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".
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".