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eBook Sales Outpace Hardbacks
dptalia writes "Amazon announced that for every 100 hardback books they sell, 180 eBooks are sold. In addition, they've seen sales for Kindles triple since they lowered the price. But traditionalists shouldn't panic yet — paperbacks are still the king."
Actually, the answer to the library question is simple. Most libraries, especially university ones, buy special library versions of the books. They typically come in hardback, printed with special ink on acid-free paper. The upside is that the book will last, supposedly, much longer, possibly a couple centuries. With no acid in the book you also won't get that nasty breakdown you do with older books that turns the pages brittle and the covers all '60s techni-color. The downside is that this edition of the book costs around $100+ for something as simple as Dean Koontz's new thriller.
Otherwise, libraries typically buy the best quality edition of the book they can and rebind it in hardback. But there is a huge market for publishers making special library editions that aren't available to the public.
Human beings are the biological version of Von Neumann machines.
There is a format war, especially Amazon. From what I can tell it appears Barnes and Noble is willing to open up its store to other readers (see Plastic Logic). Amazon seems to want to lock users into the Kindle and their format so people have no alternatives.
ePub is becoming a standard and it does have a standard Adobe DRM (which the nook can read). But everyone seems to be inventing their own DRM. Nook can read the standard DRM and Barnes and Noble's DRM. I don't know why it felt compelled to invent its own DRM.
Anyway Amazon's DRM has been cracked, and there are utilities to convert from Mobi Pocket to ePub and the other way. Most of the formats are basically similar to HTML. However Topaz is different, it is a scanned image. The books are lower quality, but basically you just scan it and are done. For ePub/Mobi you actually have to publish your book in that format which is more work for the publisher. For publishers who don't want to bother at all with eBooks, they can just scan it into Topaz and sell a few extra ebooks. For the ones who are serious about eBooks, they often put it in the format and then publish both Mobi (Amazon's format) and ePub(most of the rest) with each store locking it into the various DRM. Sometimes I see the same book on Amazon, Fictionwise, Barnes and Noble.
But still it would be good if they all agreed on one format. But it seems like with the seamless utilities, if a publisher goes to ePub or Mobi they can convert to the other format and then each store just throws its own DRM. For a consumer it sucks because you are locked in. At least with Nook you can read adobe DRM so you have some choice. But in reality most of the DRM schemes have been cracked so even Kindle users can crack the DRM and convert to Mobi.