As an indie author, I've paid more attention to what's going on in publishing than the average person over the last few years. This article has some things I could quibble with, but the overall premise is, I think, true. Publishers don't like the ebook market, and my guess is that it's because of how little control they have over it.
In the world of ebooks, indies actually have the upper hand. For one, we don't have the overhead of big publishers, so we can sell ebooks at more reasonable prices (while pocketing more than authors with traditional contracts). We have the ability to move more quickly and thus take advantage of new features (like Amazon's ad platform) earlier. We can sell worldwide with a click, instead of negotiating messy contracts.
With print on demand, we can also have our books in print. But publishers definitely have the upper hand there and, I presume, always will.
Also, as an indie I have the option to make my books available DRM-free.
Personally, I _like_ ebooks, especially for fiction. They weigh nothing. They have search. My highlights can get aggregated together. I can switch devices and even switch between ebook and audiobook. Further, I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me.
> I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me.
Actually, I believe that used ebooks can sell for almost the same price as "new" ones. Unlike with physical books, there is literally no difference in reading experience between an ebook that has been sold a hundred times and an ebook that's new.
However, as someone who reads books and who would appreciate a right for resale for ebooks, I don't appreciate it for being able to make money from reselling it. I am more interested about the effects: that I have actual ownership over the ebook. That the place which sold me the ebook going bankrupt doesn't disrupt my abilities to read it. That I can lend it to a friend. etc.
Now, if you allowed resale, ebooks would have close to "new" resale values, and more importantly, resale values of ebooks which have been sold three or four times would stay the same. This would create the problem that people could buy an used ebook, read it, and then resell it afterwards for the same price, basically reading the ebook for free. Now libraries are doing something similar with physical books, but they are inconvenient to use. You need to get to the library, stand in queue, handle the books, think about bringing them back in time, etc. But ebooks don't have such limitations and you could build a super convenient solution around ebook lending. While it's great that people read books, it's sadly not really good for publishers or authors. I kinda understand them that they want to close this loophole. Still, you could allow for resale in some different fashion. E.g. a resale tax of 10% of the value or something. In my opinion that would be the optimum, and a solution that's fair to everyone.
> This would create the problem that people could buy an used ebook, read it, and then resell it afterwards for the same price, basically reading the ebook for free.
If the author still got a cut of the resale price, this might actually increase sales.
There are tons of books I'd like to read but I felt were out of my monthly book budget.
If I could recoup a good portion of my costs I'd buy more books.
I think restoring copyright to sane periods is a better solution, resale of digital goods requires online DRM systems to continue functioning indefinitely and we’ve seen the issues that causes.
I would be less annoyed by essentially consumable digital goods if I knew sometime down the road they would enter the public domain in a reasonable timeframe, and not well after the eventual death of the current generation of children.
I shudder to say this, but that might actually be a use case for blockchain. A shared distributed ledger that an ebook reader consults before opening an ebook.
Years ago, Tim O'Reilly made the observation that time was really the limiting factor in how many books people read (or something along those lines). That's certainly the case with me. Spending (typically) $10 for a book that will take me 8 hours or more to read is a great value for my time--and that's not even counting libraries or out of copyright works--and I'm not sure how acquiring most books could be much easier than it is.
Books could be universally free and maybe I'd browse a bit more but I wouldn't really read more.
I think it depends on the situation. I read a lot more (for myself, not for classes) in college when I had access for free to all those books. The cost of books impedes humans. Luckily there are libraries all over, but they’re not nearly as extensive.
In my case, I have a fair bit of time for reading, and I read very quickly. I am forever waiting in a queue for ebooks via my library, and a lot of the books I'd like to read aren't available that way. If I were to buy all the books I read, I'd be broke.
Libby/Overdrive? It’s great, except for the 12 weeks I’m waiting for most of the books I want, then they become available during time that I don’t have to read.
I've started collecting libraries (cards) from each place I live. Libraries will often have more than one digital service (Overdrive, Hoopla, Borrowbox), and each library may have sharing agreements with neighboring systems.
I use the Chrome Instant Multi Search extension to search all the libraries+services – about 12 different sites at this point. Between them they have almost every book I want in e-book or audiobook, and by placing holds I can keep a steady queue of books going. Managed 125 books this year that way, the majority of them digital, and free.
Yes, it is like a physical book where the library has a given number of books to lend at any time, and you get to borrow it for a specified time window. Likewise for audiobooks and videos. You have to use the Overdrive app (US users can also use Kindle for e-books). It is insane and exactly what I've come to expect here in the US.
The trick (at least on a kindle) is that a book loan doesn’t get marked as closed until you go to the homescreen. Just have to be very careful to avoid that button!
> Also, as an indie I have the option to make my books available DRM-free.
It's worth pointing out that at least one big publisher doesn't use DRM: Tor.
Frankly, I don't get why the big publishers insist on DRM. All it really does is cement Amazon's dominance. Sell DRM-free formats and you aren't helping Amazon lock customers in to the Kindle ecosystem.
I love Tor. Appreciate the DRM free books, and have read them on lots of devices.
I keep very good books. Will re read sometimes. Reasons aren't important, just that a reread makes sense. Maybe the best reason is looking at a great story in a new light, different times.
Anyway, DRM free ebooks means I can keep them like my physical books and in a decade, read them again just like my physical books.
Love it. I gladly buy and pay full list. I want them to make their money because they are delivering great value.
I pretty much do not use Kindle. I prefer plain text, PDF, or an easily displayed and or converted pub, etc.
Bonus, I just dont need a kindle, or Amazon, or anything. If it can render text, or a PDF, reading happens just fine.
Just for fun, I have read some great fiction on my Apple Platinum. Honestly, it is kind of a cool experience. That task is a heavy lift for the machine, but it does it. The fonts, display, etc. take me to a different time. Fun. Frivolous.
Just as frivolous as say, reading on a beach, or something.
Tor is on a good path here.
All that said, I buy both ebook and print.
Also, samples. These are great. One can read enough to see if the book makes sense. Same as print, sans just being able to pick a section.
If they kill ebooks, I will buy fewer books. Both formats have their sweet spots.
> If they kill ebooks, I will buy fewer books. Both formats have their sweet spots.
That's a great point. If ebooks were killed , then I would simply be buying fewer books. I enjoy both formats, but I do end up reading the most on an e-ink Kindle.
A lot of tech book publishers don't use DRM when bought on their website. Informit, Peachpit, Apress, Packt. O'reilly also didn't when they used to sell it directly.
I'm surprised that you're giving it a positive spin from the "indie author" perspective, or maybe I'm just missing something about the way you do your marketing & distribution.
If you want your ebook on Amazon, then Amazon will take 70% (The 30% might be available to you if you plan on retailing at a low price and in mainstream markets, but an indie author serving niche topics will often want to set a higher price; Also you can't do public domain content on the 30% option).
70% commission strikes me as being extremely high. Compare that to bandcamp, which takes 15% for being an extremely well-known platform for indie music.
Competitors who try to eat at least a little of Amazon's lunch (like Rakuten's Kobo, or national book chains like Barnes & Noble's Nook in the U.S., Thalia's Tolino in Germany etc) are following Amazon on pricing. Only outsiders like Google & Apple offer better deals, but those platforms aren't all that interesting for e-books.
Of course you can try to sell e-books by offering downloads from your own store, but you'll have to work a lot harder and spend more on marketing, plus I'm not sure that, outside of specialist techie audiences, people would be willing to endure the friction around downloading an EPUB, connecting an ebook reader via USB, transferring the file etc.
