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German Book Publishers Cool To E-Book Market
Now that the Kindle is being actively marketed in many countries outside the US, reader
rsmiller510 sends in his piece up on DaniWeb about the skepticism in Germany about the whole e-book phenomenon. A major difference from the US book market is that in Germany, book prices are regulated in an effort to protect authors, publishers, and small booksellers. As a result, publishers don't issue electronic versions of their books until the paperback edition comes out, up to 2 years after the hardcover — and then they sell the e-book for the same price as the lowest-cost paperback. An article on e-books in Spiegel.de notes a survey taken recently for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which found that "only one in 12 Germans has a clear idea about what an e-book is, and seven out of 10 of them would prefer a printed version over a digital one." 65,000 e-books were sold in Germany in the first 6 months of 2009, vs. almost ten times that number bought per week in the US, in what is still a small niche of the overall book business.
Ten times 65,000 e-books sold per week in the U.S. equates to about 34 million per year. Sales are really that high? Is this including magazines and newspaper, or just actual books?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you artificially prop up prices for the benefit of a few, then competition and innovation that would benefit the broader consumer market can suffer.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Today I had a nice, long bath with John Grisham.
Well, not the author in person, but his book, The Street Lawyer. Paperback version.
I would have been rather more reluctant to do the same with a Kindle (or equivalent) edition, as I am pretty sure a dip in the water would render it beyond repair.
I cannot be the only one who occasionally loses a paperback to whatever unfortunate events that pass me by. (Temporary insanity and such.) I have provided Dublin Airport with one (I got my camera back, which had been impounded by security guards), an assortment of hotels, planes and trains have got their share and for some odd reason I have never found my lost PDA. (The interesting stuff was encrypted, thank you very much.)
The thing for me (and quite a few other people, I am sure) is that the loss of a paperback may be unfortunate but not a major setback, whereas the loss of an eBook reader is more than just annoying.
... only one in 12 Germans has a clear idea about what an e-book is, and seven out of 10 of them would prefer a printed version over a digital one.
Maybe a higher percentage of Americans than Germans know what an ebook is - maybe not. But my gut tells me that we probably match up similarly in terms of preferring a printed book over a digital book, since I hear that all the time (even from a fair number of techies).
I have no doubt the tech will continue to evolve until someone gets it right, and finally makes digital more convenient than paper. It's not there yet, except for the small number of people that use multiple books at the same time (e.g. students) - and even in those cases, DRM, non-availability of many titles, and other issues deleteriously affect their ebook experience.
#DeleteChrome
I just don't see e-books catching on. Even if the technology matures to make them just as legible as a printed book, that isn't the thing that will make them popular. It's a convenience thing. For example, my wife just bought a few books the other day. Yesterday, she loaned one to her mom, who read it and returned it. And today, she loaned it to her sister, who took it back home with her, which is several hundred miles away. Now, while this process COULD be easier with an e-book, since you could easily transfer the file over the Internet, the publishers will never allow this. Not only that, but good luck selling e-books you've already read to someone else.
Finally, there's the issue of longevity. Books can last for hundreds of years if they're printed on acid-free paper and properly cared for. With an e-book, while the file could be preserved, you run into the issue of making sure a reader manufactured, say, 200 years from now can still open it. I'm sure you could write data conversion software to keep the files current, but I think the publishers would resist, since they'd want you to buy new versions of the same work. And, unless you have multiple backups, one catastrophic media failure could wipe out your entire library.
Hi,
since i am german and an ebook user for several years (iRexx Iliad), i would like to comment on that:
Like the music industry the publishers are currently comitting sucide due to the fear of death. By trying to preserve the status quo, they are scaring away a big part of their future customers. Ebooks are only a symptom here.
I have purchased and read about 1.000+ books during the last 25 years. Due to a still progressing carreer, my budget is rising. But i am less and less inclined to spend it on the local market.
Sincerely yours, Martin
This is also an audiobook vs real book issue. I think audiobooks totally have their place, but they are not w/o their flaws (you can stop paying attention and its hard to "reread the last paragraph" like a book).
The funny thing is publishers complained for years about the physical cost of books, and used it as a base for low writer royalties. Once that was taken out the equation by ebooks, then suddenly it's all about the cost of editing and layout and so on. Someone along the line wasn't telling the truth, and I'm not inclined to start believing the publishers now.
The funny thing is publishers complained for years about the physical cost of books, and used it as a base for low writer royalties.
Hollywood accounting. If you believe the studio execs, no movie actually makes any money.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Or do you think books would last longer?
Actually, yes. Well-preserved printed books can and do last for centuries. We have no idea if any of our current storage techniques will last anywhere near that long, manufacturers bombastic claims of extended lifetimes notwithstanding. What electronic storage (optical, magnetic, quantum, whatever) does do is allow for data to be more conveniently transferred to new media when the older stuff begins to wear out. But that requires a lot of maintenance and awareness ... Google seems to be doing well at it, so far, but then again Google is a private corporation that may or may not be here in ten years, or twenty or a hundred. NASA, for example, is losing tons of data from the early years of the space program because they can't find enough old equipment to restore the information. They waited too long, and such data loss scenarios play out pretty regularly.
... or they may not. Flash memories self-discharge over time: plenty long enough for typical use but not for archival storage. Optical systems are probably the best bet to date, but they are also subject to degradation, and it doesn't take much to make a disc unreadable.
... I don't know. The trend towards purely electronic storage is well under way, and libraries full of printed books will soon be considered obsolete. The day may come when we start dismantling them. Would that be wise?
A typical hard drive, such as that used by every server farm in existence, will become unreadable long before a paper book will. Solid-state memories may have greater lifetime
What it comes down to is that if we want to make sure critical information is kept around in case civilization crashes, we'd better keep the important stuff on paper. I always thought, heck, even if an apocalyptic Mad Max event occurs, there will plenty of knowledge stored in the world's libraries to help us rebuild. Knowledge that will help us skip the thousands of years it took our ancestors to go from playing with bits of stone to flying spacecraft. Nowadays
Put it like this: if things go all to Hell (and technic civilization is more fragile than you think, just ask Charlton Heston) we'll be unable to retrieve squat from Google's servers. We will, however, be able to read books. If we fall so far that we can't even do that, well, I don't suppose it would matter very much.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
An e-book doesn't look the same, doesn't smell the same and doesn't feel the same as a paper book.
It's the same reason why those that can afford it have fireplaces at home: a good wood fire in a fireplace is a pleasure to one's senses.
E-books are likely to sooner or latter dominate the utility space of literature (reference manuals, newspapers, magazines) provided they're cheaper than what they replace (which isn't happening at the moment). This is the same space where the Internet has already significantly displaced paper-books (hands up anybody that still uses paper encyclopedias...) so we might bypass the e-book stage altogether.
What is more doubtful is if they will ever replace paper books in the pleasure space of literature (those books you read for the pleasure of it while lying in our sofa with a nice cappuccino, put down in your bookshelf when you're done and pull out a year or two later to read again) much less the home decoration space of literature (hardcover books with fancy covers for looking pretty in a bookshelf).