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."
Piracy! (Score:3, Funny)
It's piracy! We need to make reading a felony!
Re:Piracy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the reason I rarely buy e-books: A used paper book is usually cheaper. On Amazon a used book is often only $0.01 (plus $3.99 shipping). When I am done reading it, I drop it off at the local Goodwill, which then sells it on Amazon.
Re:Piracy! (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a book. It doesn't need any of the bling of a 90s web page, in fact most 90s (and 00s) web pages would have been better off without it too. Just a plain text file with minimal formatting, some metadata, and maybe an occasional picture thrown in. Do that and it'll work and look fine. Do you have fine control over appearance? No. The typesetting is done by the device, and that's okay. Very few people will consciously notice the difference between masterful typesetting and that done by some college ha
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When I am done reading it, I drop it off at the local Goodwill, which then sells it on Amazon.
I usually don't sell a book without scanning if first. Just to be sure.
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I bought a dozen or so e-books when I got a Nook a couple of years ago. This looked like the perfect way to carry references on coding and web site development with me, and reduce desk clutter. It has not worked out.
I don't quite know why. Logically the e-reader takes up less space on the desk than 3 or 4 references and I can carry it about more easily, too. The bookmarks should make it at least as easy to find sections when I need them. But in practice the e-reader is harder to use than a pile of books s
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.
Re:Piracy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the reason I rarely buy e-books: A used paper book is usually cheaper. On Amazon a used book is often only $0.01 (plus $3.99 shipping). When I am done reading it, I drop it off at the local Goodwill, which then sells it on Amazon.
For me, it's not price, although I do think that e-books should be priced a lot cheaper because they cost a lot less to produce. No, the main reason is that I know that I'll still have the book I bought when I hit retirement. It's still readable.
With e-books, I know no such thing.
What I do know is that the books I bought in PeanutPress/eReader format (Peanutpress got bought by Palm who sold it to Motricity who sold it to Fictionwise who sold it to Barnes & Noble), I can no longer download or change the lock on. B&N killed it, with no compensation to the customers.
They can't do that with paper books. They're mine, and will be readable in my retirement years too.
Re:Piracy! (Score:4, Informative)
Calibre.
It can change your eBook format from pretty much any format to any other. I buy them, change the to ePub (unencrypted), and I'm good, forever.
Re:Piracy! (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need Calibre to convert it every time you read it. You do it once. Therefore, even if Calibre stops working in the future, that doesn't prevent you from using the books that you've already converted. Hence, "forever".
Ignoring a handful of special metadata files in their own quirky XML format, (DRM-free) EPUB is nothing more than a zipped folder full of HTML files and PNG/GIF/JPG images (and, occasionally, SVG). Given that HTML is now 23 years old and is still rapidly growing in popularity, and that ZIP is even slightly older, and that both are absolutely ubiquitous as technologies go, barring a technology-destroying nuclear holocaust or some similar catastrophe setting us all back to the stone age, I think it's safe to say that with minimal effort, you'll be able to continue reading EPUB books for at least the remainder of your lifetime, and probably for the remainder your grandchildren's lifetimes.
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I thought that it was implied that I meant reading the wrong things. I was half-sort-of-joking, since there was that piracy as a felony story the other day.
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Re:Piracy! (Score:4, Insightful)
And *that* I think is the heart of the issue. Most publishers seem to charge as much or more for the ebook version, despite the fact that the incremental cost of an e-book approaches zero. Lets see some of those cost savings passed on to the consumer, and get rid of the ridiculous DRM that prevents me from actually owning the book, and then lets talk. In the meantime I'll stick to Project Gutenberg and DRM-free niche publishers.
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and get rid of the ridiculous DRM that prevents me from actually owning the book, and then lets talk. In the meantime I'll stick to Project Gutenberg and DRM-free niche publishers.
Remove DRM, organize your library and all for free with Calibre [calibre-ebook.com]
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You are right, I should have just quoted them directly. [curtisagency.com] Forgive me for my cynicism.. the recent news of how Apple and the publishers recently won a consumers' award for fair competition must have slipped my mind.