Whoever owns the customer relationship will take the lion’s share of profit, true in books as in everything. Amazon takes 70% because people are willing to share 70% to get distribution, because Amazon is where anyone searches for books.
It raises interesting questions about the definition of monopoly. Especially as Google gradually fades the distinction between ads and results and starts to take over categories like travel.
(not proposing anything, just making an observation)
I would argue that reinforces the point. Car customers don't really have a relationship with a dealership until they're far into the process of selecting and buying a car. Even then the dealership doesn't own the relationship, there's lots of competition and the customer can play dealers against each other.
OTOH, a customer certainly has a relationship with the car manufacturer, through advertising and mental image.
When you shop for a car you choose the make and model first, then find a dealership that will sell it to you. If you get your media from Amazon, you go to Amazon to see what they have and choose from that. Amazon controls the relationship in a way the dealer does not.
IIRC, this is basically why car dealerships exist and you can't just order a car out of a catalog.
I'm not sure it's a bad deal. New car dealership owners are often pretty successful and politically connected small local businessmen. It is generally true though that distribution isn't a business that the auto manufacturers wanted to be in at the time the current system developed. It's not a wildly profitable business to be in but, like other types of franchises, it's a decent enough living for many of the owners.
It's not that they didn't want to be in the business, but that manufacturers couldn't scale their own dealerships across the country fast enough. So they opened up ownership to third parties.
Tesla, however, was in the unique position of having enough capital to open their own dealerships, which has caused a lot of friction with more traditional, "family-owned" dealerships.
70% commission might sound bad to you - but imagine an industry where the standard commission had historically been 85-90%.
Of course, historically an 90% commission on a print book would cover expenses like editing, printing, and marketing which Amazon doesn't provide; and the risk/cost of unsold copies, which ebooks don't have. Still, if you think your publisher wasn't putting much effort into the marketing anyway....
Yes, as you correctly point out, the economics behind that royalty structure became obsolete when the ebook came around. The new thing was the low unit costs. The other new thing was channel economics. The latter triumphed and gave Amazon the bargaining power they needed to make sure that none of the economic advantage of e-books would find their way into creators' pockets. That is what I'm lamenting.
And discounting generally. New book sales used to be pretty much a list price operation. Publishers did a lot more gatekeeping and tended to provide more services for the authors they selected.
I've gone both the indie route and the traditional publisher route and I'm honestly not sure the publisher is worth the other tradeoffs. TBH, the biggest value of the publisher was that it still carries a certain (not entirely warranted) gravitas.
You can hire someone to do that though--along with cover design etc. And publishers often don't do an awful lot of heavy editing in my experience.
(I'd argue that if you're doing a book by yourself without a co-author, you pretty much have to hire at least a copy editor but that's pretty inexpensive.)
As the partner of a copy editor, I'm intrigued you think this is inexpensive, because she's been doing this for years for PhD and scientific papers, and the book she did took a lot longer and cost several thousand dollars at her below market rate. Admittedly it was for an english as a second language author, but my observation is that for a work of any significant length, copy editing is not cheap. For a self published book, it might exceed the revenue: you'd have to sell thousands of copies to recoup the copy edit cost.
I guess I write fairly well; I'm a professional writer by most definitions. By copy editor I mean someone who mostly just fixes spelling and grammatical errors--and maybe flags stuff that doesn't make sense. When I hired a copy editor for a book, I paid a few hundred dollars to someone who had interned for a magazine editor friend of mine.
I don't doubt that even a few hundred dollars may exceed revenue for a lot of self-published works. But I'd argue that someone needs to do a careful read-through of a book. You simply don't see mistakes after a while and most friends just aren't going to do a careful enough read through for free even if they're otherwise qualified.
Well, I think you're right about needing a fresh pair of eyes. And, as a pro writer you probably made less mistakes than most.
You paid low-to-below market rate to an ex-intern early stage career and I compared to a 20+ year proofreader in academic for ESL. Probably fishes to bicycles. I think you got what you needed which was a light touch confidence spellchecker.
A new to writing solo author, bursting with ten years of bildungsroman, who got Scriviner and has dumped two thousand disjoint paragraphs of prose into word...
> You can hire someone to do that though--along with cover design etc. And publishers often don't do an awful lot of heavy editing in my experience.
I bought and read a few self-published books on Amazon. The lesson I learned was that you should never, under any circumstances whatever, pay for a self-published book. The average quality of writing is atrocious.
Publishers may not do much direct improvement of your writing, but even if they perform a purely censorious function of printing good writing and refusing to print bad writing, they're adding a lot of value.
(And my understanding is that they do in fact work with you to improve your writing, but I have no experience in the field.)
If you think 70% commission is high, you should look into the deals authors get from publishers. Typically author gets low single digits, the shop gets around 50% and the publisher gets the rest. Sometimes the author gets only a fee, then zero commission.
30% is the norm from Amazon anyway, though I agree the terms are onerous and a world in which Amazon (or any other large corp.) dominates distribution would not be a pleasant one for authors. The nice thing above the that though is that the Internet means that monopoly on digital distribution can be broken relatively quickly by a superior solution.
You have a source on that? Everything I see and read shows amazon takes the "standard" 30% platform rate that Apple started years ago, I think 30% is way to high as well but I see nothing in any of Amazons documentation where they take 70% of revenue for selling an ebook
Well IMO no ebook should be more than $9.99 in the first place, and no TextBook should be $80 either
The prices of TextBook has long been insane largely because they are "required" by the professors that write them or getting kickbacks from publishers
No Free Market will support $80 textbooks
I am sure we are not going to even come close to agreeing on this topic so....
as to 35% royalty, how do that compare to a standard publishing contract from a publisher? I have a feeling that is still more than what the Traditional Publishers give their Authors
"Traditional Publishers" is a whole different game though: They will try to make money by moving huge quantities of something. So they start with something that has potential mass-appeal, like a cookbook, and then 99% of the value is a result of marketing. The publisher will have the ability to get the author on cook shows on television, will advertise it on billboards, will have the distribution power to get the book into the display window at bookstores etc etc. -- In such a case, the publisher is executing all of the strategically important functions, and the author is almost exchangeable.
Compare that to someone whose life's work is some academic area where their book has become the standard textbook. If it weren't for that person's work, there wouldn't be a product here. That person can choose between a handful of publishers, and whichever publisher they go with has a product, and the others don't have one. -- The recent backlash against Elsevier and the drive towards open journals is basically showing how different the economics are here.
But the fact is: There is a spectrum here, and the above are the two ends of the spectrum.
Amazon's model is basically encouraging the cookbook-stuff and being extremely hostile towards the latter kind of content.
My own opinion is that I don't have a problem with a textbook costing around $80. I started buying college textbooks even before I was in college, and I still do now, 10 years after graduating, often even for topics that are quite remote to my actual profession.
When I was into sailing, I bought meteorology textbooks, because I reckon "What the heck, I pay $100 for a weekend on the water. For an extra $60 I might as well be able to read the skies and the synoptic charts for added pleasure." I recently bought the standard textbook on equine hoofcare, because a visit by the farrier costs $200 a pop, happens every 6 weeks, and I reckon "What the heck. For an extra $100, I want to be able to tell the difference between a good farrier and a bad farrier."
