No One Buys Books Any More (www.elysian.press) 165
The U.S. publishing industry is driven by celebrity authors and repeat bestsellers, according to testimony from a blocked merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Only 50 authors sell over 500,000 copies annually, with 96% of books selling under 1,000 copies. Publishing houses spend most of their advance money on celebrity books, which along with backlist titles like The Bible, account for the bulk of their revenue and fund less commercially successful books.
I love books (Score:2)
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Last time i bought books it was from a antiquarian
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I pretty much stopped building my sf&f collection in the 1990s. The writers moved on and I don't like where most of them moved to.
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The writers moved on and I don't like where most of them moved to.
I still buy sf/fantasy, both in electronic and physical formats (heck, I still have subscriptions to Analog and Asimov's!), but I do feel the same, especially regarding sf. The number of new sf authors I like is very small, and I don't feel we get the same "sense of wonder" that made old sf so enjoyable; I find myself drifting more towards fantasy. Also, in both fields quality has IMHO gone down a lot on the whole. There still are some exceptions though.
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Baxter & Pratchett's "The Long Earth" anthology has quite a bit of wonder, but they are experience authors. Paolo Bacigalupi's newer, and there are some interesting ideas and nuggets of wonder in things like "The Windup Girl..
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Yeah, I don't know where the *good* Sci-Fi authors went either?
* Does anyone know if Lindsay Ellis' Axiom's End [wikipedia.org] is any good?
* I'm extremely disappointed in Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary [wikipedia.org]. I'm about 2/3 of the way through and it is SO boring.
* I was given Ready Player One [wikipedia.org] as a gift and I'm NOT looking forward to reading given how shit the movie is/was. Are the books any good?
* Apparently the original Chinese book is better then Netflix's adaption of the 3 Body Problem [netflix.com] but the series highlights the idiotic na
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It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost
Oh, come on ... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I don't know where the *good* Sci-Fi authors went either? ... cry me a river. There are way more good SF books than you can shake a stick at let alone read.
Vernor Vinge just died. Read any of his stuff? Very well written classic SF.
The Expanse series.
The Dune books, not just the first one. Given, Dune is a tad overrated in some regards but the good bits are really good and well worth the read. That goes for the entire Dune series.
What about Cyberpunk, somewhat of a sub-genre of SF? Neal Stephenson, read him? If not you've got some catching up to do. ... William Gibson seems to put out a Cyberpunk novel every odd year and the latest stuff is still as premium as ever.
Cory Doctorov, Orsen Scott Card, Richard Morgan, Michael Weisser ...
If you get bored you can look into lore books. The RPG universe of Shadowrun is your type A Nerd fest but of the 80 novels or so they have the top 5-10 are really good and worth a look, even if you don't care about the franchise. I'm pretty sure other expensive IPs have similar traits. It's quite unlikely that the top 5 novels of the Battletech or Warhammer universe are a complete waste of time. The writers of those books tend to spend years working on the worlds before writing a book on them which does lead to consistency and a baseline of quality.
Bottom line: You likely have vast unexplored areas of SF still to discover. Old and new.
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I suppose it depends n the authors you enjoy. Niven and Baxter have both produced excellent works in recent decades. For instance, "The Destroyer of Worlds" series is an excellent capstone on Known Space.
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I have not bought or have been given a book in the last 15-20 years I enjoyed.
That sucks! I still buy as much books as ever (40 in 2023, just counted my Amazon history). Sure, only half are good and enjoyable, but since I have disposable income and these are electronic books (my bookshelves are full) I am willing to experiment and I occasionally still find new authors I like.
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As an owner of the complete History of Middle Earth series, these books are not for the casual fan, or probably even the average fan. They really are more designed for Tolkien scholars, and anyone picking up The Nature of Middle Earth expecting ripping yarns filled with Hobbits and wizards is going to be very disappointed.
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But that was my question: is "The Nature of Middle-Earth" just another repackaging? You could have saved a lot of effort and simply said "no".
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The two latest generations can't fucking read anyway...
I do not think that is the issue. The issue is unrealistic expectations. Reading has always been a niche hobby. The kids that are interested still pick it up. The others have not done so even before the Internet. "500'000 copies per year" is just an unrealistic expectation and never has been the norm.