Definitions (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the word you're looking for is "plateaued". Does no-one do calculus any more?
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And it's not "ebook sales", it should read "ebook rental license" since you don't own the ebook like you do an actual book.
Which probably explains, in large part, why sales are plateauing.
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There are programs out there that help you solve that problem.
Disappearance of E-Ink (Score:5, Insightful)
Truth is, the one-trick pony feels much better on the eyes after reading for any extended amount of time. Staring at a backlit LCD just burns out your retinas, and changes reading from a relaxing experience to a tolerable situation.
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Not to mention that the amazing battery life is something that I really enjoy from e-ink devices. I truly believe that with e-ink devices we are facing the situation of the very good light bulb, it became so good that afterwards nobody wanted to replace it, so the factory had to shut down.
Re:Disappearance of E-Ink (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just illustrated Edgar Rice Burroughs books off course!
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It'll normalize when the tablet fad is over. Smartphones are better tablets than tablets are.
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No in a hundred years. I tried reading a book on my phone, and it was a miserable experience. I see people on the bus doing it, but having to scroll constantly is very annoying. I like the form factor of the Nexus 7, if I could make it my phone and just use the bluetooth headset I'd be a happy camper.
There are readers that have the option to automatically scroll for you. If you can read an entire line without moving your eyes and have it scroll at the right speed you can speed read a book with less eye movement.
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If all you're reading is novels, sure...
Myself, I prefer to read textbooks. Many of these even utilize color diagrams
Of course, I realize I'm probably not within a sigma of typical e-ink readers manufacturers target demographic.
Give me a color ereader with a form factor large enough to read academic material (roughly letter or A4 size) without scrolling or panning that doesn't feel like I'm reading while staring into a flashlight while I'm holding it 12 inches from my face, and with a fast enough u
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There are readers that have the option to automatically scroll for you. If you can read an entire line without moving your eyes and have it scroll at the right speed you can speed read a book with less eye movement.
You may even be able to read one handed though I'd suggest that you refrain from doing so while on a public bus.
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I read my Kindle Books on my iPhone 4, I don't find it a miserable experience at all.
Jason.
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It'll normalize when the tablet fad is over. Smartphones are better tablets than tablets are.
I dunno, man - if I'm going to bother trying to read a document on a mobile device, I find it much easier to do with the Nexus 7 than my (4.5" screen) Droid X.
Maybe once they figure out the whole 'holographic screen projection' thing, or flexible OLEDs get to a low enough price point that it makes sense to build phones around them...
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As for the Kindle Paperwhite....I read that there is little difference between reflected light (off a page) and one coming from behind a page like paper white. Of course, you can do something like not have enough ambient lighting and it would be like staring at a (low powered) light bulb in a dark room, but barring that, why would there be eyestrain and headaches? Of course, there's no constant refresh rates of the text like a LCD screen, except for the backlights which all CFL/LED lighting is subject to.
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The real reason to me to get a kindle over a table for reading is simply the weight difference. The tablets I held would be uncomfortable compared to a 6" kindle which easily weighs the same as or less than a fiction paperback.
Exactly. I recently picked up a Nook HD after B&N slashed the price. It is much heavier than my 2nd gen Kindle. So while the Nook displays color and updates the screen much faster, it is more wearying to hold for extended periods and is harder on my eyes than the Kindle for extended periods of time, and is almost unusable outside in the sun. The upside of the Nook is that I can view PDFs and web pages in a reasonable fashion, where those tasks are just painful on the Kindle.
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The upside of the Nook is that I can view PDFs and web pages in a reasonable fashion, where those tasks are just painful on the Kindle.
Plus, considering the weight, it makes a much better cudgel than the Kindle. You know - just in case.
Re:Disappearance of E-Ink (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Disappearance of E-Ink (Score:4, Insightful)
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Am I the only one who reads mostly on a phone, in night mode (even in daylight)? Good contrast without that feeling of having a flashlight shone in your eyes, hardly any weight to support with your hands, and nothing else to carry around. To me, this is the iPod for books.