I think college textbooks provide extremely good value for money. Working though one attentively, including doing exercises and checking the answers etc is pretty much as good value as actually doing the course at university (if it's a theoretical subject; obviously you can't learn surgery that way). This is also reflected in the way that they are now routinely being up-sold from mere books into online courses. The market for online courses hasn't quite equilibriated yet. But it's not uncommon for authors of textbooks to recycle the book into a slideset, play the slides on video at the same time as reading the book into the audio track. Throw in a meaningless certificate, and, bang, your $100 textbook is now a $1000 online course. People pay it because, often times, it's actually still worth it. (Although I prefer the bang-per-buck ratio of textbooks to online courses).
> But it's not uncommon for authors of textbooks to recycle the book into a slideset, play the slides on video at the same time as reading the book into the audio track.
Examples? What you’re describing does not jibe with my experience doing MOOCs. Even the better ones cover a lot less ground than a textbook on the same topic, for the same reason a lecture course does.
The weird thing about textbook pricing is, to listen to debates on the internet, textbooks simultaneously cost $$ AND don't make the author any money AND the main market is people who've already paid $$$$ for an in-person college course.
The funny thing is that my experience has been that the static topics are just as bad or worse for students.
For my Newtonian Physics class, the textbook we were using was on its 14th edition and cost more than $100 new. I was fortunate that my professor asked us to use the 13th at the latest, and gave the mappings to the 12th edition problems (because the only difference between 12th and 13th was which order the problems were in). This for a subject that's been essentially the same for centuries.
Meanwhile my Computer Science classes all had $40 textbooks that were in at most the 2nd edition.
This is the one thing that should be made out and out illegal -- version churning without a fundamental reason.
Inclusive of: (1) altering problem sets or numbering, (2) reordering chapters, (3) organizing chapters.
Where if any of the above are done, a free mapping must be available on the internet.
I presume there are actual university guidelines prohibiting using older editions (i.e. ones the official college bookstore couldn't buy in bulk), but most professors just didn't seem to care (in between everything else they were juggling).
YES! The DRM-free books are amazing. It feels so good to finally be able to _own_ a book and be sure of being able to read it for long into the future.
This is true, for all but a minority of titles and editions imo. I have probably a couple of hundred hardcover and paperback and most of them nobody really wants. Collectively they are also quite heavy and difficult to transport from place to place. We haven't moved in a number of years but the last time we did my crates of books made up a significant portion of the total load weight. In the end I will probably sell a very few volumes that have a little value, give away a few more, and dispose of the rest.
I’ve found this to be the case too, especially mass market paperbacks. Book resellers aren’t interested, libraries are better (but they’ll also occasionally turn them away).
That's the buyer's perspective though. I buy used books as well although I'll often actually pay a premium for an eBook because I have the most reading time when I'm traveling.
But selling low cost goods as an occasional thing is incredibly time consuming for the return. In the past I sold on Ebay every now and then and basically came to the conclusion that unless I was making $50+ on a transaction it just wasn't worth the hassle. Books are easier in general but they also are usually a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.
If you're willing to keep the book in storage indefinitely and ship it anywhere in the world that improves your odds. If you just want the library to take your old books you might have worse luck.
My local library has a book sale every year. I don't give them trash like outdated software manuals but I take them some bags of books over the course of a year to at least offset any new books I bring in. I'm sure a lot of them end up getting pulped anyway but at least I've tried to give them new homes. No way I'm going to the trouble of trying to sell books (or anything else for a few dollars) at a sub-minimum wage value of my time.
"Publishers don't like the ebook market, and my guess is that it's because of how little control they have over it."
I heard a different explanation in the early days of ebooks: that publishers were afraid ebook pricing and lack of physicality would diminish the perceived value of print books. This from a few in the print publishing industry, but I don't know how widespread it was or is.
There was definitely some truth in that. When eBooks were relatively new there was a widespread trope that they "should" be a lot cheaper than physical books because they didn't have all the printing/distribution/return/etc. costs associated with dead tree versions. In fact, these costs were pretty trivial (maybe $2/copy as I recall).
And pre-Amazon, in 1990s dollars, B&N 25% discounts on bestsellers was a big deal when non-discounted $25 hardcovers was the norm. (Mainstream eBooks came a bit later of course but the basic point that the cost of providing a physical book was a lot less of the cover price than most people assumed it was.)
"...because they didn't have all the printing/distribution/return/etc. costs associated with dead tree versions. In fact, these costs were pretty trivial (maybe $2/copy as I recall)."
The weird part about that is that, back in the 80s-90s, book prices took a big hike and the publishers blamed paper prices.
Their reasoning is amazingly flexible.
Also note that all of the non-printing, etc., costs are one time affairs. Except for the distribution channels, which take ~50% of the cover price (and which don't apply to e-books).
Ebooks are also more accessible than print books. Text-to-speech and the ability to change font size mean ebooks are accessible to people with vision disabilities, and many people with learning or attention disabilities find text-to-speech helpful as well.
Braille and large print books exist, but only sometimes will you find the book you want in those formats. And those traditional accessible formats aren't nearly as flexible as an ebook. Depending on the individual, a particular level of contrast, certain colors, or font may make a big difference, particularly for people who are legally blind but still have some limited sight. There is little chance of finding a print book with precisely the right formatting for you, but with ebooks the problem evaporates.
> "Publishers don't like the ebook market, and my guess is that it's because of how little control they have over it."
My interpretation is slightly different. They don't line it because of the commitment it creates.
1) From a legal perspective, it's only a matter of time before someone says, "You sold me this book. What do you mean I can't access it any more? I want my money back." What call action lawyer wouldn't love that opportunity?
2) The upfront cost of the ebook might be cheaper, but again, there's the ongoing infrastructure, etc. Those costs over time add up. Vs print the book once and be done with it.
I think you may be confusing the e-book reader (which may well have infrastructure behind it) and the e-book itself. The latter is just a file and, modulo DRM, doesn't carry any more legal or infrastructure costs than a physical book.
And those asserts come from where? And you simply trust the payments Amazon sends? Just because someone else is handling the transaction doesn't mean you have nothing to do otherwise.
As mentioned above: Books are finite. Ebooks are forever.
Do any of us anticipate that Amazon is going to leave the digital book business anytime soon? It's about as theoretical as saying you shouldn't use EC2 because Amazon might get out of the cloud services business.
A slightly different, yet more relevant example: digital music.
Microsoft had their “plays for sure” DRM. No one thought Microsoft would get out of the music game. They did. “Plays for sure” no longer works. Does not play.
> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online?
Repeat after me: the average person doesn't read. The market for ebooks is a fraction of the market for movies and music.
OTOH, there is a viable market because there are such things as "avid readers" (people who read more than one book a month.) Those are the people ereaders are made for.
I predict that ebooks will be like jazz records: they not terribly popular, but they'll still be made because there's a devoted audience.
Tangential, but even movies and music are smaller than the games industry.
The entire, global music industry, for 2016, was worth $16 Billion.The global movie box office total for 2016 was just over $38.6 Billion US dollars.[...] Meanwhile PC games alone earned $34 Billion (including sales, DLC, subscriptions and in-game transactions).Console games pulled in $30 Billion (including hardware, games and services).and Mobile games topped $40 Billion (sales and in-game transactions).
But they weren't lumped together. They are distinct line items in their post. Not sure what the concern is anyways, their claim is clearly supported by the numbers: games are much bigger than music and movies. You can ignore the mobile games figure and it's still true.
The overall market for books is roughly the same as that for music and movies. Quick googling says $27 billion for books, $16 billion for music, $41 billion for movies in the US. Not digging in to those numbers but if we assume they're roughly in the correct ballpark then it's all similar market sizes.
