Slashdot Mirror
E-Books Are Only 6% of Printed Book Sales
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's technology blog argues that e-book sales represent 'only six pecent of the total market for new books.' It cites a business analysis which calculates that by mid-July, Amazon had sold 15.6 million hardcover books versus 22 million e-books, but with sales of about 48 million more paperback books. Amazon recently announced they sell 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, but when paperbacks are counted, e-books represent just 29.3% of all Amazon's book sales. And while Amazon holds about 19% of the book market, they currently represent 90% of all e-book sales — suggesting that e-books represent a tiny fraction of all print books sold. 'Many tech pundit wants books to die,' argues MIT's Christopher Mims, citing the head of Microsoft's ClearType team, who says 'I'd be glad to ditch thousands of paper- and hard-backed books from my bookshelves. I'd rather have them all on an iPad.' But while Nicholas Negroponte predicts the death of the book within five years, Mims argues that 'it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of e-books will slow.'"
I thought E-books were by definition not Printed Books.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Ebooks will not be able to beat out paper books until prices come down. People are cheap and don't want to spend more for an eBook than the mass market paperback version. Drop eBook prices and watch them take off.
It is difficult to argue with the meteoric rise in ebook popularity. I'm an ebook insider, and I still buy mostly physical books. But customers really are demanding ebook version of many books. And pretending that the trend towards ebooks doesn't exist is unrealistic. I might start and stop in fits but I think the writing is on the wall (or display).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The very reason ebook prices are so high is because publishers won't let Amazon drop them further, as that would cannibalise their book sales in which they get much larger margins.
But, I doubt ebooks will ever replace books completely (at least in the foreseeable future). Books will be around a lot longer than CDs, DVDs, BDs, and many other such media.
E-Books still aren't there yet. When an E-Book as as convenient, as cheap, and as trouble free as real books, then we'll see e-books take off. But I think they've still got a way to go. Prices need to come down, the devices themselves need to get better (more durable, longer battery life, cheaper) and the software inside them needs to get much better.
Speaking only from owning a Kindle, the limitations on display imposed by are sometimes infuriating: Limited type choices, no ragged right, an orgamizational system which doesn't scale past 100mb of material, let alone the two gigs that comes onboard, (Why people moan that the kindle is not expandable I'll never understand. Aside from a wikipedia dump, who needs two gigs of text on the go!). PDF Support needs vast improvements (why, god why do you let me zoom, but only to the scales you chose for me... which are always way too wide or ten letters too narrow on academic papers?)
Annotations for academic work are important, and on the impotent keyboard they give you on the kindle, good luck. HIghlighting is slightly better, but still painful.
Having ranted though, I have to say, I still love my kindle, if for no other reason than receiving my news paper every morning electronically, combined with Instapaper for long articles.
The devices have amazing possibility, but until they improve, they won't kill the book.
The title should be, "Holy crap, an entire 6% of books sold are eBooks."
The vast majority of the reading public doesn't own an ebook reader. The vast majority of people say things like, "I like the feel of a paper book, I wouldn't want to read a novel on my computer." The fact that, despite the relative novelty of the medium, and endemic resistance to ebooks, they've already captured a sizeable percentage of the venerable book market says quite a bit about the future. And frankly I'm surprised.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
E-Books Are Only 6% of Printed Book Sales
Pretty remarkable considering that e-books aren't technically printed ... Painted? maybe. Rendered? perhaps. Printed? only if it is flat text with no formatting info.
Millions of people are already reading on Kindles and Kindle is the #1 bestselling item on Amazon.com for two years running. It's also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon.com.
Let me start with this; I knew someone who was close to an author (she will go unnamed) and whenever the author published a book, I was always encouraged to go up to Amazon and write a review.
I'm trying to find the original article, but a year ago Dow Jones reported that online reviews are inflated - people are way too nice.
In my experience with my own purchases, five star reviews are horribly misleading and inflated. And many times, I think they're written by shills. I now go to the 1 star reviews first (ignore the user errors and the folks who didn't like the shipping) and go up the ratings and ignore the fives. Apparently, some shills are writing 4 star reviews. Fortunately, the shills are kind of easy to spot - I'll leave that up to you figure it out - I don't want to make my buying harder than it is.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
If you print an e-book doesn't it become a ..., oh forget it.
Am I the only one who prefers reading real books?
