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Books Businesses

Books Are Physically Changing Because of Inflation (economist.com) 93

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Rising paper prices are forcing publishers to change. Economist: Publishing can, then, find the paper for the things it wants to print, even in times of scarcity. The industry is currently experiencing another period of shortage, and war is once again a cause (along with the pandemic). In the past 12 months the cost of paper used by British book publishers has risen by 70%. Supplies are erratic as well as expensive: paper mills have taken to switching off on days when electricity is too pricey. The card used in hardback covers has at times been all but unobtainable. The entire trade is in trouble. Not every author is affected: a new thriller by Robert Galbraith, better known as J.K. Rowling, is a 1,024-page whopper -- and this week reached the top of the bestseller lists in Britain. But other books are having to change a bit. Pick up a new release in a bookshop and if it is from a smaller publisher (for they are more affected by price rises) you may find yourself holding a product that, as wartime books did, bears the mark of its time.

Blow on its pages and they might lift and fall differently: cheaper, lighter paper is being used in some books. Peer closely at its print and you might notice that the letters jostle more closely together: some cost-conscious publishers are starting to shrink the white space between characters. The text might run closer to the edges of pages, too: the margins of publishing are shrinking, in every sense. Changes of this sort can cause anguish to publishers. A book is not merely words on a page, says Ivan O'Brien, head of The O'Brien Press in Ireland, but should appeal "to every single sense." The pleasure of a book that feels right in the hand -- not too light or too heavy; pages creamy; fonts beetle-black -- is something that publishers strive to preserve. [...] For at the heart of the publishing industry lies an unsayable truth: most people can't write and most books are very bad. Readers who struggle with a volume often assume that the fault is theirs. Reviewers, who read many more books, know it is not.
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Books Are Physically Changing Because of Inflation More

Books Are Physically Changing Because of Inflation

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  • Electronic books (Score:3, Interesting)

    by p51d007 ( 656414 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @06:25PM (#62875833)
    My late mother was a HUGE book reader. When my parents moved in 2000 to another town, she donated a lot of her hard cover books to a local library. 20 years later, they moved back to the first city they lived in, and she donated another bunch of books. Around 2010 we finally got her to use a Kindle after begging her to try it. When she passed away in 2020, I was helping clean out and her kindle had over 300 books, magazines, newspapers. She wouldn't go anywhere without it. She LOVED it more than a book because she could increase the size of the fonts making it easier to read, not have to lug around books/magazines etc. Maybe one day paper books will start to decrease.

    • E text books same price + DRM so don't do that! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @06:35PM (#62875857)

      E text books same price + DRM so don't do that!

      • The price of a book isn't just in the money you part with, it's in how you can enjoy it, and what you do with it. ebooks don't take up loads of shelf space, and if you're out and about they are lighter than a normal book and if you're out and about for longer than a day or two they are far more wieldy than taking several novels with you.

        Other than maybe giving a shit about DRM (most people don't), the fact ebooks are the same price as a real book is not seen as a negative.

      • I did, I do, I will.
    • Unfortunately thanks to how publishers have rigged ebook sales, they often charge more for the ebook than for the paperbacks now. I am quite certain that publishers, like every other industry these days, is whining woe is me as they pack away record profits.

    • Re:Electronic books (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @11:30PM (#62876359)

      Same experience here, when I retired and we sold the city house to move to the smaller mountain condo. I didn't have room for my big collection of books, so I went ebook right then and never bought a physical book again. My reading experience is actually better on an iPad than the printed page ever was, and I don't have to search for the right light.

      As a bonus, I do more reading than ever before because ebooks are easier to acquire, including the ones I borrow from the library with Libby, than print.

      • And each and every single one of those "books" can be silently altered, censored, or removed at a moment's notice by the multi billion dollar evil corporation controlling your device. To say nothing of all the books you'll never be allowed to see or read in the first place.