It does. It includes all publishers and academic journals. I would wager a huge portion of that 27 billion is textbooks in k-12 & university, and journals; though, I haven't been able to find the raw data.
Well NO ONE I personally know buys or keeps physical books any more except for children's books if they have kindergarten or primary school kids. Everyone's book collection is on the Kindle including middle school and high school kids. Living in a tropical/sub-tropical humid climate, the tendency of physical book collections to deteriorate or grow mould is a major liability especially if you have small kids.
Whereas I genuinely think that everyone I know buys, owns and keep physical books. Some have only a few, some have hundreds and thousands, but all of them do.
I do live in a country comprised entirely of Oceanic and Subpolar Oceanic climate, though.
There's selection bias here; people tend to know people like themselves and people like each other. Be it people like themselves because they work together, or live near each other, or have similar hobbies, or are from the same family, or some other non-random selection bias, but however it happens, people tend to know people like themselves and people like each other. I have thousands of physical books and probably acquire a few dozen more each year; I tend to like people who like physical books, and presumably you do not.
>There's selection bias here; people tend to know people like themselves and people like each other.
And, presumably, someone who is young, mobile, and lives in a small urban apartment (and knows mostly people in the same boat) will tend to default to lugging and storing less stuff than older folks who have a roomy house. I know if I were starting out today I'd almost certainly have less of a physical footprint than I did in college and immediately afterwards.
Ha. You could almost be talking about me, as was. Moved in to this apartment 15 years ago, not long out of university. Been through a half-dozen jobs since then, ranging from less than ten minutes' walk away to literally in a foreign country (not remote working either - moved there while still paying rent on this one), and I'm starting to think that I'm going to end up buying a house purely to be able to build a proper library room for the books.
My wife and I have a collection of several hundred physical books, and while the size of our collection is unusual among our friends, nearly all of them have a collection of some size, even if it’s just in the 10-20 book range. Pretty much everyone I know has at least one category of books they prefer printed, often textbooks and cookbooks, even if they generally use ebooks. We’re in Austin, currently, so we don’t have the mold problem you mention, but I grew up in coastal Mississippi and New Orleans and never had that problem unless the books were stored out in a shed or something. Several of our physical books are ~200 years old, and while I understand that an ebook will conceivably live for that long, I am suspicious that it would remain useful, given changing devices, formats, publishers, etc.
Anecdotally I see a strong clustering. I have friends with a ton of books, and their other friends also heavily liking books and physical goods (CDs, cards etc.) in general.
My other friends tend to have basically nothing in terms of physical books, music, movies.
I’d wager it depends on how people see physical goods in general: is it an asset or a liability ? And the “minimalist” switch might become more and more attractive when people prefer to rent instead of going into debt.
I order physical books by calling my bookstore, so I can pick it up there.
To me, random access time in print is superior to ebooks.
I wish it was possible to flash an entire bookshelf full of epaper tomes in seconds so I can reap the best of both worlds.
This must be unique to your "tropical/subtropical humid climate" because surveys consistently show the vast majority of books bought by high school kids are print, not electronic.
In addition to data, I'd also like to offer some counter-anecdotes: I have a large collection of printed books to which I'm still regularly adding, I know many other people who do also, and I can only think of a couple of people who've told me they've stopped buying printed books and do all of their reading on the Kindle.
I don’t think you can assume that what you see necessarily reflects the industry. Independent book stores are doing well in the small market where I am (New Zealand).
On the other side of that coin, sometimes when I buy a physical book I seek out a really good one because I want to own a good one. Paper that feels nice with printing done well (and in some cases smells nice - ever smell a No-starch Press book? I can pick them out of my bookcases blindfold, by the scent).
Expensive binding that will last; covers that are a pleasure just to hold. Nobody like to read super small fonts on crappy quality paper, but there's a real pleasure in seeking out and buying a really good quality book.
I've even done this with books that I've read in cheap paperbook format and enjoyed so much that I want to own one (or in some cases, more than one; usually when my search reveals something unusual - for example, when I went looking for a copy of Marisha Pessl's "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" I found a hardback ARC print that came with some extra bit n' pieces - a little pack that must have been sent to a reviewer by the publisher). Sometimes the good printings sold out years before and I have to track down one second hand in perfect or near perfect condition.
I can appreciate all those things about great books. However, all of that is secondary to actually being able to read it for me. If my eyesight gets bad enough, I'll probably switch to audio books.
Well, so far you've got the scent right, the feel of the paper is good, the colouring is good, the binding is good, and whoever is in charge of typography is doing well - the layout of code and the font changes and how specific lines are reference and so is all good. I've not yet been stung by counterfeit printings either.
Now that I think about it, is the distinctive scent actually coming from the binding? I've had a dig through my shelves and my copy of "Programming Linux Games" from 2001 does still carry that scent, even though it doesn't state "RepKover" on the back. I see that it does carry the Linux Journal Press tag on it as well as No-Starch. I'd forgotten about that, but now I look, those early titles certainly were Linux heavy.
Furthermore, eBooks just aren't a very good format for many types of books. Fiction that's 99% flowing text--and some non-fiction? Sure. But even though I buy $1 and $2 eBook cookbooks when there's some special going, it's mostly a lousy format for that sort of thing--much less "coffee table" books in general.
eBooks have ended up being a sort of niche as you say. Not a wholesale revolution of the publishing industry. Probably not that much of a bigger deal than print on demand at the end of the day.
TBH, a lot of the same forces that helped create eBooks have actually limited how many books a lot of people read. I'm pretty sure I read as many words as I ever did but I read fewer books.
What is your evidence for the average person not reading? Trying to find some numbers I came across the following pew research poll that showed nearly 3/4th of their survey participants reading a book in one format or another in the last 12 months.
> reading a book in one format or another in the last 12 months
That study is a binary "read at least one book at all or read 0", doesn't indicate how many books the people who made it through one book finished. I would not call someone who reads one book a year an avid reader.
In our reading club even the most ardent readers of only physical books converted to using iPads/Kindle. I hear the same from my other social circles as well. So it would be very hard at this point for the publishers to try to kill off ebooks. They should have done it at least 5-7 years if they ever had a chance.
At some point in history people would have killed for an ability to access almost any book without any problem. When we finally got to tne point, people rather watch films or scroll endlessly on Instagram.
Slightly off topic, but I often wonder why there is no backlash on print media regarding the environmental aspect of this whole publishing industry. Most books are mass-printed, shipped to warehouses, then shipped to local sellers (or e.g. Amazon, that ships a single book to a buyer) - and the (huge) non-sellable rests are either deeply discounted or completely dumped. If you see a pile of the latest "bestseller" at the local store, its almost guaranteed that only a fraction is sold, the rest will be disposed.
Moreover, most print books, magazines and newspapers aren't even fully read by the buyers, let alone multiple times. Its a huge industry producing, promoting and selling mostly single-use items.
And the used market for most books is virtually non-existent: I had to move a couple of times and the paper weight was one of the biggest hurdles. I dumped lots of books because I couldn't find a buyer on the used market (handling would far exceed the value of the books, some companies buy used books only based on weight and condition) and even libraries and social services like the Caritas declined to take used books.
So, I'm really wondering why we as a society aren't more demanding on the sustainable side of the publishing business, especially the environmental effects. Ebooks could perhaps be a much more environment-friendly alternative, but I agree that publishers and market places have done a lot to make them less attractive, affordable and available for most readers in comparison to printed alternatives.