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Apple devices auto adjust to ambient light. Works great as long as the ambient light isn't changing too much but then that's going to be annoying no matter what.
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You can adjust the brightness of the Kindle Paperwhite.
e-readers, Paperwhite and Tablets (Score:3)
I'll actually start with the Paperwhite, considering I own one. I rarely use the backlight feature and when I do, rarely at full. In daylight and full sunlight, it's completely unneeded and reading is awesome. Indoors as long as you have decent lighting, still not needed - same as a book. If it's dimmer, adding a little backlight can be nice just to get greater contrast, but it does make my eyes tired more quickly. However, whether that's the backlight, the general lack of ambient light, or the fact th
Re:Disappearance of E-Ink (Score:5, Informative)
Even the new Kindle Paperwhite is meant to be used with a backlight, increasing the likelihood of headaches and eyestrain.
Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where people just aren't informed enough
...for example, they think that the Kindle Paperwhite is backlit.
It's sidelit. That means the light comes from the front, diffused across the screen via a fiber optic mesh, reflects on the screen, and then back at you.
It doesn't have any of the problems that backlit devices do, and is extremely similar to reading with a booklight--except for the not having to carry a booklight part.
Nook Glow is the same basic tech.
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The paperwhite with backlight on is only for reading in a situation with dim lighting.
Which is has always been an eye-strainer, even with conventional books.
At least with the backlight, you have the option to increase lighting a bit. Not as comfortable as natural lighting, but better than reading a book with little light.
However, when there is ambient light, the backlighting of the paperwhite adds almost nothing.It looks exactly the same on a sunny day outside, sitting in the shades, with backlight on 100%
Re:Disappearance of E-Ink (Score:4, Funny)
No, the Paperwhite readers (and Kobo Glo) use frontlighting not backlighting. Much less eye-strain, and one research study suggests less disruptive to sleep when used in the evening.
My Kindle Paperwhite is much less disruptive to sleep than my iPad, but it has nothing to do with the lighting. It has to do with the weight. The iPad is heavy enough that falling asleep and dropping it on my face hurts enough to wake me up. The Kindle is light enough that I can take one to the face and keep sleeping.
Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they're charging the same price as a paperback, or hardcover, sometimes even more.
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I don't find that to be the case - at least with nook. Nooks are almost always cheaper than hardcover and sometimes cheaper than paperbacks. They also sometimes have sales on nooks but not on the paper version.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Informative)
Because they're charging the same price as a paperback, or hardcover, sometimes even more.
And eBooks typically cost more than twice the price of used paperbacks. And I can give the paperback to someone else after I'm done or sell it again for a couple dollars so it's even cheaper.
I really like my Kindle (the paperwhite with backlight is great for reading in bed without disturbing my partner - better than the clip-on book light) and prefer reading on the Kindle over reading paper books, but not so much that i'll pay twice what it costs to have a used book delivered to my door. My kindle to paper book ratio is about 3:1 -- lately I've only been buying Kindle books when I travel.
I know the publishing industry says they can't sell eBooks any cheaper, so they will continue to get very little money from me as I stick with used books.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Informative)
Yup. They are greedy; they want all that sweet extra crash - and despite the attempts of people to mau mau the numbers to convince the naive that ebooks cost as much for the producers as paper books, it's simply not true. The fact they don't have to factor in the risk cost of returns alone makes them vastly cheaper, even before considering materials costs and storage and transportation costs.
I'm simply not going to pay hardback prices for an ebook, and I suspect there are plenty of others who feel the same way.
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$1 per book once it hits paperback, and you'll see ebooks rocket, ereaders become the next big thing, and therefore, people will be lapping up cheap content. Spending $15 on a book that's available for less in a B&M store puts people off. Maybe a buck is too low, perhaps $3 will be a sweet spot. There's too much shit available from self-published wannabies right now. Proper books will still sell on paper, a lot of us prefer the media, but there's a whole planet of people that will buy books. Once they'v
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.
