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."
First edition (Score:2)
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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.
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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
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> 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.
I read many things that go under 'specialist literature'. Trouble is, there is so much (good) stuff to read that I one of the ways I se
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>>>I read many things that go under 'specialist literature'. 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?".
Same here but in magazine format. My filter: "Is the e-magazine cheaper then the paper magazine?" So far the only one that is cheaper is Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine ($12 instead of $34). The other magazines like Asimovs and Analog charge the same amount even though they are not wasting money on po
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).
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Of those I normally buy 2-3 which keep me fed for a weekend or two. These days I buy a printed book perhaps no more than one a month.
Re:First edition (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First edition (Score:4, Insightful)
publishing only ebooks will lead to massive piracy
Why any more piracy than will already exist with current levels of ebook distribution? I'm not really convinced by what you're saying.
There are clearly plenty of people like me who buy ebooks, and apparently even more than buy paper books now, at least among online savvy shoppers. Yes, there will always be freeloaders, but not everyone is that selfish.
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You can already find the ebook pirated for a lot of things. If you aren't too picky (ie it must be books 1-5 of this particular scifi series) you can easily download a lifetime of stuff to read in a weekend and not pay a dime. I think you're right in the wrong way. As long as paper copies exist there will be people that collect them just because they have a mild form of hording behaviour, or prefer paper to electronic and it is a pain to find the paper copy so buy it by default. What could/probably will mak
kindle...? (Score:4, Interesting)
So does the kindle support ePub yet ...?
(or non-latin scripts?)
Re:kindle...? (Score:5, Informative)
"Through conversion" is not supporting it (Score:2)
Otherwise you could claim any device supports any format so long as you convert it first!
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Re:kindle...? (Score:5, Informative)
I actually don't know how most people put media on their kindles, but I use calibre. http://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com]
It converts from epub to mobi without any issues as far as I've seen. The main achilles heel is pdf's as far as I'm concerned... sure, the kindle gladly displays them, but you can't change font size or anything but have to rather zoom in on parts of static pages, which is very annoying. Of course this isn't a problem with kindles, but rather typical of the PDF format.
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Re:kindle...? (Score:4, Informative)
In my experience PDFs convert badly, partly because many times they are badly made - the text might be encoded as images rather than text, or there might be security added so that you can't select text or such. Of course this depends on where you get your PDFs from, but as a generalization of the pdfs in the ebook scene it seems to hold accurate.
But like I said, this is a problem with PDFs, not with the kindle.
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I've been known to do the same at times, although I try not to... But say I've downloaded a series of books and one book in the middle has major formatting errors - well gee, there's half a day well spent.
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I also experience this and it's because most PDF's are horribly designed by people that need to be beaten with the Acrobat manual. I have a PDF that you can not read in any reader but the actual adobe PDF reader. it's because the idiot that made it put a fancy background on every page and got the Z order wrong. Adobe forces text to the front all the times, other readers will do as they are told.
Step 1 is to find the people that made the PDF and beat them bloody with the Spec Manual for the PDF format.
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I also experience this and it's because most PDF's are horribly designed by people that need to be beaten with the Acrobat manual.
That's funny. According to a few PDF processing tools that I have, people who wrote Acrobat need in turn to be beaten with the PDF specification document.
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I also experience this and it's because most PDF's are horribly designed by people that need to be beaten with the Acrobat manual.
According to a few PDF processing tools that I have, people who wrote Acrobat need in turn to be beaten with the PDF specification document.
You're both right, except they should beat each other with Louisville Sluggers instead of mere sheets of paper.
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In most cases that I've had issues with I believe it's not so much bad people but bad software. Users converting to PDF using various software just because PDF is as close to a "universal" format as you can come... supposedly. Hopefully this boom in ebook readers means other formats will take over that role.
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Step 1 is to find the people that made the PDF and beat them bloody with the Spec Manual for the PDF format.
But isn't the spec manual a PDF?