Our culture holds print books as sacred objects. Talking about the environmental impact of books is like talking about the environmental impact of churches, or music halls, or war memorials, or grave stones: it doesn't even make sense to talk about it because people don't imagine those things at the level of costs and impacts, they are inherently worthwhile.
If you propose printing less books, or even worse, destroying existing books that nobody reads to recycle their paper, you will quickly have a pitchfork-bearing mob at your door calling you a book-burner.
> I had to move a couple of times and the paper weight was one of the biggest hurdles.
It is painful, but packing and unpacking books is by far the least painful bit about moving. You can clear or stock a shelf in seconds and they transport well too.
Paper is not really environmentally unfriendly. Those are farmed trees. No one is turning virgin rainforest into paper. The shipping is far and away the worst part of that.
On the other hand, ereaders use electricity. Tablets use more. So not much of an environmental angle here.
> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online?
[...]
> Then there’s the question of what you get for your money with an eBook. According to the publishers in that recent case in the CJEU, you get a perpetual licence (not ownership) to access their copyright content, which never deteriorates in the same way that physical books do. As a result, the publishers claimed successfully, you aren’t free to sell on your licence, and can only do so if they, the copyright owners, agree. In other words, you pay much the same price for something which immediately on purchase becomes worthless.
Well... what's the difference there? That doesn't seem like it, since it's no less true of movies or music.
Actually, my guess is that most people never read most of the books they buy. Maybe they intend to, but it ends up mostly being some kind of affirmation of the kind of person they are. While the e-book experience has a lot to recommend it if your object is actually to read a lot of books (particularly outside the house), it doesn't do much to burnish your bookshelf.
> According to the publishers in that recent case in the CJEU, you get a perpetual licence (not ownership) to access their copyright content, which never deteriorates in the same way that physical books do.
What crap argument is that?
In reality, a random physical book has expected useful lifetime longer than most publishers, longer than Internet and anything recognizable as personal computing ever existed. Books don't deteriorate into uselessness for decades. Licensed content on-line typically disappears after few years, very often together with the service that you rented it from in the first place.
The point is: used ebook is indistinguishable from new ebook. While used book is distinguishable. Person who wants new book will buy new book. But person who wants new ebook can buy used as well, no difference, but price is likely lower. So it hurts sales more.
> Books don't deteriorate into uselessness for decades
Depends on the type of book. Fiction / story books likely have many years (decades) of potential use.
Technical / education books are probably less so, depending on the topic. eg A book about software is likely only useful while that software (and maybe version) is in use. Whereas a book about (say) optics might be useful for decades as well.
> Books don't deteriorate into uselessness for decades.
I wish. If a new paperback survives being read (by my wife) once it’s a notable occurrence these days. If the spine is broken, it’s a crapshoot whether the adhesive for the pages will last.
"Deteriorate" in this case refers to the physical condition of the product, not the value of its contents. Reading physical books puts wear on them and reduces their value. Reading ebooks produces no change to the book whatsoever. A resold ebook is indistinguishable from a new ebook, which means if reselling ebooks is allowed, there's no incentive to buy "new" as long as there are people willing to sell "used".
GP was using "deteriorate" in the same way you were. A well cared-for book will last for a really long time, particularly if it's a hardcover.
I have books on my shelf that are older than I am -- for example, a children's book that was passed down to me from its original owner after being purchased nearly 50 years ago. The pages have some slight yellowing, and the corners are a little banged up as a result of me throwing it into a bookbag a few times, but it's otherwise in great condition. The binding hasn't even deteriorated. Eventually, I'll probably pass it down to a younger relative as well.
Of course with digital goods you get literally no deterioration at all, but given how little they deteriorate I suspect most of the preference for 'newness' where books are concerned is probably mostly psychological, not practical. It's worth considering whether similar psychological effects might also pertain to digital goods.
Handing someone a flash drive with an ebook on it might already count as a 'deteriorated' experience over typing in a code on your ebook reader's official store and getting a nice download that syncs with your account and has a shiny Verified Purchased Badge on the cover or something. There are lots of ways to make a purchase and a downloaded file feel personal and unique.
Would it? I could see Amazon arguing that you're reselling the book, not the annotation storage/syncing -- and as a consumer I generally wouldn't have a problem with that argument. The book is the thing I want resale rights on, not Amazon account features.
I'm curious, what does the Kindle do with 3rd-party book annotations right now?
On Kobo, 3rd-party Epubs that are loaded onto the device are treated differently than books bought through your account. They won't be used for recommendations, and as far as I know, nothing syncs anywhere. If your device breaks, you can't re-download your 3rd-party files unless you personally backed them up somewhere.
I don't care, I buy most of my books directly from independent sellers/authors and side-load them. But it is admittedly a pain, and I have on occasion bought from Kobo's store just because I wanted to be reading right now instead of hunting around for a USB cable.
Does it really though? In 100 years I think people will care more about Citizen Kane or Michael Jackson than Rich Dad, Poor Dad or Excel 95 for Dummies.
It doesn’t seem fair to compare classics of two media with books that are definitively not in the same league.
I definitely want to be able to pick up my copy of Pale Fire in 30 years and read it. Similarly with The Idiot. Those physical books will definitely still be functional in three decades. And, if a copy is lost or damaged, it’s easy to get a cheap replacement at a used bookstore, something that isn’t possible with ebooks.
There is no shortage of forgettable anythings. If that was your point, it's a poor one.
If you could predict ahead of time what might be valued in the future, then you could discard the rest. But you cannot do that, since you are not from the future. Scraps of data once thrown away as mundane are now valued in the present by researchers; there is no reason to believe this won't continue to be true into the future. Even your poorly contrived example of mundane data was debunked easily by another commenter.
Keep what can reasonably be kept, and let future researchers worry about filtering it. Preemptive filtering will only deprive future researchers of data they'll desire for reasons you cannot presently fathom.
I took the claim to be that there was something inherent about books that made them more enduring than other forms of media, which just isn't really true. Anyway, libraries, among others, make these kinds of decisions all the time, because they don't have infinite space for books (hey, here's another reason ebooks might be valuable).
Movies and songs sell digitally because of convenience. I can watch what I want now, instead of waiting two days or making a two hour trip to a store that may or may not have that movie.
But reading a book is a much larger commitment than watching a movie or listening to a song. Thus it's more planned and waiting a bit isn't as much of a factor.
I question the premise that books are rarely impulse-bought. That's kind of the idea of Hudson Books, for instance.
Besides that, digital books are actually much more convenient in some important ways -- if I want to read a dense technical book on my way to work and a thick novel on my way back, I might not bother with the physical books because I don't want to lug them around. With the Kindle that's no problem.
Reading is a trade-off. Sure, an ebook reader is lighter and smaller than a book, but reading on an LCD is 20% slower than on paper, meanwhile eInk screens are rather slow. Both are only slowly catching up to books in terms of print quality (i.e. pixel density). Also books don't require a battery and have often better UX in terms of annotations etc.
In some situations the ebook will win (e.g. when traveling), in other situations the book is still superior.
> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online?
Well let's look at the technology involved:
Books have been around since writing and evolved from clay tablets which we can still "read" to this very day so long as the text is intact. Nothing other than your eyeballs and hands are needed to interface with a book. No batteries, headphones, passwords, or wires. Plus reading a book is quite a different experience as your mind is actively painting images and creating sounds. Video and audio can present some wonderful sensations but ultimately arent as personal as the creations of your minds eye (and ear). So books as they are work very well and do exactly what they were meant to do. Plus reading on a screen sucks and who wants to buy another electronic gizmo with a good screen like e ink which will become obsolete, fail, or have your book deleted after some DRM copyright spat? Please no.