Same price ? (Score:5, Insightful)
You pay the same price, but then you can't lend them easily to your friends or resell them, you can't rent them from the local library, depending on the device used, annotating or marking the pages is not effective and can't easily be shared between two people reading the same book at the same time (keep slowly browsing through to get to the current page), and you need to have that device charged up (more or less a problem depending on the device type). Beside having it instantly and the lighting on the kindle paperwhite / kobo glow for night reading, there's not much to like :(
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keep slowly browsing through to get to the current page
I don't know of any ebook solution that doesn't have a "goto location" function. The kindle's even offer page numbers that match those in the hard copies.
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It's a pro/con balance thing. I can read a new release without lugging around a hardcover. I can finish one book and immediately switch to the next without having to carry two books on the train - or worse several books when flying for 15+hours. I can bookmark a book on one device and pick it up on another (like my phone). I can instantly get more obscure titles that aren't in store without having to have it shipped.
The biggest downside is that right now you can't read them during take off and landing.
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What are you talking about?
The ebooks are cheaper, though not nearly as cheap as they should be, but still cheaper. There are also countless books in the public domain that you can get for free.
You can borrow ebooks from the library, you can annotate and bookmark, you can share annotations, and some can go weeks without a recharge.
What is there to like? I like being able to carry a library wherever I go. I have over a dozen tech manuals that are very awkward to carry with me but with a kindle, tablet, or sm
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There are also countless books in the public domain that you can get for free.
and
You can borrow ebooks from the library,
That and the occasional free book from Amazon constitutes about 99% of the reading done on our Kindle. I don't know if other people are as cheap as me, but I sure can see how once you find Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] you might purchase a lot less at $15/pop.
The Sonny Bono effect (Score:2)
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LOL, true - but so far I'm enjoying catching up on some classics. The head of our English department in high school had a very unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare, accounting for about 50% of the curriculum. As a result, I missed out on a lot of staples. I'm currently making my way through the complete works of Mark Twain. :)
(Innocents Abroad is a hoot... the man had a gift for a good insult.)
William Shakespeare and one's anglophone card (Score:3)
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There is no DRM on the books I bought so far.
I can lend them whoever I want.
But I sure as hell won't lend them my Kindle. They got to bring their own.
Oh and my local library is lending out ebooks. Which you have to return. I still don't understand how that is supposed to work, because there is no DRM on those books either.
But yes, lending ebooks is a thing apparently.
"KindleNook Writer" by the Beatles (Score:2)
As prices have risen, quite frankly, I might as well order a paperback. Much nicer to hold and read.
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Too many devices (Score:2)
More buck for the bang? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps it may have to do something with the price fixing scandal?
(I love it when publishers tell the public that e-books can't get cheaper because paper isn't actually that much of an expense and people need to get paid for the work, while the authors and translators are told in private that they can't get paid more because "paper and the printer shop costs too much".)
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There are other expenses besides printing:
shipping, warehousing,
editing, layout, cover design
promotional expenses, incentives,
etc...
Re:More buck for the bang? (Score:5, Informative)
From http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html [bookfinder.com] (Slightly old)...
Based on a list price of $27.95
- $3.55 - Pre-preduction - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
- $2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
- $2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
- $2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
- $4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Subtract the author's agent fees and self-employment taxes from that, too.
- $12.58 - profit for the retailer.
In the case of an ebook, you're removing the $2.83 in printing.
You might be removing some of the wholesaling cost, but you might be using Ingram to do your wholesaling if you're a big company. If you're self-publishing, you might be using something like BookBaby or Smashwords. Yes, you can go to KDP and register your own book yourself, but if you're selling in multiple places or selling multiple books, you're going to use a middle-man to handle cataloging, recordkeeping, and listing things in multiple places. If it's more than $2.80 in headaches, you use a distributor.
Marketing, pre-production, royalties all don't change. (Or they get squeezed, and you get exactly what's going on right now, which is authors complaining "they don't pay us or market us or do a good job editing us like the good old days.")
As for that $12.58 of supposed profit, here's the interesting thing - Amazon doesn't sell books at list price. John Grisham's new book, The Racketeer, is an example. List price: $28.95. Yours for only $19.81 in paper.
I'm not saying that ebook prices should be equal to the price of a printed book, but removing the printing doesn't suddenly make a book cost a dollar or even five dollars.