I wonder if it'll get even worse because of AI (Score:2, Interesting)
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50 Authors get all the money. How can it get worse than that?
That's pretty bad, I'll definitely admit. I guess it could be two authors or no authors getting the money. Tough to be in a spot where AI can completely supplant you, no doubt or argument there.
anyone who wants to write, can write because they will be supported by UBI
Will there be rainbows, puppies, and sunshine, too? I like puppies.
Sure we do (Score:5, Insightful)
Stats meaningless without history (Score:2, Insightful)
Do they even include ebooks?
Re: Stats meaningless without history (Score:5, Insightful)
I also would like to know how many sell 50,000+ copies, not 500,000+. An author who can consistently sell at least 50,000 copies of each book can earn a decent living, as long as they dont take years in between each release. Knowing only 50 authors are making $1+ million per year isn't as interesting as knowing how many people can realistically be full time authors.
Re: Stats meaningless without history (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. Apparently, when print was the thing, you needed 10'000 copies (total) to even get them out. These times, if an author builds a nice backlist and continues to write reasonable books, they should be good. Obviously, self-publishing is a bit more complex and you absolutely need to hire an editor, but it is entirely possible.
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There are more low-quality books on the market now. Not even including the ones written by AI. It's hard to sell many copies when you're one of an ever-increasing pool of low-quality talent. Between self-publishing and print-on-demand (and ebooks), there's a much lower barrier to entry.
Just bought... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fiction:
12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell
Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual
Re: Just bought... (Score:5, Funny)
PowerShell listes under fiction. Love it.
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Does it have the intro "Imagine Bash, but object oriented and with function call names so long they would drive a Java developer to madness. Brought to you by the author of Microsoft Bob and Clippy, psychopaths that infect your computer with their dead-eyed smiles comes Powershell."
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Powershell has its weird quirks, but after writing a lot of bash, I can't stand it. Any time I write more than 5 lines of shell script I quickly stop and switch to Perl if for personal use, or Python for longer term use.
Bash is for scripting.
Perl and python are for programming.
If you need a program you shouldn't be using a scripting language. They don't do the same things.
I don't get how after so long, Linux is still cursed with such a horrible scripting language.
Scripts need to run other programs, pipe input/output between them, and occasionally perform an IF when an error is raised. That's it.
A script blindly types commands for you, and shouldn't be making decisions other than "give up" - it takes the place of copy/pasting a list of commands into a terminal.
Bash does that just fine.
If you need something to chan
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Bourne Shell (to be pedantic as it's more portable), and Make are two tools that are quite often written by people who don't understand how they work. It kind of drives me crazy, but I see how it happens. You learn a little bit, then write a small script. Then you make it bigger. Then you change job and the noob that replaced you makes it even bigger. Then you've got an ungodly abomination that is now critical for production and nobody dares to touch it.
I see people attempting to write shell scripts in
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I dropped Bash for Perl a long time ago in most scenarios.
Pro-Tip: Linux has Perl available when the init-scripts run. Yes, I have had a few old-time sysadmins outraged when I told them that ;-)
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The Perl in many linux instances I've used often do not have all the pieces needed if a script relies on a third party module. Sometimes these modules are pre-installed in some distros, sometimes they require an optional package, sometimes they just aren't there unless you grab them yourself. Though I find it vastly more common to have a stand-alone Perl script that has no additional requirements on packages or modules than with Python.
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I'm with you. I used to write all my scripts in Bash, and while you can do more with Bash than most people imagine, one day when I had to alter an old script, I realized I wasn't doing myself any favors. I do use a fair amount of "Ansible-style Bash" still, but if some thing is worth having a script for, I almost never use Bash anymore.
Aside, when I used to do everything in Bash, I was using it on Windows also, where, at the time, it was a vast improvement over batch files.
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> Powershell has its weird quirks, but after writing a lot of bash, I can't stand it.
Can't stand PowerShell or Bash?
Re: Just bought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Powershell falls firmly in the horror genre.
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I thought it was dark humour genre. Unless someone is taking it seriously?