        By the way you'll be getting a visit from the FBI soon to sign some forms waiving all of your enumerated rights, since those same corporations reported your reading habits to the government and an unelected anonymous administrative agency

        • And each and every single one of those "books" can be silently altered, censored, or removed at a moment's notice by the multi billion dollar evil corporation controlling your device. To say nothing of all the books you'll never be allowed to see or read in the first place.

          I just checked my go-to Evil Corporation and yes, you can get what is obviously your favorite work, the Unabomber manifesto, in Kindle format, and for half the price of the paperback. No tree would be harmed by this action.

          • The Unabomber was wrong about whether bombing people would improve anything, but he wasn't wrong about the way technology is being used being harmful to humankind, and then some...

        • And here is the cat and mouse game that most people aren't willing to play. Personal privacy and rights vs the big bad men. God fucking dammit, can't the human race do anything right?

          It should be

          (DRM free) E-book --} reader , and nothing else.

  • Maybe if the publishers hadn't been so greedy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SoCalChris ( 573049 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @06:40PM (#62875869) Journal

    Maybe if the publishers hadn't spent the last 20 years shitting all over e-books, they wouldn't be in this predicament. Sure, there's a lot of people who prefer a physical book, but there's a lot of people who don't care one way or another, but just don't generally buy the e-books because they're more expensive and almost always poorly edited for accuracy. I can't tell you how many e-books I've had that was obviously a poorly scanned copy, with numerous OCR errors that affected the reading of the book. And the publishers have the nerve to ask for the same price for that as one that they've had to print, store, ship, and place on a store shelf somewhere.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 )

      I can't tell you how many e-books I've had that was obviously a poorly scanned copy, with numerous OCR errors that affected the reading of the book. And the publishers have the nerve to ask for the same price for that as one that they've had to print, store, ship, and place on a store shelf somewhere.

      So, high-speed OCR hardware is free? Servers, software, storage, high-speed networking and subsequent maintenance staff to keep it all running, along with handling or paying someone for payment processing and in some cases writing some level of document security to avoid theft, all comes at a the bargain price of $39.99/month?

      Not quite sure how you've overlooked basically all costs found in the digital realm when comparing price between mediums. Hell, according to your testimony they can't even afford e-p

      • So, high-speed OCR hardware is free?

        What the hell are you smoking? Why should they even be OCR'd in the first place? The publisher is publishing the book. They're typesetting the book from copy. Why are they not producing an epub and pdf at the same time, even if they are not releasing them? Hell, just do a bad job and print them to PDF the same way they're printed in the book, it's better than nothing.

        • So, high-speed OCR hardware is free?

          What the hell are you smoking? Why should they even be OCR'd in the first place? The publisher is publishing the book. They're typesetting the book from copy. Why are they not producing an epub and pdf at the same time, even if they are not releasing them? Hell, just do a bad job and print them to PDF the same way they're printed in the book, it's better than nothing.

          Well, you've somewhat dismissed a single aspect of digital book publishing.

          Now dismiss the rest. IT, isn't free.

          • I've done DTP, layout, typesetting... I know what goes into doing those things well. I'm saying that even doing them poorly would be better than a bad scan.

          • IT, isn't free.

            Compared to producing products it really really is. Bonus points for your "IT" being simple enough that it was so cheap you used to get a free cellular connection with your ebook reader.

            We're not talking about streaming 4K here. The cost of IT is pathetically insignificant. I'm sorry if you work in IT but the reality is that you're not that important in the ebook world.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Book publishers business model is weird. It recently came out in a lawsuit that 50% of the books major publishers put out sell less than 12 copies.

      Think about that. Someone had to write those books, someone had to edit them, another person had to do typesetting, and then they had to program the machine that prints and binds the books. For less than 12 copies sold. They probably gave away more free copies to reviewers and prestige libraries than they got paid for.

      Makes me wonder what the ratio is like for se

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        It was a little more complicated than "half sell no more than 12 copies" but yeah, the market is skewed mostly to one end. Another problem is that they'll pay a midlist author (decent seller) a $5000 advance that may be all the money they see for half a year's work, but several million dollars to some celeb who then gives out a few thousand copies on the rubber chicken circuit, but sells effectively zero copies otherwise -- someone pointed out that this is just Big Publishing's version of money laundering.