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Eventually you can reduce or even eliminate more of the overhead. It used to be that writers needed publishing companies to get their books to the public. But now that is no longer true with the internet and ebooks you can sell your own books and keep all of the profit. I think that electronic media is going to be more and more popular for music and books as people see the benefits in convenience. Unlike music there's going to be the issue of providing a format as easy on the eyes as paper, but it gets bett
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Let's assume that the initial print run is 5000 (apparently not atypical in the US for hardcovers: http://www.ian-irvine.com/publishing.html [ian-irvine.com], see "Lesson 11"). That $3.55 for pre-production comes to almost $18,000. Given how poorly edited most books are, and the degree to which layout is automated (I've created both e-books and print books myself, with purely open source tools, and can script the whole process so a monkey could do the work with a push-button) that seems like a huge amount of money.
I'm not
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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 d
You can't build a library with an e-reader (Score:3)
Forgoing the DRM on music in Itunes did not kill the music industry, but that's what all the book publishers act like.
So all we're offered is lock-in, can't loan to friends, etc.
I don't even enjoy owning physical copies of anything, but with the digital copies I'm allowed to own outright and with as I please in private, I tend to buy (music), with the digital copies where they take every DRM step (movies) or go above that and lock me in (amazon, ebooks), I tend to either rent (netflix), get the physical copy and rip (DVDs), or borrow (Amazon Once a month or whatever library).
Price. (Score:2)
6. E-book prices have not fallen the way many expected. There’s not a big price difference between an e-book and a paperback.
THIS.
Also, perhaps this reflects a plateau in the number of people willing to invest in tablets or ebook readers? Do these numbers correspond to tablet sales, for example?
Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Something not mentioned was Apple pushing the price of ebooks up often by 25%. In general the main reason I haven't switched is that from Amazon used I frequently can get print books much cheaper than the corresponding ebooks. At the time ebooks were surging ebook prices were crashing and there was a huge difference between the ebook and the printed book price. Perhaps, not unreasonably, many people prefer printed books and given a high ebook price there weren't be a cut over.
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More than that, they were in the news for having done so, which painted the ebook market as a crooked game. I'm not surprised it suppressed sales.
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: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.
eBooks are an easy sell to the uninformed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:eBooks are an easy sell to the uninformed (Score:4, Informative)
[[Citation Needed.]] Seriously, every reputable analysis I've ever seen (like this one [bookfinder.com] from Money magazine) places that figure much lower.
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Sharing, pricing, archiving and DRM... (Score:2)
I would suspect that it's more a case of users at the front end of the purchase curve tailing off after too many cases of "oops, I can't download it again because the publisher pulled it", crap I can't easily share it with a friend (who probably also has a different brand reader, even if their own reader supports lending), or even the... loss of the fun of "gee let's stare at the shelf and stare at my books"... Let's not forget the fact that there's no discount that one would expect in an electronic book si
too many still not available in ebook format (Score:2)
Only about half of the books I buy are even available in ebook format, and the price isn't always enough less to offset the fact that they have no resale value.
The convenience factor is only an influencing one if you read on the go a lot, which I generally do not. YMMV, of course.
If I could convert my entire library (several thousand books) to ebook format for no or VERY minimal cost, I'd probably do it, but that's probably what it would take.
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The biggest advantage of eBooks is portability. Where my phone goes, so does my book collection. When on a vacation (I RV a lot [1]), the Nook HD sees a lot of use.
Yeah, I'm thinking about getting an old Airstream and fixing it up for putting on a cheap plot of vacation land somewhere on the Washington coast, and if that happens, I'm quite sure I'd be doing more e-booking than I do now.
Most of the ebooks I buy are from new authors who don't have print versions of their books yet, and their ebooks are very fairly priced by comparison.
Take a LOSS? A LOSS on eBooks? (Score:2)
The cost of an ebook is well over 99% pure profit for someone after the first 10000-20000 sales at $10 a book. (you have sunk costs of editors, proof readers, the writer, person who listed the book and maintained its entry on amazon.)