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I read the first Three Body Problem novel, and I thought it was crap. Some of that might have been the translation, although I've read other translations from Chinese without that much of an issue. The plotting was terrible, the characters flat. I finished it more because I kept expecting it to eventually turn around, breaking my rule that if I don't like a book in the first three chapters, I won't finish it. In the end, I couldn't imagine why I would want to read any more of it.
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The "Three Body Problem" _is_ crap. I am an avid reader, but this thing has nothing going for it except the nationality of the author. To add to your analysis, the ideas are old and unoriginal and have been rehashed several times in proper SF.
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Keep asking in bad faith and keep being called an ass for it.
Re:Just bought... (Score:5, Insightful)
I enjoyed the Three Body trilogy in the same way that I enjoy tasting Chinese cuisine... it's interesting to experience the unique flavors of other cultures. A lot of Chinese history, philosophy, and worldview permeates Liu Cixin's fiction, and it gives his writing a subtly different texture than the works of American authors like Asimov or Niven. The handful of American characters in the trilogy like Frederick Tyler and Thomas Wade are particularly interesting, since they look so much like fun-house mirror distortions of Hollywood archetypes. I think it's a combination of the image we project to the world, and China's interpretation of that image. The result feels eerily familiar yet strange.
The experience was similar to reading Stanislaw Lem's science fiction, a Polish author frequently cited as the Eastern bloc's response to Asimov. Lem's fiction is frequently darker and more philosophical than the usual American fare, with overarching themes of defeat and the limits of human achievement. In His Master's Voice, all the scientists of the world gather to decode the first ever alien radio transmission, and ultimately fail to do so. Humans similarly fail to make sense of the intelligent ocean planet in Solaris. In the Invincible, the crew of a mighty starship is forced to flee a planet when they are overwhelmed by the self-replicating machines that evolved there. Contrast this to the triumphant conquest of space by daring heroes usually found in American sci-fi!
This is not to say that all American authors are the same, or that foreign authors are entirely defined by their backgrounds. Nevertheless, I find it interesting to see how other cultures influence their authors, and how they view us in turn.
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The handful of American characters in the trilogy like Frederick Tyler and Thomas Wade are particularly interesting, since they look so much like fun-house mirror distortions of Hollywood archetypes. I think it's a combination of the image we project to the world, and China's interpretation of that image. The result feels eerily familiar yet strange.
This is pretty much the same thing for basically ALL Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean, or any non-American/European) characters in American movies and novels. Now you get to feel what most of the rest of the world have known for a long time, the weird feeling of reading a distorted stereotype of people from your own culture.
Re:Just bought... (Score:5, Interesting)
The handful of American characters in the trilogy like Frederick Tyler and Thomas Wade are particularly interesting, since they look so much like fun-house mirror distortions of Hollywood archetypes. I think it's a combination of the image we project to the world, and China's interpretation of that image. The result feels eerily familiar yet strange.
A common problem the world over. As a Brit, I get it with British people written by Americans. Japanese characters written by Westerners get it a lot. It's quite rare for authors to do a decent job with more than one culture, it seems.
It works in reverse too. A lot of the criticise I see of the Three Body Problem novels is down to people not understanding how Chinese people think about things. Again, the same applies to Japanese stories, and even when the translator provides notes to try to help the reader, it's usually insufficient. I thought I understood a lot of stuff until I actually learned Japanese and stopped relying on subtitles, at which point I realized that the translators were giving a paraphrased and Americanized version of the characters and plot that was only superficially the same.