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A tablet might work better, but then I bought an e-ink device specifically for the battery life, which no tablet comes even close to matching. I could definitely see the use of a good pdf-reading tablet for technical manuals however... or for say roleplaying rulebooks. I'd still prefer it if people just started using simpler formats for things that are mostly text-based and doesn't require so much fancy formatting. A stunning amount of things I've found in PDF format only could have been just as well format
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Yeah, that sounds like what I'd like - except not with the ipad since I'm an android user.
But I never suggested roleplaying rulebooks be put in RTF: as I said that was aimed at books that doesn't require fancy formatting, such as regular books for instance which at a stretch requires emphasis and italics. PDF is still a good format for magazine type publications, technical manuals, rulebooks and such, where there is a large amount of pictures, tables and fancy formatting that needs to be preserved. I'm sure
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I have a kindle fire and read PDF's (medical textbooks) on it all the time. I do have to zoom in, but that "sticks" from page to page so I just have to do it once. Note -- this is with the Mantano reader (free version) which handles pdf better than the native kindle app (e.g. allows highlighting, freehand notes, etc..)
I have tried converting the PDF to mobi/epub with calibre (which works) but the layout gets really crappy -- especially with respect to the legends of figures/images/tables.
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Can you extract text from a pdf and keep basic layout formatting?
There are basically two very different PDF formats:
The classic format is essentially Postscript with absolute positioning of text fragments in page. There are many programs that try to guess the original document flow with better or worse success. Even worse, some PDF documents are scanned so short of OCR and its own problems there is no text and little formatting.
The flowing format is similar to HTML so
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The main issue I have with ePub->MOBI conversion so far is that sometimes the page breaks stay as they were in ePub, which makes reading them awkward in Kindle - you often have an ePub-page converted to one and a half page in MOBI.
I am thinking about an perl script to fix that, but for now, I was too lazy.
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Hmm, I've never encountered that problem that I can recall, not from epub. Perhaps I've just been lucky, perhaps I've fiddled around with the settings at some point.
Re:kindle...? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are only two devices that are useful for reading pdf's.
Kindle DX, and iPad. you really need the big screen.
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Yeah exactly. I actually read quite a lot of them on my second screen while I'm compiling... It bugs me that pdf is such a popular format for things that doesn't benefit from it - like anything that is mostly just text.
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Kindle DX, and iPad. you really need the big screen.
More importantly you need a responsive screen. PDFs more than other formats require pinch to zoom, pan etc. to work reasonably because they often don't fit in a screen well or contain detail that necessitates zooming in to see.
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So does the kindle support ePub yet ...?
No, it doesn't support ePub, but Amazon does have a free program (search for "kindlegen") that will convert epub to mobi. There's even have a Linux version. Obviously not as good as actually supporting it on the Kindle, but works.
Can we get our rights back, please? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can we get our rights back, please?
Another vindication for technological progress, and another steely blow to the right of first sale.
No. The idea of first sale belongs to the world of physical things, and the physical world is slowly learning to adjust to what that means. Stop trying to apply physical laws to information.
Now get off your lawn!
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No. The idea of first sale belongs to the world of physical things, and the physical world is slowly learning to adjust to what that means. Stop trying to apply physical laws to information.
When it has finished adjusting, I fully expect to be able to copy as many things as I want as often as I want. And I still expect art to be created, and many artists to make a living wage. All this will take time. Meanwhile, pretending I've bought something when I can hardly even use it, is a farce.
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Can we get our rights back, please?
Another vindication for technological progress, and another steely blow to the right of first sale.
No. The idea of first sale belongs to the world of physical things, and the physical world is slowly learning to adjust to what that means. Stop trying to apply physical laws to information.
Now get off your lawn!
And what about your right not to have books that you have legally bought and paid for effectively stolen back from you by the retailer [theregister.co.uk]? Does that only apply to the "world of physical things" too?
