
So does the kindle support ePub yet ...?
(or non-latin scripts?)
Re:That's not because eBooks are taking off... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously that's quite a claim and needs a bit of backing up. UK folk aren't all dribbling TV-addicts whose idea of literature is The Sun "newspaper".
Given the circulation figures of The Sun, I think you're not doing a great job of disproving the grandparent's assertion.
For my own part, I'm a reader with a voracious appetite for new material.
If you put down your book for a minute and go and wander around for a bit then you might discover that you are not part of the majority.
Re:That's not because eBooks are taking off... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a fine example of where socialism breeds it's own suicide by providing for everyone regardless of the effort they make.
Why is that socialism? The U.S., which cannot be accused of being too socialist, has the same problem, while the pretty socialist Finland does not. Don't blame every social failure on Socialism, it's just a cheap excuse not to do anything about it!
Re:That's not because eBooks are taking off... (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you stupid?
The current problems with education are the result of a National "one size fits all" Curriculum, a Tory measure, plus the privatisation of exam boards so there is a standards race to the bottom to maximise the number of students taking your papers. Also a Tory measure.
People whine about measures of 40+ years ago like the combining of comprehensives and grammar schools, forgetting that deciding people's future at the age of 11 was an absurd idea, and that all good schools put people into sets by subject according to ability (though, again, the NC and its offspring make this much more difficult than it should be).
And I say this as someone who went to a top fee-paying private school, having won a continuation and regular scholarship before my 13th birthday.
Of course, we could go back to pre-"socialism" literacy levels, back in the day when only the sons of rich parents or the wards of generous sponsors even had a full education... indeed, it probably wouldn't matter for people like me, as I naturally shine. But it would matter for people like you, because you don't seem very smart. Now shine my shoes.
Re:Can we get our rights back, please? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck with flogging that high horse with your buggy whip.
If you want to buy a tangible object, read it, sell it, rub it all over your nekkid body while singing Yankee Doodle, you're still free do so.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will shed our hair shirts and enjoy living in the future.
OK, the science. What we buy is a copy. We can't sell that copy without selling the physical device that it's on. Really, we can't. To get it on someone else's device, we'd have to make another copy.
Get that? It's not semantics, we can't actually sell the eBook that we bought, we can only duplicate it.
What does your most high and holy doctrine of first sale have to say about that? Given it was conjured up in the stone age by slave owning wizards (to hear tell), I'm guessing not a lot.
Re:First edition (Score:2, Interesting)
Now an ebook.
What this means is that, whilst old 'first edition' books will still be collected, they may now be seen as an artefact of a past way of living, much like chamberpots or bedwarmers.
Not so sure about that, publishing only ebooks will lead to massive piracy. This may not be an issue for the big names in publishing but it will be the end of many small specialist publishers if they go all digital. These small publishers may actually be better off staying analog since printed books are a pretty good anti piracy defense plus those customers that are really interested in this specialist literature will still buy the paper books. It takes way more time to scan and OCR process a book than it takes to rip a DVD and share it on bittorrent.
Re:First edition (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words: "If people can't be bothered to publish their stuff in a format that I can pirate I don't read their books."sound like you aren't much of a loss as a customer. All it takes to ruin a small indie publisher is one guy like you cracking their kindle books and putting their entire line on bittorrent. Where is the motivation to go digital?
No, those are your words stupid AC. Please re-read (with your brain in working mode):
>> Trouble is, there is so much (good) stuff to read that I one of the ways I select what to read is "is it available as an e-book?".
>> If a writer/publisher can't be bothered to sell their content in the way I want to consume it, I'll just shop elsewhere.
One of the ways "I **select** what to read". If you don't sell it digital, I will just buy some other book. Shop elsewhere, as in 'shop from someone else'.
If people can't be bothered to sell digital for the kindle (I don't even bother with Adobe digital editions), I just read something else that is available for the Kindle.
The motivation for a publisher to go digital is to actually be able to sell books to the most avid book readers, who are all migrating or have migrated to e-readers. Publishers not going digital will be out of the market in 5 years or less (assuming you have a platform like the Kindle for the given language, there are only what 5 6 languages with real books for sale at Amazon).