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I was extremely disappointed by Three Body problem. I thought some of the concepts were pretty cool (I actually thought the part where the Trisolarians build the Sophons was great) and the the story through the lens of the Cultural Revolution was an interesting viewpoint. But damn, the writing sucked. Like you, I plodded on hoping it would get better and like you, I wondered if it was just the translation, or because I didn't have the right cultural background to get the cues, but ultimately... it's some
Technical books are different ... (Score:2)
However for textbooks and other technical books you need a large screen color tablet. IMO the printed book experience is often better in this niche. Although having various reference books on an iPad can be convenient for short term unexpected stuff. But sometimes having the textbook or technical reference open on the physical desk, opposite side of the keyboard from the mouse, just can
Same with music (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a LOT of really good music being made in all styles
My favorite music style is not popular, but I can find an abundance of it on Spotify, all really good
The bad news is that pretty much every band I listen to are either hobbyists or have a tiny following and play few local shows. If they get paid at all, it's a pittance
The traditional record industry only wants mega hits. The publishing industry only wants bestsellers
Ideally, it should be possible for thousands of artists to make a middle class income from their work
Sadly, it seems to be a "winner take all" situation, with a handful of mega stars making billions and thousands (millions?) of starving, but very talented, artists
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Ideally, it should be possible for thousands of artists to make a middle class income from their work
It would be if it weren't for the streaming royalties that Spotify pays being so unrealistically low. Somewhere between a 1/3 of a cent to half a cent. If 10,000 people hear your song in a year, you get $50 at best. A million streams, $5,000. And then remember that some artists are a group rather than solo, so divide that multiple ways.
The nightmare is over, Enos (Score:2, Troll)
“The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth” -Enos Hitchcock, 1790
Enos Hitchcock can finally rest easy!
Steve Martin (Score:4)
Step 1: Get a banjo.
Step 2. Already be incredibly famous.
It's a similar situation for authors. If you try to sell a book to a publisher, the biggest thing they want to know is how you will sell your book (by having a huge social media following or being a celebrity, or both). They want a sure-fire thing and to cash-in on easy money with no risk.
On the other hand, it is easier than ever to self-publish your book. If you have something you want to say or share, it is easier than ever to publish it at a fairly low cost to you. Just don't expect to make a living doing this.
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I'm personal friends with a number of authors who publish books in one of several subgenres. Mostly, they rely on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited: some of them are prolific enough that their book sales account for most of their income, simply based on peoples' reading of their works.
Mostly, unless people want a piece of history or something they can reference, folks seem to hate having clutter. Fiction that sells isn't usually, primarily sold as a hardcopy book anymore, I don't believe - short of the kinds of boo
No time, while reading online stuff (Score:2)
I still do find good books, and occasionally buy them. Lately they tend to be with more excellent illustrations, and with much less of text. But even this does not help to overcome lack of time, I allocate them, so they just gather around me in piles. The main problem is - I read and write online. Recently it is Twitter, as war information has its pulse there and can be reacted in two-way manner. Local news are also on sites online, paper gone. Therefore, books do not get time to them, and are very likely t
Lack of options (Score:2)
Right now the vast majority of the sci-fi/fantasy books are all Game of Thrones type, set in some medieval-style world where evil lurks around every corner.
Then you have the Kim Harrison types (which usually have fantastic cover art), followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost always a man) can solve.
I've tried reading various books at random, but either I've lost my ability to immerse myself in the story or the stories a
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The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)
FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think t
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I agree. Some of it, I suspect, is that I've just read so many books now that I'm in 50s that when I read a trope-driven genre novel (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, whatever), I rapidly feel like I've read this story before. I've gotten to the same place with TV and movies. Both mediums really suffer from a lack of any kind of originality, or even attempts at quirkiness. It all just feels like Thomas Kinked-esque cookie cutter.
I've started reading a lot more non-fiction, mainly history. Ironically, there's
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Oddly enough, so have I. Right now I'm on a book about Aaron Burr. Before that was Andrew Jackson and before that was James Madison. Then there was the book about how the Pilgrims and Puritans screwed over the Native Americans in New England (wonderful title: God, War, and Providence) despite Roger Williams' best efforts. And who couldn't read history without delving into World War II and the German army, Panzer Battles.
That last two
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I built my own recommendation engine; as with every engine about half of the recommendations are hit and miss, but the other 50% gave me some terrific leads - for example "The Genome" by Sergei Lukyanenko.
Still, it's very hard to define the personal style that people like, so it can be matched against the existing works.
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Check out the Four Horsemen series by Chris Kennedy (and friends).
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/the-four-horsemen/
Dump a bunch of Asimov, Star Wars, Gundam, Heinlein, and a dose of Bladerunner, add a cup of political theory, put in a bowl and stir...
It's the only scifi universe I've read from in years.