I have an ebook reader and while it has undeniably cool and useful features, I'm not blind to the things I'm losing; ability to resell/give to a charity shop, lend to a friend, read anywhere/anytime and not just on the retailer's preferred devices/DRM scheme, and even (on some platforms) control over my own library
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And what about your right not to have books that you have legally bought and paid for effectively stolen back from you by the retailer [theregister.co.uk]? Does that only apply to the "world of physical things" too?
They are revoking your right to access it, not 'stealing' it back. You didn't buy it (how can you buy information???), you bought the right to access it. It turns out Amazon didn't have the right to sell you in the first place, which also invalidated the purchase you made from them. AFAIK they refunded the purchase price anyway so if you want to draw a parallel with the physical world it's more like someone selling you a stolen car then the original owner taking it back from you, with the added bonus that a
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And what about your right not to have books that you have legally bought and paid for effectively stolen back from you by the retailer [theregister.co.uk]? Does that only apply to the "world of physical things" too?
They are revoking your right to access it, not 'stealing' it back. You didn't buy it (how can you buy information???), you bought the right to access it. It turns out Amazon didn't have the right to sell you in the first place, which also invalidated the purchase you made from them. AFAIK they refunded the purchase price anyway so if you want to draw a parallel with the physical world it's more like someone selling you a stolen car then the original owner taking it back from you, with the added bonus that actually get your money back.
Eh, no. It's more like a bookseller sells you a book, then breaks into your house and takes the book off your bookshelf, then later sends you a note saying "Oops, my bad!" and enclosing a cheque. It doesn't make the break-in right.
The problem is that the content owners have invented the artificial concept of your right to access something so they can derive a revenue from their work, and then the resellers use that concept to try and also make money for themselves.
Actually I'm fine with paying content creators for their work. They have to make living like everybody else. "Information just wants to be free" doesn't pay your mortgage or your grocery bills. But once I pay for my copy, it should be mine in perpetuity. Not stolen back/revok
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Eh, no. It's more like a bookseller sells you a book, then breaks into your house and takes the book off your bookshelf, then later sends you a note saying "Oops, my bad!" and enclosing a cheque. It doesn't make the break-in right.
It does if the book you bought was stolen from the rightful owner
But once I pay for my copy, it should be mine in perpetuity. Not stolen back/revoked/whatever on a whim later.
Figure it out: You didn't buy the book. You bought stolen information. By copyright law, you're only allowed to have a copy of the art if you legally obtain the right to a copy (a license, more or less). In that case, you did not. You obtained a false license from a retailer who did not have the legal authority to sell you access to the book. As such, your access to the book was removed as it was never legally given to you.
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Stop trying to apply physical laws to information.
No exceptions admitted? [wikipedia.org]
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Hardware: the part of the computer that you can kick.
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.
It's still a bad deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the fact that Kindle books often cost the same or more than physical books, these restrictions make the Kindle versions a very bad deal for the consumer. Worse, in my opinion, than DRM on music, because you have to give up the email address of the person you are sharing your purchase with. Name me one other merchant who requires that you personally identify the person you share a purchase with. I'm not sure that's even legal, but even if it is, it's a horrible precedent.
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What does your most high and holy doctrine of first sale have to say about that?
For a similar result, simply send them a copy of the ebook and then delete your own. Now, I don't really see the point in deleting your own copy, but that's how you'd get a similar result.
Given it was conjured up in the stone age by slave owning wizards
Really? It makes quite a bit of sense to me.
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Your own post points out why first sale doctrine doesn't make any sense for digital goods.
I meant the first sale doctrine in general. He said "Given it was conjured up in the stone age by slave owning wizards" as if insulting them.
And making a copy for the purpose of redistribution is an infringement of copyright.
Is it? Doesn't that depend on precedent? I thought I heard of a few cases dealing with this subject (not necessarily in the US). The point is, that doesn't necessarily need to be so (if you delete your own copy, most likely).