        M

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      The problem is the majority of cost in a book isn't in the deadtree. The deadtree format is only around 10% of the full retail price of the book. Everything else goes to the author, the artists, the editors, the typesetter, and the myriad of other work that goes into a book, and the majority goes into the distributor and retailer cuts.

      Now, deadtree books have a problem because they occupy physical space, and both distributors and retailers are motivated to move that content out the door to make room for new

  • Naw, use ebooks. Prices for that may eventually go up for that (because of the high cost of marketing), but for now ebook prices compare very favorably to printed books. (BTW, I run an ebook publishing press)

    Also, ebooks are always being discounted. Just subscribe to an ebook daily newsletter like Bookbub, Freebooksy, Bargainbooksy, Fussy Librarian. (There are dozens others). Better yet, if you like a publisher, subscribe to one of their newsletters.

    I use ereaderiq, a price alert service for Amazon prices.

  • Happens every downturn, not just this one. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @06:45PM (#62875891)

    Now -- shrinkflation, less product for same (or more) price

    2008 -- same. What.. none of you noticed that the slipcovers for DVD sets got thinner? Or vanished altogether? Or the book paper suddenly got shittier?

    1979? Same..

    73? Same.... I noticed even as a 4 year old back then things got really shitty when the economy would struggle. Hell, my current house is vintage '73.. and I can tell soooo many corners were cut. Wires not secured to joists, just casually thrown over them. etc.

    Slow news day, folks?

    This isnt a new thing. One more thing, last year, that propelled me to getting an ipad (12.9 inch) for sheetmusic, and then I realized it's also an outstanding reader for books. So far I have pdfs (no drm) apple books (who cares about drm) and kindle (why won't you sync with my other itoys, you retarded POS)

    If I care enough about a book to double-dip, I may seek it out on paper.. but at my age, I've given up on paper, to a large degree thanks to the ipad + pencil. It works like I do. It can even search and find words in my handwriting -- which is a bit like a seismograph. I was taught Palmer Method cursive but I never bothered with making it pretty. the Notes app buit-in into ios/ipad os finds whatever it is im' looking for. Neat. I couldn't search my paper notebooks so I would bold key things and just rapidly flip by 'til I found ($thing)

    The real question is why we keep getting into these bad times. You'd think we'd learn from our past mistakes, but no... we (as in all of us, world-wide) keep doubling-down on what patently doesn't work.

    Fix it. Then worry about the shit paper publishers are using and how much less product you're getting. Today I got sushi from a usual source.. instead of 9 pieces of nigiri, it was just 6.. for the same price.. and the pieces are smaller. Hail Progress!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.

    • "Civilized Society" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
      My current house is vintage '73.

      So civilized society ended when your house was built?
      How did 1 house affect all of society! [sarcasm]

    • The real question is why we keep getting into these bad times. You'd think we'd learn from our past mistakes, but no... we (as in all of us, world-wide) keep doubling-down on what patently doesn't work.

      One would think that citizens might get a clue as to what causes this when they vote for Popular instead of Competent. The old saying about the definition of insanity comes to mind, for good reason.

      Fix it. Then worry about the shit paper publishers are using and how much less product you're getting. Today I got sushi from a usual source.. instead of 9 pieces of nigiri, it was just 6.. for the same price.. and the pieces are smaller. Hail Progress!

      You want 9 pieces of nigiri again? Simple answer is to stop buying and settling for 6. Maybe fellow customers will wise up and do the same. Supply and Demand 101. Stop the insanity.

      • You want 9 pieces of nigiri again? Simple answer is to stop buying and settling for 6.

        Make Sushi Numerous Again! You want 9 pieces of nigiri? Crack down on unsustainable fishing practices, so that there are fish to catch. Or accept that the pieces are going to shrink, because without profit there's no reason for a business to exist. Oh yeah, and we have to solve this carbon problem too, because oceanic acidification is also destroying the ocean's ability to produce those fish anyway.