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If you like police procedurals, check out the In Death series by J.D. Robb. It takes place in a near-future world that's not quite ours and the protagonist is Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD and head of the Homicide Squad at Cop Central. Not only is she good at solving murders, she's quite capable of beating the hell out of a military trained man who's fighting for his freedom and is quite ready to take her life to get it.
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I think it is just a lot of crap flooding the market. My personal hate-target is "urban harem portal LitRPG slice-of-life" stuff. Also, if there is a semi-nude woman with big boobs on the title, it is almost always crap.
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>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.
That would generally be "space opera".
There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.
Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harr
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Right now the vast majority of the sci-fi/fantasy books are all Game of Thrones type, set in some medieval-style world where evil lurks around every corner.
You can tell it's GRRM apeing, extra gritty "realistic" fantasy because you'll hear about "whores" within the first chapter. It's like my dude, cargo culting GRRM by sprinkling some of the same words like seasoning doesn't make you like GRRM.
Not true (Score:3)
Mostly used or second hand though - haven't bought a new one in ages, I guess that's what the article is about.
On a slightly different note - I used to buy a lot from library sales - those used to be epic - you could get a bag of books for $5.
Every year since Covid the selection gets smaller and smaller...
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Sometimes a Good paperback at ThriftBooks is $1 less than a new one at Amazon so I just get the new one.
Weird market!
PS unless the recent printings have been Trust & Safety'ed.
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Re: your subject "Not true", the data doesn't lie. The fact that you're an outlier doesn't change the situation.
I keep buying books - I guess I am just old fashioned.
Me too, though usually it's audiobooks for fiction and certain types of non-fiction. Being able to "read" a book while mowing the lawn, or whatever, has made chores far less annoying and opened up big blocks of time for reading.
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I buy history books, HB and SC, new & used. A specific area of history has interested me for years and many titles are simply not available online. The versions available on Kindle are crap; can go F*** itself with it's inaccurate recreations.
Some of the new history books in my favorite area have proven to be repetitive pulp, still replete with errors that have been debunked by previous historians.
A few new books in English and in rarely covered topic areas are worth having but sometimes suffer from tra
Don't let Facts Get in the Way of a Good Headline (Score:4, Informative)
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Slashdot seems to be on a tear making up headlines lately. This one is at least similar to the actual article title.
"No One Buys Books Anymore" implies this is a new situation. The article is "No One Buys Books" which I suppose might seem true to a blog author who gives it away for free: "Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that.." right down to the excessive ellipses.
The blame lies with the tradpubs (Score:2)
It's not that things aren't selling, it's that the stuff they like to push doesn't sell. Tradpub was always hit heavy, with the hits generally not being what the pickers thought was 'good literature'. Combine this with 90+% of their highly advertised biographies being either in kind political donations or personal favorite celebs of the higher ups in the publishing companies and it's no wonder that sales are so lopsided.
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You're not wrong. And since the multitude of mergers, the Big 5/4 (no one's quite sure now), they buy less, and push the work of marketing onto the writers.
Idiots. MBAs. (sorry, I repeat myself).
Meanwhile, I'm trying to push my current novel, Becoming Terran, from my publisher, Novus Mundi, which is a small press, so they don't have the money to buy ads, etc, the way the Majors do.
To some extent (Score:2)
The ghost writers have gone along with it and I think really shot themselves in the foot.
We are still getting new Tom Clancy novels. Sure you can look below the line any see who actually wrote it but that isn't the big bold letters on the cover. This is true for a lot of the popular "air port series", I guess Lee Child is actually still writing his own books.
How are new authors supposed to make a name for themselves when marketing all goes to guys already in the ground. The authors actually writing those
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The last Lee Child book I bought was written by his brother, although Lee gave him the plot outline. It was an "airport exclusive", so maybe he still writes his own books for more general distribution.
Enough (Score:2)
Of course they don't: nobody READS books (Score:2)
Ofc I don't mean LITERALLY nobody. There are niches of readers here and there.
But my kids are all in their 20s and 30s, and they have many friends who say things like "you know, I haven't read a single actual book since college".