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Go e-books! (Score:2)
I am quite thankful for e-readers as they have allowed me to read more books in a more convenient format by solving problems I was experiencing with paper books, namely: storage (I own too many books and carry too many books while traveling) and font size (I have an eagle nose, not eagle eyes).
For all the problems (DRM, bad typesetting) and the perception of (IMO hyperbolic) problems with e-books (oh, Amazon will know which page I am reading -- as if there was not a direct way to turn that off AND as if you
It has become my preferred method of reading (Score:5, Insightful)
having a Kindle touch, Kindle Fire, and even an iPad 2, I find myself reading almost all new books on the Kindle Touch. For two reasons, its so damn light and second because I can use it in full sun light.
For me nothing beats being able to read outside without having to worry about glare and portability. While I am still a fan of hard cover books, having shelves of them, I am more than happy to own an e-reader version of them. Too bad publishers don't help the trend and follow a similar model DVD publishers do, where you can get a digital version without your hard copy.
"Amazon sales" not "UK sales" (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. The actual story is Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Print Sales ON AMAZON In UK.
Huge difference.
Re:"Amazon sales" not "UK sales" (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Since no one else sells Kindle books, that means 10% of all "book" sales are Kindle. Not over 50%. Ignoring other ebook formats, of course, but so did TFA.
Obviously number of ebooks has gone up, but they don't "surpass print sales in the UK" without a lot of qualifications added to that statement.
Re:"Amazon sales" not "UK sales" (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Except brick-and-mortar stores don't really offer e-books, and Amazon is a skewed sample as they're pretty much the champion of digital book purveyance. So no, not fairly indicative at all I'd say.
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On this recent episode of Open Book on BBC Radio 4 [bbc.co.uk] a guest said that ebook sales in the UK account for something like 12-15% of total book sales. He said it was about 40% i
possibly dystopian (Score:2)
Can you back up the ebooks? This is *absolutely crucial*. A year or so ago, Amazon pulled existing copies of "1984" by George Orwell because of a licensing dispute. It would be naive to think that a government will not take advantage of this "kill switch" (and it doesn't even have to be a government to be scary, if a company can censor information that's just as bad). If you can back them up, on the other hand, then all is good. Doesn't matter if they're DRMed either, as long as you can load them back onto
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Wheel of Time on Kindle (Score:2)
Mini "Ask Slashdot" (Score:2)
As long as we are on the topic of ebooks, anybody know of a good ebook reader for *PDF*? A lot technical stuff that I have is in the form of PDFs, and I was wondering if any body had a good experience reading those on ebook reader.
(E-ink based ebook readers, btw, not one of those Tablet-Reader combos like Nook Colour or iPad or whatever)
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Isn't that old and possibly unsupported?
Also, are you recommending it due to its large screen, or because of its ease of readability (page turn, text flow etc)?
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Ah curses, I would have liked that ability too, often you want to browse a question paper and solution together, on a computer you can just switch tabs, I think it becomes a lot more cumbersome on an ebook reader.
Nevertheless, thank you for your recommendation. Am I correct in believing the DX is the only reader in it's size category? A pity no one explored that market.
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Free books? (Score:2)
I must be showing my age... (Score:3)
Don't get me wrong, I live in the Now, and always have an eye down the road for Later but my heart relishes the comforts of Then. From what I observe around me, this is hard-wired into us.
I don't like the idea of books, film and music being only available as ethereal data. I double dislike the idea when one factors in "cloud" storage, and a vendor's ability to remove things from that cloud.