Video and Audio NEED electronics. They are already hamstrung with a technological need so consuming via digital means is much more practical. And as far as physical media goes nowadays, it's less convenient than streaming. Though Music still enjoys a strong association with the medium being an art so it goes hand in hand with physical collecting which is why you still see tapes and vinyl. Like a book, you want to be able to hold it and also enjoy the art work. Some artists even release ultra limited handcrafted cases to house said physical media adding a more personal touch.
eReaders are amazing. I have 3 books that I am reading at the same time that I literally carry everywhere I go because it is so easy. I never did that with physical books.
Additionally, my Kindle was $90. Between all the books I can get for free from Project Gutenberg and how ebooks are often cheaper than physical books (and should probably be even cheaper given their effectively $0 distribution costs), my kindle has already paid for itself and then some, so the fact that it will become obsolete isn't a big deal (I've had it for 5 years). I can buy a new one in a year or so (or tomorrow) and very easily it will pay for itself.
We also have plenty of storage mediums for digital data that last much, much longer than a paper book, so ebooks win on the "surviving a mass extinction event" front too. Hell, every book published today is starting out as an "ebook" anyway, given that they're all written digitally. Given that, it's even easier to distribute it digitally than physically.
I should have said reading on regular tablets or phones sucks but dedicated e readers are decent. But the uncertainty of the devices longevity and the markets tolerance of standards makes them a poor long term investment.
I have books my father had when he was a kid. There are books from my great grandparents kicking around. They will never cease being legeable barring physical destruction. I'm sure your ereader is nice. But will your kids be able to power it on 50 years later and read the books contained on it? And who will curate your digital e books if they are fixed to an account? When you die, does your book collection die with you? It almost devalues the book itself as its no longer a tangible piece of information you can pass along. Its a digital thing trapped in a digital realm which can evaporate in one of a million ways.
There are 49 remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible, I'm not sure how you can claim with a straight face that digital media last "much, much longer" than an acid-free book.
> This data will be stored on 3,500-foot film reels, provided and encoded by Piql, a Norwegian company that specializes in very-long-term data storage. The film technology relies on silver halides on polyester. This medium has a lifespan of 500 years as measured by the ISO; simulated aging tests indicate Piql’s film will last twice as long.
> The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft’s Project Silica to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser.
There are many other strategies that last much longer than ink on paper. Combine that with the fact that beyond an extinction event, there will always be computers that can share ebooks between them, and the longevity is basically as long as humanity exists. Except with ebooks + something like bittorrent, I can create 1,000,000 copies almost instantly, distributed around the world.
Reading devices aside, you can copy an e-book and have the exact same ebook. You can back it up across a variety of mediums, and keep doing it so long as we have access to digital devices. The ebook containers (epub and mobi) are also remarkably future proof, consisting mostly of HTML and CSS.
I can also assure you that a lot of time, money and resources have gone into keeping the Gutenberg Bibles around; and it’s not as if your or I could pick one up and read it (unless it was copied into a digital format and distributed).
While all of what you say is true, and there are numerous additional advantages mentioned by GP, I am responding specifically to:
> We also have plenty of storage mediums for digital data that last much, much longer than a paper book, so ebooks win on the "surviving a mass extinction event" front too.
My assertion is simply that this isn't accurate. Digital is easy to copy exactly, but also easy to lose completely; I see the sibling comment about Github's archival storage, but most of us don't have a way to either print or read microfiche, and surely, this is less apocalypse-proof than plain old acid-free paper.
If, and only if you can protect that paper from the elements. If someone devotes effort to protect those paper copies.
Frankly, any event which can destroy all digital copies of a book can just as easily destroy physical copies. And the same amount of money and effort put into the preservation of a physical book, when applied to a digital book, will be just as effective (digital books can in an extreme case, be printed out on “acid free” paper as the raw HTML and CSS, and redigitized later with no loss of fidelity).
That is ignoring the cut mentioned in the article from middlemen and the like (and the environmental cost of transport).
If a publisher wanted (and some already do), they could send me a copy to my email at fractions of a penny with no middlemen. Hell, they could use something like BitTorrent to make their costs of distribution literally zero if you consider the fact that any publisher has spare bandwidth and compute from a desktop or two sitting around in their office somewhere with which to start a BitTorrent pool.
I can't help but compare this to the tabletop RPG space, something I've gotten into recently for inspiration.
Over the last few months I've spent a good deal of money at DriveThruRPG. Distributed via (usually) watermarked PDF, with limited security.
Prices are cheap, and often the electronic version is included for free if you get a print on demand version.
Buy a product and want to get a bundle it's in later? Bundle price of the product is discounted (not the price you pay, which is fine).
When I was buying electronic versions of programming books about a decade ago this is what I was hoping for. Instead I have useless files since they can no longer authenticate.
I’m in the RPG space myself. Ive basically bootstrapped up a small but profitable publishing company in that scene (http://shop.swordfishislands.com).
I also like how DriveThruRPG gives drm free PDFs. The watermark is up to the creator (I don’t). I wish they took a smaller cut on their market though. :p
There is also the Bundle of Holding, that does bundles of drm free rpg PDFs and content. It’s pretty great as well.
My personal take is that the ebook/pdf/digital book market is replacing the “cheap paperback/trade” market. I use Kickstarter to raise funds for pretty deluxe offset print runs and am then pretty liberal with the digital copies (buy a book get the digital free, charity bundles, bundles, free in person download codes, etc). This seems to have been beneficial because the “infinite digital” product serves as a gateway to the “limited, special, ‘deluxe’” version.
Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing (e.g., I have the digital I don’t need the paperback) so downplaying the digital seems like it would make sense long term for books that don’t make sense to exist in some sort of “deluxe, you’ll want this for 50 years” format.
I've got some of your stuff. :) I think from a BoH, in fact. (Whether part of a bundle or not, Questing Beast's videos are how I really know of your works.)
> Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing
Counter to that is people like Questing Beast, or the guy that did Grognardia, who like to have print. I've been going OSR systems and have purchased way more than I would have because they're electronic and won't take up (physical) space. I almost skipped Whitehack because I could only get a print copy via Lulu.
Granted, you could purchase a PDF and then pay to have it printed, but your point about deluxe editions is dead on. That's why I bought my SO the illustrated Harry Potter books, and why she bought me the Final Fantasy Ultimania books; they're beautiful deluxe books that we'd cherish and pass on to our descendents.
I hate that I need to break DRM to keep a copy of an ebook. There was that famous case where Amazon found out they didn't have a license for a book in Canada and pulled it from everyone's devices. The book? Orwell's 1984.
We have DRM free music from BandCamp, iTunes, CDBaby, AmazonMusic and others. But the only place to get DRM free books is Kobo, and it's not a huge selection.
Offer me a DRM free book where most of my money goes to the authors and I'd be all over it. This recent trend has lead me back to pirating the larger or older titles.
If you want "most" of your money to go to the author, you'll need to look outside traditional book publishing - even Amazon ebook publishing will take a 70% cut. Your best bet is supporting your preferred authors on Patreon, Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms, and asking them to refrain from adopting DRM. The crowd-funding model works very well for this, because you aren't restricted to paying per-copy in the first place.