To me it's incomprehensible, and I sort of take it as evidence of the collapse but...is it really all that different than say, the 1950s? 1930s? Sure, intellectuals of all eras read but I don't believe the % of intellectuals by nature has particularly swung one way or another sin
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Case A) $40.00+ for a single season of a given TV show. The show has 8 seasons, and each season needs 6 discs to store the episodes on. That's 48 discs that cost a grand total of $320.00+ before tax. All of which you need to store somewhere. If you're not willing / able to rip them, then you cannot view the entire show uninterrupted without purchasing some ridiculous 48+ disc changer and providing electricity for it.
Case B) Same as case A, but the o
I do! (Score:3)
I buy cookbooks. Love 'em. Exclusively hardcover. Sometimes I buy them when they're new releases, but more often than not I go to brick and mortar stores and check out the discount sections. Often I can get great ones in the $10-$15 range. I use LibraryThing to keep track and prevent picking up duplicates.
Technical books? Never. I threw out probably several thousand dollars of them back in the day... certification guides, technical manuals, product how-tos... but I long ago gave up buying those. Even if the book I needed was sitting on the shelf one meter away from my chair, I would still search online for the answer to my technical question. I have only one reference book I keep handy... Sed/awk by O'Reilly.
Other than that, though... I might pick up one or two other books a year.
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I prefer e-books now because I got tired of hauling books around whenever I move, but there's a lot of old ones you can't get that way. But a couple of bucks gets you a used $50 cookbook these days, it's great!
Ebooks (Score:2)
I think realistically most people that read a lot have moved onto e-books. Just like physical copies of video games or music are dying, so are physical copies of books. Not only is it convenient, but realistically the cost to "publish" an ebook is effectively nothing.
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Not only is it convenient, but realistically the cost to "publish" an ebook is effectively nothing.
Which doesn't really do much to explain why you can often get a new paperback for less than the ebook. The paperback can even be resold. I often look to used books in good condition. I only read in one place and it's just as convenient to read an ebook as it is to read paper.
I buy books on occasion (Score:2)
I find books challenging to follow (Score:5)
I can't speak for other people, but the main reason I don't read books is because I find it difficult to follow them. When I'm reading, I tend to think about what's happening as I'm reading. So it's pretty frequent for me to zone out for a few seconds. With a book, I then have to hunt down where I was in a giant wall of text and probably reread the same passage several times to get there. Audio books have similar problems, especially if you're trying to play them while e.g. exercising. This can happen many times on even a single page so it gets frustrating.
With a visual novel, I'm presented with a small snippet of text at a time and there are other stimuli to engage my brain so it's not such a heavy focus on one single thing. This makes it easier for me to take my time and think about what's going on while I'm reading. I find visual novels a joy to read whereas reading a book feels like work. So at least for me, this is why I haven't read any books in over a decade. I assume a lot of other people probably also find the format burdensome and just turned to other media as a result, with TV and movies probably being the most popular alternatives.
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Reading books with ADHD is a challenge. I do it at bed time, when my brain is too tired to wander and it also helps me get to sleep. It may take 6 months sometimes to get through a longer book, but that's OK. Though if you're reading an ebook, you can also zoom in even if you have no trouble with your eyesight. The large print means that when your mind wanders, you can very quickly get back to re-reading the last thing you tried to read.
Of course it's not just you (Score:3)
And it's not some character defect. It's the ecosystem you grew up in. You're probably what... 32? The diversity of media you've been inundated with since birth has meant you are not wired for reading in the same way as people 10 years older than you are.
I will say - and again, this is not a condemnation, but an observation - that Gen Y/Z have less developed imaginative capability. I do not know how that extends into any other part of capability... but I have a lot of theories. I think if you jam a brain fu
Falsified (Score:2)
My wife bought a book recently. Headline is fake, article must be junk.
Obviously many books are bought electronically, and these buggy whip manufacturers are choosing to ignore being cut out of a market they have long acted as parasites over.
What kind of books? (Score:2)
Too lazy to read the source. Does this include digital books? In the last 5 years, I've bought books almost exclusively on Kindle. I've only bought a handful of physical books. They take up no room, never get damaged, can be read anywhere (as long as I have my phone, tablet or laptop with me), they can still be lent out, etc.. There are tons of advantages to buying a digital book vs a physical one.
Re:What kind of books? (Score:5, Insightful)
A real book may be readable 2000 years from now. Your Kindle book may not work tomorrow.