Can you imagine? "License" "Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt" now in 2012, watch it a bunch of times, then in 2022 try to go to it again only to find.. "Due to violation of Federal Decency Code #A113 paragraph 1313, this title has been removed for your own protection." I *can* see this happening. Good thing I have it in hardcopy here.. You want it? *come and get it*
How about availability? Can you get, 50 years from now, an e-book of some low-run title from some unheard of author? Cinemas are starting to find this out right now.. "Oh, you want "Everybody Sing" (1938, Judy Garland) in 4k DCI? So sorry, we don't have it.. but we do have the last 35mm print known to exist.. what's that you say? You sold your film projectors in the Great Physical Purge of 2012? So sorry to hear that! We can offer you the latest by Michael Ba"----*CLICK*
Speaking broadly, aren't we headed for a possible Digital Alexandria, or a Digital Book Burning Party? Didn't one of the major e-bookstores remove Tom Sawyer from reader's devices? What would prevent this on a much larger scale? What would prevent a government from declaring a title "verbotten" and having the e-vendors pull it from all readers' devices and zap it from the cloud?
I can't think of a world where all the world's books, music and film are sold and contained in "the cloud." I may be getting old, so I may have a skewed perspective on the physical world.. but there's little comfort to be found knowing that I have Mahoromatic on my hard drive, vs. just looking over my shoulder and seeing the 8 books sitting in my shelf, snugly surrounded by other obscure titles that no one in the mainstream cares about. A shelf full of books, film and music is a good sign. To me, anyway.
And yet, as I say all this, one of my back-burner projects is to build a home media server and stuff it with bit-for-bit copies of all my music and film. The physical media itself would remain, right where it is, lining the walls of my favorite room.
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I wonder how you measuring literary merit? A lot of people would love to have an agreed measure. For what it's worth, I'm finding an eReader (not a Kindle, but it could be) very useful indeed for the set texts on a university English Literature course I am studying at the moment. Not least because I have to go abroad on business during the course, and I would much sooner carry all the set texts on an eReader than weigh down my baggage with dead trees. I also use it for the books we read in the two book grou
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.
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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.
The majority of people don't read the sun. In fact, in the UK, the combined circulation for papers thick people read (Sun, Mail, Star) is under 10% of the country. Mail readers are thick, but they'll probably disagree, and probably read books in any case.
However, the UK does have a large TV viewership. Probably due to the fact we have relatively decent TV compared with the U.S. 75%-80% of us watch TV at some point during the week, and spend about 25-30 hours a week watching (it's higher at the moment due to
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More than 50% should be getting C or above, as the GCSE grades go from A*, A, B, C, D, E and Fail - C and above is slightly more than half on the range.
I got a C at GCSE English, despite the fact that I read five or more books a week, wrote novella length stories, had excellent typing skills, perfect writing technique and had read all of Shakespeare (out of choice) by the time I was 13. Why didn't I excell at English? Because it had fuck all to do with "English" and a heck of a lot of more to do with "Eng
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Here in the USA you would have received an A++
Yes our grading system is that badly skewed, we don't want to make the morons feel bad so we give everyone A's and B's... I had classmates in CS classes that should have been ejected. They were in CS 112 and still did not know CS 102 concepts, the prof had to stop and teach remedial computing over and over.
and the funny part, in reality when you leave school, your GPA means nothing to anyone that matters. Your boss will not care if you got A's, all they
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Here in the USA you would have received an A++
Not always. His experience sounded just like mine here in the US in high school. Grades were more about being able to write about what the teacher wanted you to say rather than any technical skill or ability to construct your own clear coherent ideas. I even got in trouble for correcting the teacher on Arthurian legend and she got really made when I showed her the relevant text (ya, right, argue with an 80's D&D nerd about Arthurian legend) and found teachers marking points off because I was using vocab
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Unless the curriculum has changed a *lot*, it's all about reading "Of Mice and Men" (a book that I read in a couple hours, several times over) and then spending 6 fucking months dissecting it to find ridiculous hidden meanings and literary bollocks.
Wow. That's exactly my experience with the same book. I guess we both went to a UK school when they were trying to knock out carbon copy thatcherites.
I remember being the only one in a math class who was willing to point out that if you had to round to a whole number 4.46 is closer to 4 than 5. Apparently the rule was to round off one digit at a time and always round 5 upwards. Not one of 29 or so other children was willing to agree with me because the teacher must be right even when he is clearly wrong.