Yeah the author is being deliberately dense. To make a point I guess.
The idea that e-books are licenses is self-serving for the publishing industry. Since they can't control distribution of an e-book after it leaves their site, they want legal controls. So they can sell the book more than once.
I don’t know what sort of actions would fall under your definition of trying to kill e-books. But from my (admittedly unsophisticated) point of view, some publishers seem willing to at least hamstring them if it will net them more traditional sales.
That's almost identical to how movie companies restrict rentals (as opposed to sales) of videos for a period after movies are released, but nobody would claim that this means movie companies are trying to "kill digital video rentals."
At the very least, "trying to kill e-books" would mean that publishers were actually attempting to convince people to buy paper books instead of e-books, which is not something they are doing. Moreover, when I first read the title of this article, I thought that publishers were actually considering ceasing publication of ebooks, which is definitely not what is being described.
Someone mentioned Special Topics in Calamity Physics, so I looked it up. MSRP for the paperback is apparently $18 (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297621/special-topi... on Amazon the Kindle version is $13.99 while the paperback is $11.39. On the other hand, Barnes and Noble has the NOOK version for $13.99 and the paperback for $16.20, so maybe Amazon is trying to kill e-readers.
When e-books came along, I can only assume publishers panicked and said "we have to protect these books from being copied somehow", so they crippled them with DRM, created their own standards, and so on. Years later, the only way to comfortably enjoy a purchased e-book from a major publisher (that uses DRM technology) is to:
* Pay for the crippled e-book and download it to some Adobe application that is only used to unlock your crippled e-book.
* Use a plugin for an open source application to strip the book of the DRM, creating a real e-book.
* Send your "pirated" and de-DRM'd e-book to your device of choice as it can now be easily converted.
The whole e-book market is backwards and is reminiscent of the way music was being sold around ~2005. You were forced to buy a CD so you could rip it to mp3 files and put them on your device. Sell mp3 files directly? Oh no, we can't do that, anyone can copy those! (Except you can, of course, copy the mp3 files created from the CD, so your guaranteed sale is one disc).
Then comes the argument about making piracy uncomfortable: "Sure, books can be copied, but if we at least make them annoying to copy, people will gravitate towards buying them through legitimate channels" -- except they won't, because the reason people aren't buying through legitimate channels in the first place is the same reason for e-books as for music: they suck. They create problems for the users, they are price-inflated and overpriced (to prop up the dying physical copy-part of the industry), so everybody hates them.
I'll buy a book online if it lacks DRM, but only then. Humble Bundles are great for this. But, if you publish a book and you use crippling DRM technology because you're scared of being copied, you are making the book market a worse place for everyone, and you are contributing to the problem. Only an absolute fool would think that going back to physical copies of books is the right move here -- and if that turns out to be what happens, I will gladly dedicate my time to digitizing books made by these consumer-hating Luddites, and spreading them online against their will.
Find a new model, or die like the rest. Stop being scared of change, it's getting old.
I keep hearing again and again the same argument regarding DRM. I really doubt people (not the technical ones found here) care about DRM. They didn’t care when the music industry implemented it, see how much the music pirating has fallen. I think what they care about is convenience. The convenience of instant access to hundreds of thousands of books, recommendations, ratings.
You're right that people care about convenience rather than caring about DRM - but the DRM affects the convenience. Publishers have handed Amazon a monopsony on a platter, because it's just too inconvenient to buy books somewhere else and put them on a Kindle. And that's all down to DRM.
This is exactly it. No, people don't care about DRM because they don't know what DRM is: but they care about the actual consequences. DRM makes media harder to consume, share (even to yourself) and secure through backups.
I'm finding the article's arguments pretty unconvincing.
eBook prices might be high, but as I've grown older I've realized that the price of the content is typically well below the opportunity cost of consuming it. If a good portion of that money makes it back into creators' hands, I'm satisfied.
The author spends some time complaining about the lack of first-sale doctrine, which is just a relic from the time when all content came on costly physical media. It would be wasteful to be forbidden from selling a book that you no longer want to read, so the reasoning went.
The arguments get even more nonsensical ("eBooks don't appreciate in value", "You can't photocopy them")
Meanwhile, they totally miss my biggest issue with eBooks: that they give significant power to platform providers, who may demand unreasonable concessions from authors and publishers.
For me, ebooks are life changing. I read around 100 to 150 books a year and i can carry an infinity of books in my pocket no matter where i am at in the world! And, 99% of the time ebooks are cheaper when i compare....
I put ebooks right after electricity and i dearly hope my print books disappear.
I have a Kindle, but I often find myself buying the physical copy of books just for the satisfaction of having something I can physically touch. It's the same reason I go and buy physical copies of games from BestBuy when I can rather than buying games from Nintendo's e-shop.
No worries, everybody will pirate e-books, just like it happened with music.
Indie publishers will make some money, probably more than going through a publishing house because they can sell directly to the customer and cut out the publisher. A 70% cut on eBooks sales is outright theft imho. If I were a book author and Amazon took a 70% cut, I would rather publish it online for free under a license that prohibits commercial distribution of the work (in exchange for money).
> Did you give or receive any books for Christmas? If so, were they physical books, or electronic ones? I suspect that, while many of us have exchanged real, printed books as presents, eBooks were far less popular, and unless you give a voucher, they’re almost impossible to give as presents anyway. So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online?
Huh? You can't give digital copies of movies, music, or games as Christmas gifts for exactly the same reasons. What is this paragraph supposed to have established?
> eBook readers are still incredibly primitive, and won’t even let you refer to two or more sections of the book at the same time. You can’t photocopy them, copy quotations, or do anything remotely advantageous.
Kindles have supported copying quotations since at least 2010.
I love ebooks. I also hate drm so I only "buy" drmed ebooks if I can strip the drm and usually convert it to epub.
I do wish that the highlights I make were actually saved to the epub file rather than in a separate file that is difficult to transport to another device.
No! Since buying a Kindle I don’t have nearly the same guilt over my stash of unread ebooks compared to the reminder I see of physical booms. I read a lot, but not as much as I buy. :/
I have a Kindle which I loved and used to be my main way to read books when I lived in a third world country.
I've pretty much abandoned it since I moved to a next-day Amazon delivery country. Dead-tree books are much more convenient in the ideal case when I'm in a comfortable position at home, and I never have the foresight to buy an e-book to read something on vacation without having to carry a physical tome of whichever book I'm reading right now.
This is why I love Manning Books. I actually ordered a book off of Amazon that I forgot was produced by Manning, and I went to cancel the order and get it from Manning instead. That way I got the print version, the digital version and even free digital of the older editions of it. They've won me as a customer in that I'll always order off them if they have a book I want even if it's available on AMZ.
Publishers don't need to kill e-books, they were never a good product to begin with, which is why they've mostly failed to replace paper books.
The author missed the most obvious reason e-books have hit a wall. Compared to hard-copy books, e-books offer a vastly worse user experience, with the only benefit being lower price and easier storage.
Paper books are incredibly durable, easy on the eyes even for very long periods of reading, affordable, and a nice break from staring at a screen all day. Even children prefer paper books to kindles and other e-readers, so it's not a matter of nostalgia or people refusing to change. Paper books are just a really great user experience as far as media goes.
The comparison to other media like music and video is also completely wrong. Records, tapes, video cassettes, etc. are all new technologies, less than 100 years old in most cases. So eight-tracks and CDs getting replaced with mp3s and streaming services is a case of a new technology being displaced by a slightly newer technology. Books on the other hand have had centuries, even millennia to develop and perfect the user experience, which they largely have (I can't take credit for this last argument, Nassim Taleb points this fact out in his Incerto series).