        You know what we oughta do for salmon? Ban fishing outright and just pick up the fish out of the rivers. The n

        • ...California for example used to have it all mapped out where different tribes picked up fish from different parts of the river, could only take so much and so on, so everyone got some and it was fully sustainable. Ensuring that as many fish as possible spawn actually means more salmon for everyone...

          Having more or enough salmon for everyone, is one thing.

          Ensuring an entire generation of 4th-grade yuppie-fuck children are properly spoiled with a well-stocked bento box lunch every day, isn't exactly a sustainability problem we should give a shit about.

          • Ensuring an entire generation of 4th-grade yuppie-fuck children are properly spoiled with a well-stocked bento box lunch every day, isn't exactly a sustainability problem we should give a shit about.

            I'm really not sure where you were going with that untethered microrant, but I can take comfort in knowing that you don't know either.

  • Evolution of paper and printing (Score:5, Informative)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @06:53PM (#62875903)

    I recommend this NOVA episode from Sept 2020 that re-aired the other night, A to Z: How Writing Changed the World [pbs.org] (link includes a transcript of the episode):

    Just as writing changed the course of human history, the evolution of paper and printing revolutionized the spread of information. While the invention of paper boosted Chinese and Islamic societies, the simple fact that the Latin alphabet could be printed using a small number of discrete, repetitive symbols helped popularize moveable type, handing Europe a crucial advantage at the beginning of the Renaissance. The printing press itself kicked off the scientific revolution that fast-tracked us to the current digital age.

    It discusses the evolution of different types of paper (including papyrus and parchment), how easy/economical it was to produce, how easy/difficult it was to use (store and write on) and how that helped / hindered the spread of information in various societies/cultures like Egypt, Greek/Roman era, China, the Islamic Empire and Medieval Europe.

  • internet has destroyed ability to read books (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RemindMeLater ( 7146661 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @07:33PM (#62875955)
    seriously, trying to get lost in a book is harder and harder as years of scanning terminal output quickly for a keyword or scrolling social media or just fucking everything in the internet age. Patiently reading a sentence at a time can feel like walking in shackles.

    Readers who struggle with a volume often assume that the fault is theirs

    I mean it just might be. How many 14 year olds are capable of reading the Lord of the Rings anymore?

    • How many 14 year olds are capable of reading the Lord of the Rings anymore?

      Probably most of them. After all, it's only a few paragraphs [box3.net].

    • Re:internet has destroyed ability to read books (Score:4)

      by narcc ( 412956 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @02:22AM (#62876575) Journal

      How many 14 year olds are capable of reading the Lord of the Rings anymore?

      Most of them? They're children's books, after all. A friend of mine was absolutely obsessed with those books when we were kids. I even remember him trying to get me to read The Silmarillion in 6th or 7th grade. I'm pretty sure the average 14-year-old can handle it.

      Children are a lot more capable than you think. I remember most of my 3rd grade class had independently read or was reading through the Chronicles of Narnia. When this fact was discovered, a couple of my more ambitious classmates took it upon themselves to put together a play, which the class later performed, based on what was the third book.

      People have been complaining about kids for thousands of years. It's always been overblown.

      "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."

      —Socrates

      • People have been complaining about kids for thousands of years.

        I am not "complaining about kids." I think you're massively overlooking what the effects are of thousands of hours a year spent on phones where your attention is only held for seconds at a time. Even one of the founders of facebook commented once "god knows what it's doing to our children's brains." Suicide, depression, anxiety, all that went way up with the advent of social media.

      • People probably have been complaining about kids for thousands of years, but that particular quote is only about 100 years old. It's obviously way out of character for Socrates too.

  • Exceptions (Score:5, Funny)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday September 12, 2022 @07:40PM (#62875965)

    There are always exceptions.
    My old astrophysics textbook had to add a new chapter due to inflation.

  • "Blow on its pages and they might lift and fall differently: cheaper, lighter paper is being used in some books. "

    Just blew light a madman on my kindle, but I can't see the difference.

    Give up dead trees for good, I thought we'd be striving for a paper-less society.