I h
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I struggled with some of English and English Literature (they were taught together, so I don't remember which was which; there was poetry as well as Of Mice And Men). Much of my coursework was graded as B or C. However, towards the end of the year the teacher set me (only me) an assignment to analyse some factual writing -- articles from popular science magazines. I could do that, and easily got an A*. Apparently, stuff like that was on the syllabus but most English teachers didn't like it, so taught th
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Oh, and it's actually A*, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and "fail" ("U", I can't remember what it stands for). A G is a pass, and you get a certificate, if you get U you don't get a certificate.
(There are noticeable differences between E, F, G and U, but I don't know whether any employer would care.)
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Nice to see the haters are out today - having a nice time are you?
I understood the books I was reading very nicely thank you - I just didn't give a fuck about English Lit (and I still dont). And no, they weren't separate subjects when I was taking GCSEs (mid 1990s) - it was just "English". English Lit was a separate subject at A-Level, but not at GCSE.
Do I have to sit through months of dissection of Of Mice and Men that the class is walked through just to get to some pointless hidden meaning? No, I don't
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Nice to see the haters are out today - having a nice time are you?
I understood the books I was reading very nicely thank you - I just didn't give a fuck about English Lit (and I still dont). And no, they weren't separate subjects when I was taking GCSEs (mid 1990s) - it was just "English".
http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/8938/1/6908_gcse_english_literature.pdfseems [ioe.ac.uk] to think otherwise, but I'm not a teacher, and did mine in 2002.
its just that "English" as taught today (as in my day when I took GCSEs) has little to do with mastering the various technicalities and abilities of the written and spoken word, and much more to do with contrived, manufactured investigations into so called "literary classics"
After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:
English:
- reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again
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http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/8938/1/6908_gcse_english_literature.pdfseems [ioe.ac.uk] to think otherwise, but I'm not a teacher, and did mine in 2002.
When I took my GCSEs in 1995, there was one single paper - and my GCSE certificate (having just checked) only has "English" on it.
I was in the upper bounds of the year, so I certainly wouldn't have been left out of any exams (if you could even be left out of a core subject!)
After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:
English: ...")
- reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again and shouting out every "may", as in "it's is thought that immigrants MAY have
- reading a few poems
- "speaking and listening" -- a presentation, and listening to everyone else's presentation
Didn't have any of that - poems were covered in lower years, but nothing at GCSE exam level.
English Lit:
- what you said
I don't remember where the Shakespeare and novels went -- probably some in both.
This was the only subject of any English lessons I had, and the only exam I took on the topic was orientated toward what I commented on earlier.
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"You're confusing statistical ranking (the government's policy) with fair grading.
Everyone should be getting a fair education and A-C grades."
Giving everyone a good grade regardless of whether they deserve it is what has led to the mess we have now where the grades are increasingly becoming meaningless and employers and top universities are ignoring them. If you want to go that be nice to everyone and make them feel good about themselves by giving them all good grades liberal lefty route then fine , but do
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.
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People sitting on their backsides doing nothing has little to do with socialism. Socialism is about workers not welfare, welfare is meant to be a safety net to stop people sinking into abject poverty. I'd say the situation we've got is down to two things: the lack of low paid manufacturing jobs which has it's beginnings in Thatcher, and that aspirational culture that says I can be wildly successful without doing any work, which again has its roots in Thatcher but became far worse once the reality TV celebri
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No. If free eBooks are a big part of the sheer numbers, then so be it. Why throw them out of the statistics? If you want to know the revenue from paper books compared with the revenue from eBooks, you are looking at the wrong statistics. And even then there is a problem: You would have to remove the revenue from selling recyclable paper from the paper book sales, because the paper and ink are not part of the eBook sales.
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Except the stat says 'sells' more ebooks than physical, not 'distributes'. Sells implies an exchange took place, not a gift/give away.
I'll take a free ebook on a whim, and might not ever read it. Or I might read part of it and not like it.