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Unfortunately, since most books are selling less ~3,000 copies, almost very few books, e-book or otherwise, make a profit.
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I read that after I posted. It said the average book made less than $300.
Of course "average" is always a danger. We can't guarantee a profit to books as some (many) (most?) are probably not that good. So you have a lot of zeros in there from books which are essentially vanity efforts.
Tablet Sales (Score:2)
Price Fixing Killed E-Books (Score:2)
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Who in their right mind pays the same amount of money for an e-book that they do for a paperback? The rich, and the stupid. Most others know they are being ripped-off.
The rich, the stupid, and those who have boxes and boxes full of books that just take up expensive space. If I buy an ebook, I buy it, I read it, and I keep it. If I buy a paper book today, I buy it, I read it, and it goes to the charity shop.
Audible Rocks (Score:2)
But I listen to about 2-3 great books a month with audible.com. Expensive... and worth it.
rate of growth (Score:2)
Amazon always has free books "on sale" (Score:2)
I have a huge backlog of reading in front of me
Dozens of free books every day with some really good ones in there
The limiting factor is time, not money (Score:3)
Almost everyone I know with an e-book reader went nuts buying cheap books until they had a few hundred book in the unread pile. Unfortunately, they've got adult jobs, and thus limited time to read. Their book buying went from 10 times normal rate back down to the normal rate.
I think a lot of people in the industry were hoping that revenue per reader was going to stay constant, even if the readers were buying 5 times as many books at 1/5 the price. Now reality is sinking in. With cheap e-books, people *might* buy 50% more books, which is still a huge decrease in industry income. This is not a merry time to be a publisher, an author, or to have anything to do with the book industry.
However, once the publishers are gone, Amazon should do very well in the self-published market. Not with readers, of course - who has time to sift through hundreds of books to find the odd readable one. But with desperate authors who want to get promoted. I figure $25K to get a book to show up decently in the Amazon listings is going to make a lot more revenue than Amazon did from selling books.
It'll just suck if you want to read anything.
The Economy Sucks (Score:2)
Disposable income is less, so 'luxuries' get pushed down the list.
Pretty simple.
I wanted to read an old scifi again. 6 bucks. (Score:2)
6 bucks if I buy the ebook now.
The paperback was 3.50 at the time it was released.
They better rebuild all those used bookstores because we are going to need them. Heck, even
a used bookstore tried to sell the used paperback for more than the face value.
Gimme a break.
Oh, and my nook read is key bouncing me all over (Score:2)
The dang books. So much for convenient when it skips 20 pages somewhere else.
Pricing matters... (Score:2)
I have certainly bought ebooks.
But... I went to look for a book which has been out for a few years. I could buy a paperback for $8 if I wanted to drive somewhere. Or... I could buy an ebook for $12.
That's gonna cut back on sales a fair bit.
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I'm not sure e-books are the venue to contest the fundamental validity of economic accelerationism.
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An eBook is available in unlimited supplies, but we still have a limited population. That's what I hate about economists and other fields who compute numbers like the real world has no limits, they're completely out of their minds and disconnected from reality.
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I'd buy more of their stuff if I had infinite money. Unfortunately, the Fed isn't pumping cash into my bank account...
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It depends on how old the title is. If you are talking public domain then you have thousands available on Project Gutenberg which you can read on your reader.
And I guess you get your internet connection free since you don't believe in paying for non-durable goods.
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And I guess you get your internet connection free since you don't believe in paying for non-durable goods.
OP never said they "didn't believe in paying for non-durable goods," they said, "when there is absolutely no price benefit, why buy a non durable good?"
Completely different, and a sentiment I agree with.
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Book clubs become dens of iniquity full of felons
All the best book clubs already were that.
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From your link:
You can lend a Kindle book to another reader for up to 14 days.
and
A book can only be loaned one time. Magazines and newspapers are currently not available for lending.
Only being able to loan a book to 1 person, EVER, and only for 2 weeks, doesn't really qualify as "loanable." At least in the sense OP is talking about.
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Those distracting kittens would be a problem if Bush had let Cheney finish the job.