    • My ten year old kindle is great but my paper books don't need the power to be working, and don't depend on an appliance with perhaps 12 year lifespan. If you're depending on your ability to back up your backs to another media you might be screwed down the road too.

      • Paper books are great, but they take up a vast amount of space, are fragile and flammable, and readily infested with bugs.

        My e-Library takes up utterly minimal space and can be read at any time, on any of a computer, tablet, or cell phone, wherever I am.

        • "Paper books are great, but they take up a vast amount of space, are fragile and flammable, and readily infested with bugs."

          And you never know how many bathrooms that book 'visited' nor how many thumbs were licked in those bathrooms to turn a page.

          In a Pandemic I wouldn't touch a book with a ten-foot pole.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        We should be careful about locking up so much of our cultural output in digital forms without an analog backup. Preserving digital works takes real effort. Draconian DRM schemes and absurd copyright terms mean that we are going to lose a lot more than we'd like.

        I tell people that their children will find two things in their attic: Their photo album and the computer. They'll only be able to look at the pictures stored in one of them. This is to encourage them to print out important photos. We face the

        • "We should be careful about locking up so much of our cultural output in digital forms without an analog backup."

          We have 3D printers for clay nowadays, they can not only make vases, they can also be used to create clay-tablet copies of every book.
          And as we know, these last thousands of years.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by narcc ( 412956 )

            We call that "chronological snobbery" and it's an idiotic way of thinking. Just because something is new does not in anyway make it better than something old. Just because something is old does not mean it's useless.

            I can't tell you how many people have lost beloved family photos because they believed myth that "the internet never forgets" and trusted their photos to Facebook instead of paying a couple bucks to have them printed. But newer is better, right? Printed photos are as outdated as clay tablets.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

          I tell people that their children will find two things in their attic: Their photo album and the computer. They'll only be able to look at the pictures stored in one of them.

          I love this. I've had a hard time getting people to understand why digital everything -- especially digital _borrowing_ instead of ownership -- is not a panacea and has problems, but there's usually a gap in them really getting it (it works great for me _now_, so what's the problem?). Framing it like that is a great way to break through the temporal blinders most people wear.

      • "My ten year old kindle is great but my paper books don't need the power to be working, "

        My 78 large books on my kindle don't need a power-lifter to schlepp around.

        " If you're depending on your ability to back up your backs to another media you might be screwed down the road too."

        You need to get a copy of CALIBRE.
        https://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com]

        • Our kindles assume a working power and information infrastructure and also themselves will fail after about a decade

          I use calibre for some things but that doesn't change the point your e-book backups can become useless in the future

          • "I use calibre for some things but that doesn't change the point your e-book backups can become useless in the future"

            It's the way of the world, lost knowledge.

            We have orders for materials, bills and other trivial documents from thousands of years ago but the important stuff is gone.
            Many books are lost because of acid paper or ink destroying them.
            The Rosetta stone has pieces missing from it.

            It's always going to be that way.

            • but I am speaking of knowledge unnecessarily lost, in the span of a lifetime.

              We have scrolls on parchment and papyrus over 2200 years old, not sure you have a point. With proper storage, barring disasters, they can last and most in the past didn't have proper storage.

              Most books are printed on acid-free paper, I have books from fifty to over a hundred years old that are doing quite well.

  • Sounds good to me (Score:3)

    by pavon ( 30274 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @01:24AM (#62876481)

    I very much prefer smaller mass market paperback books over the larger trade paperback format that everything is printed on these days. For older books, I go out of my way to find used copies printed in the 90â(TM)s or earlier rather than recent printings since they are so much more compact. Would love to be able buy new books in that size more often.

  • I always had problems (Score:3)

    by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @11:58AM (#62877697)
    I've always had problems reading books. I didn't realize it was books until the internet started taking off and I found that I could read a lot of text fairly easily if it was bigger and broken into smaller snippets.

    It sounds like this kind of change will actually make things worse for me, but on the plus side, I can get a lot of stuff digitally now where I can just zoom in.

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