Another thing to be careful about is that this is one on-line retailer. B&N, with it's physical stores, would be a much more interesting case if it started selling more digital editions than dead tree.
Re:But how many books are actually read? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sure, more e-books are bought, but how many of those are read?"
You mean people put them on imaginary shelves so that it looks pretty?
Reading is sort of the point with e-books, their value as status symbols is nil, you can't impress people like with leather bound volumes, bought by the yard to decorate your condo.
You can't use them as paper weights nor use them to flatten dried flowers, you can't use them as door stoppers, you can't level old tables with them, you can't hide cash in them nor hollow them out to hide your stash.
I pasted a link below with other stuff you can't do with ebooks.
http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/27/cool-non-literary-uses-for-books/ [neatorama.com]
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"Sure, more e-books are bought, but how many of those are read?"
You mean people put them on imaginary shelves so that it looks pretty?
Reading is sort of the point with e-books, their value as status symbols is nil, you can't impress people like with leather bound volumes, bought by the yard to decorate your condo. You can't use them as paper weights nor use them to flatten dried flowers, you can't use them as door stoppers, you can't level old tables with them, you can't hide cash in them nor hollow them out to hide your stash.
I pasted a link below with other stuff you can't do with ebooks.
http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/27/cool-non-literary-uses-for-books/ [neatorama.com]
You convinced me: unless I can print it, I'm not going to buy an ebook ever.
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My wife has hundreds of classics which she downloaded but has not read. I have downloaded some things on a "free for today" offer, read a page and then just discarded them. I wonder if these are included in the ebook sales. TFA doesn't not say.
TFA: The online retailer said that for every 100 print books bought through its UK site, it sold 112 Kindle books. Free Kindle books were excluded from the calculations and if included would have made the gap even wider, Amazon said.
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eBooks should be a CONVENIENCE format AS WELL as your paper copy.
It should NOT be REPLACING your paper copy.
Anybody who buys an ebook without a paper copy is just a mug and is welcome to jump blindly off the cliff to the CLOUD.
My parents came in with this leaflet about FREE CLOUD from the purchase of a new computer and asked me to install it lol.
FOOLS.
You can pry my paper books from my dead cold hands.
You obviously haven't had a shelf full of books fall on you recently. I had to cut back on book purchases because I didn't have physical space to store them all and I re-read books over and over so I don' get rid of them. I almost never bought hardbound editions for the same reason (plus the expense, of course). So having them in electronic form instead has been a real life-saver.
On the other hand, when I "buy" a book, I expect it to STAY bought. If Amazon or B&N does a "Borders" and goes belly up, I wo
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I personally prefer that paper book in my hands. Nothing quite like the paper, and smell of a good book. The problem of course is the one you already mentioned. The other of course is that ebooks cost more than paperbacks, until that changes I'll just stick with paperbacks. Heck, I've seen hardcovers that cost less than ebooks, and that's saying something.
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On the pricing, if you like the sort of books they sell, you should check out baenebooks.com. Baen is a regular publisher of fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a military bent, which has for over a decade sold all of their books in electronic as well as print form. Single e-books are normally $4-6, with no sales tax or shipping (obviously). They also have a monthly bundle for $18 which includes six full novels, 1-2 of them new releases (usually available a few weeks before the books show up in stores) and t
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You obviously haven't had a shelf full of books fall on you recently. I had to cut back on book purchases because I didn't have physical space to store them all and I re-read books over and over so I don' get rid of them.
Never had that happen. But having moved 9 times since college, it certainly gets old packaging and repackaging and carrying a wall of books. I realized a couple of moves ago that half of my books had been in boxes through several moves, and decided it was time to get rid of them. That was a tough choice, as I hate giving up reading material, and I would have been thrilled if those hundreds of pounds of books could have been condensed into a few weightless magnetic bits on my computer.
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Well, do enlighten all us poor slobs as to what these precious freedoms are that we are giving up, and why we should care about them.