I was originally skeptical about "digital rot", but after publishing maybe 150-200 technical papers and a similar number of "chart packages" over the last 40ish years, 100% of those I have on paper are still good, and the ones I published last week are about 50/50 on whether they are corrupted or unreadable. Similarly, my library of my predecessors' work dating back to 1956, 100% good on the paper documents.
Same thing with various supposedly "eternal" internet/web documents, those die even more quickly.
People worried about this all becoming a "blank" generation leaving no permanent record are absolutely right.
Re: (Score:2)
In the early days there were companies selling eBooks and I would buy them for all the reasons you mention. Those companies were typically brough up by bigger companies that switch to the rental model while pretending to still sell them. I would far rather have eBooks, however I only pay for physical books because if I
Libraries (Score:2)
Pity they don't sell ebooks any more (Score:2)
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Clearly the claim is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Begging to be disrupted (Score:2)
The publishers don't have enough of a monopoly to kill them off and "enshittify" publishing (;-))
Sales are one thing (Score:2)
The real question is, of the books that do get sold, how many actually get read?
It has become fairly fashionable among some to amass shelves with many books, but it's not easy to actually determine when books are bought, if they ever get read or not. I don't think publishers even want to find this out even if they easily could, since it's probably going to be rather humiliating, but that's pure speculation on my part.
Physical vs Digital (Score:2)
With the exception of reference books, nearly all of my recent book purchases ( within the last five years ) have been digital editions ( Kindle ).
( once I've read the story, I don't care about the DRM. It's unlikely I'll read the same series again. )
They're typically cheaper and take up zero room on my already overloaded bookshelf.
I tend to go through my physical collection from time to time and donate many I've read to the local library.
Barnes and Noble (Score:2)
I've purchased two real physical books in the last 3 weeks.
I'm also wildy astonished at the quantity of people in Barnes and Noble lately. It is FULL of youngsters and nerds making eyes at girls. Doesn't matter what day of the week either. Parking lot is packed every time I drive by. I went on a Friday night and once on a Saturday afternoon recently and it was like going to a high school sporting event.
What were the historical numbers? (Score:2)
So, were the numbers really different in previous generations? I would think that the idea that there are a few extremely successful authors with a bunch of not as successful authors should be a universal truth.
Re: (Score:2)
The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.
Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.
The editors of print books are ... not quite worthless, as they may do a decent job for e-books, but the print version is merely an aft
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If you're like a "strategic" consumer of books rather than impulsive, you could probably ask them to order the books for you and then just wait until it shows up. This is purely in the "it's not economic but i want to pay 30% extra and wait 2x or 3x as long just to keep these people in business because they're 'part of the community' "...
It's something i sometimes do but prob. not often enough to make a real difference. I should do it more. (although sadly in my case the "local" store is a Barnes & N
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I did an impulse buy at Barnes And Noble a few weeks ago. At the register, with tax, a paperback book from an author I had never heard of was 20.00 bucks with tax. Looked it up on Amazon when I got home. The paperback was a similar price, but they had a hard cover for about 8.00 cheaper.
Since then, I ordered some used books from eBay. I can get four books from people I have actually heard of for about $15.00. And these books get really good reviews.
Now, I routinely pay 15.00 for an audiobook, and I'm happy
Re:No one buys dead tree books (Score:5, Insightful)
I buy dead tree books. I prefer them over screen reading, the feel for one thing, I like the feel of the book in my hand over holding a screen. Also no need for power of any sort.
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Well, you pay money for a Kindle book, but you don't actually own it. Amazon still owns it and can take it away from you at any time.
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Not really. Just make a backup and Calibre and other ways to remove DRM are a thing. Incidentally, removing DRM because you want to read them, say, on Linux, is totally legal in Europe.
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This is a generational thing.
The older generations want real books, and don't like the electronic things -although they like the adjustable font size and the ease of holding an e-reader.
Then there is a generation who wants only e-books, and thinks of dead-tree editions as obsolete and old.
Then comes the later generations who will read e-books, but want real books because they are more special.
It has a lot to do with where you were in life when e-readers became a thing: Were you set in your ways when they ca