I'm an avid reader. I'll sometimes read a book a day. I don't have the room or money for reading and buying that many physical books. I'm getting to the point where I even prefer the interface of an ebook. I can search, long press a word look it up, read in the dark without carefully positioning a lamp, change the brightness, change the font size, change the font....
I think you're completely backwards about how much ebooks are failures and in what manner. And your comparison to other media is incomplete.
> Compared to hard-copy books, e-books offer a vastly worse user experience, with the only benefit being lower price and easier storage.
For novels, ebooks are a vastly better user experience. Adjustable font size, lighter weight, adjustable brightness and color temperature. There is no curved page warping of the text, each page is perfectly flat and legible. You can actually have the book with you when carrying around a book all day can get impractical. I suppose I should preface this with the fact that if you aren't using an e-ink screen then you really aren't using e-books properly.
> Even children prefer paper books to kindles...
There is a learning curve and pre-novel children books are more of a visual medium than text so children have exposure to page turning prior to actually reading.
> So eight-tracks and CDs getting replaced with mp3s and streaming services is a case of a new technology being displaced by a slightly newer technology. [...] Books on the other hand have had centuries...
This comparison still feels off... The technology of CDs, records, etc. is all pretty new but the content is just as old as the content in books e.g live concerts, live plays, oral history, etc. Bound, mass printed books were just ahead of their time compared to music & video since the latter two contain a lot more actual data (bytes/item) so incremental improvements matter much more.
Of course, I too think there are reasons why e-books don't completely replace physical novels/books.
1. Format is only good for novels and stuff without lots of diagrams or images. Textbooks are a huge market and having e-readers the size of them is kind of impractical at this current time. Even so lots of students prefer the PDFs anyway so it's kind of a toss up.
2. Upfront cost. e-readers are not cheap for a lot of people and people don't read a ton in general so paying for an e-reader + books vs the free library is a tough sell. (Most people don't know or don't know how to use free ebooks services through public institutions and a lot of the time they don't work on all e-readers, etc.)
I think there is also some generational trends that work against e-books such as the older & less tech savvy perhaps reading more but having learned preferences for books BUT I haven't researched this theory yet.
This really doesn't hold up. If people liked e-books and if they offered anything near the "vastly better user experience" folks here are claiming they do, they would sell better.
The publisher conspiracy theory argument as to why they don't sell is also silly. Record companies, network television stations, and hollywood studios all tried their hardest to kill streaming music, mp3s, streaming video and so on. They failed miserably and those new mediums succeeded because they offered the user a great experience that they weren't getting previously. If anything, publishers have taken a much warmer approach to e-books than the recording industry did to digital music. Fortunately for them e-books just aren't very good and have mostly failed on their own.
If e-books offered real benefits over traditional books that most customers actually valued, it wouldn't matter what publishers thought or did, e-books would succeed the way streaming music and television have.
In terms of generational trends, the only folks I regularly see with e-books are retired baby boomers, so if anything I'd expect e-book sales to gradually decline as that generation rides into the sunset.
I like technology as much as the next guy. Much of the time tech can offer serious improvements over the way something was done before, but sometimes it can't. We need to get over the knee-jerk belief that digital always equals "better".
You may be underestimating the value of easy storage. I’m a city dweller, and I’ve been outright barred by my spouse from purchasing any more books - we just don’t have the room.
Amazon has a monopoly and monopsony in the ebook market. Oddly, the department of just does not seem to care. Their recent test of “does it hurt consumers” is too narrow. In this case the monopsony is hurting the entire industry.
Physical books are gone. The people who actually read books have already switched to e-books. I haven't bought a single physical book since i bought the first iteration of the amazon swindle.
Some people who also read books will try to refute this argument, saying they still buy love and read physical books. So do i. I love physical books. I love them as a commodity. I love holding them, reading them, putting them on display after finishing them, but sadly, it's simply not convenient for someone who really reads. When i finish one book and want the next in the series, when i find out about a book that i am actually curious about what it is saying, i will simply get the e-book. The desire to read and convenience simply wins.
I thought the last iteration of the generic ebook reader was my last purchase because it had the backlight, but now they came up with the yellow backlight so i have to buy this. Blue light causes macular degeneration and yellow light is so much more comfortable.
Ebook readers are like a dream come true. When they came out, i thought wow, truth is probably solipsism.
Physical books are not "gone". The word you are looking for is "dominant". Physical books dropped down to about 80% of the new book market in 2012, and since then have held steady or even gone back up, closer to 90% in recent years. The used book market is, of course, even more dominated by physical books.
The preference for physical books over e-books is actually higher among younger readers than older readers (who appreciate being able to increase the font size in e-books).
Totally anecdotal here, but we bought several physical books for our nieces and nephews this Christmas. These were all requested by them, too. Totally didn't expect that.
I disagree - I think you're extrapolating from your own experience into everyone. I sell a moderate number of books I've written each month (nothing special, but it's about 1/10 of my income), and that's print only.
They're definitely not dead in schools, and lots of people have said they like having a physical book to read from. In addition, despite owning a kindle, I always buy physical books, not ebooks. I don't own the ebooks, and the kindle reading experience is convenient (in terms of transporting many books with me), but it's not as good (for me) as a paper book. I read books - in fact aside from work, it's about the only thing that I -do- do.
This seems like a hasty generalization based on your experience. My wife and I definitely “actually read books”. Between the two of us, we’ve read more than 50 books over the last year. Almost all of these have been physical purchases. Some were library rentals, and a very few (one or two) were ebooks. We have a lovely local bookstore where I can put a book on order, then take a quick walk from the office over lunch to pick it up. It’s more convenient than getting it delivered and gives me an excuse for a nice walk. Alternatively, I can walk from the office to the library and pick up whatever I need there. Certainly that is more than convenient enough for us.
You're over-generalizing. Yes, for just reading text eBooks work great--especially for travel. But I still buy tons on physical books as well where the graphic design (photos, etc.) is relevant.
I'm in a similar boat. I use an e-reader for reading on the train when I have one hand available, but it doesn't at all replace physical books. Physical books are a more delightful product.
I own a larger tablet--which I don't particularly care for because of the weight--and I've tried various software. YMMV but I still prefer physical books for certain uses.
For those amazon ones, take a look at the reviewer comments. One of the reviewers has a video showing the contents of each so you can see the book in detail. Very nice. :)
I read mostly physical books and intend to keep doing so. I prefer unusual, rare, and out-of-print books, and I'd rather keep a physical copy of those on hand. I will acquire a "backup" ebook copy if I can, but often there is no ebook available.
Ebooks make a lot of sense in certain cases (school books, technical reference, genre fiction).
In the world of ebooks, indies actually have the upper hand. For one, we don't have the overhead of big publishers, so we can sell ebooks at more reasonable prices (while pocketing more than authors with traditional contracts). We have the ability to move more quickly and thus take advantage of new features (like Amazon's ad platform) earlier. We can sell worldwide with a click, instead of negotiating messy contracts.
With print on demand, we can also have our books in print. But publishers definitely have the upper hand there and, I presume, always will.
Also, as an indie I have the option to make my books available DRM-free.
Personally, I _like_ ebooks, especially for fiction. They weigh nothing. They have search. My highlights can get aggregated together. I can switch devices and even switch between ebook and audiobook. Further, I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me.