I stare at a computer screen enough.
a
Ebooks are great for quick fact checking, but if Im reading 100+ pages I'd prefer a paper book. Its just easier on the eyes.
--
Windows Media Codec Pack
We have to remember that it is possible that, in the current market, due to markup costs, eBooks may be selling for less than they cost per unit.
The only metrics that matter to the consumer are price and utility.
The only metrics that matter to the writer are profit and control.
The only metrics that matter to the middleman (book publisher, distributor) are profit per unit.
We can't compare apples to oranges. We can't use Gross Sales Price, since many books sell for less, due to markdowns and returns in the distribution channel. We need Net price after costs, including tech support and returns, and capital requirements.
If we sell one eBook for $5 million but it gets copied electronically so that we make no other sales, and this electronic version reduces physical book sales by a larger amount (due to piracy), then we lose money.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"The $40.8 million in e-book sales generated in July came within $20 million of the July sales generated by the nine mass market paperback publishers that reported results to the Association of American Publishers. The e-book gains also came in a month where all print trade segments reported a decline in sales."
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/44546-e-book-sales-jump-150-in-july.html
I'd love to buy some e-books, but I don't want any of the DRM restrictions they come with. I can't sell an e-book online once I've read it, I can't give it away to a friend, I can't check out an e-book from the public library unless the publisher allows it, and often I can only copy my e-books onto a limited number of my own devices. While I expect e-books will someday become the standard for book publishers, I don't want to be part of that future unless and until these DRM issues are resolved. Publishers have little motivation to do so, which means I'll likely remain a technological dinosaur with respect to books and will never own a Kindle or whatever device has replaced it in the future.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I like the idea of ebooks and being able to carry around a library on my iphone, I don't want books to go away. I don't know of any DRM that prevents me from sharing paper, whereas there are plenty of restrictive digital formats. There's plenty of reasons that textbook publishers would like ebooks, though. They can charge the almost the same amount for an electronic copy, save on printing costs, and implement DRM to stifle the used books business. There are good things about ebooks, but there's a certain freedom about paper that I prefer.
it is the BIGGEST 6%. All those other sales figures mean nothing in the face of a new technology wave.
And the thing is, this is both ironically sarcastic, and sardonically true.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
I am liking the trend (started primarily by Paizo) of role-playing companies that give Print + PDF bundles for their books. I love having access to reference PDFs on my laptop. When regular ebooks start coming bundled with hardcovers or at a more reasonable price, they will definitely take off. As it is, who wants to pay more than a softcover price for a novel?
Got Apathy?
Lots of factors here. I know I won't buy a book while it's tied to a machine or even several machines let alone the installation of the operating system on a machine. I know I'm not the only one. I suspect that's a huge factor. It isn't reasonable that if I lose or damage my reader, my entire library is wiped out. Is it any wonder that if people are asleep reading in bed or reading in the bath or on the toilet that they don't want to risk an expensive device AND their entire library whereas risking a single paperback or hardback book is acceptable? Imagine rolling over in bed and killing not only your poor reader but $5000 in books. Stuff that for a joke.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The very reason ebook prices are so high is because publishers won't let Amazon drop them further, as that would cannibalise their book sales in which they get much larger margins.
This NYTimes article broke down prices of ebooks -- showing that a $10 ebook nets them about as much profit as a $26 hardcover. It goes on to suggest that they're keeping prices high to slow down adoption -- their whole infrastructure is built around dead-tree books right now, and they fear they won't be able to adapt fast enough to scale down their own DTB-related costs. I suspect though, that when they do figure out how to scale down, they'll be just as happy keeping the prices high.
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
I agree, to an extend. The real thing the publishers fear is the loss of control. On Amazon's ebook store, there are many self-publishing authors there. Publishers get zero for their books. If this were to catch on, the major publishing houses would die. So, they do everything they can to marginalize the ebooks. Now, it's true that many self-published authors aren't worth reading...but there are several that are, and who I enjoy. But ultimately? The candle-makers guilds did not stop the lightbulb, and the buggy-whip makers did not stop the automobile. Both these industries still exist, but in very different, and much smaller, forms than they did before.
Ah but he's a geek. Carrying all that weight will be the only exercise he gets.
It's going to be a multi-step program before I migrate fully to eBooks:
I'll take two out of three. However, I can't see the paper book becoming any more obsolete by the eBook than the radio was by the television. My wife wants a Nook and I would love to read the WSJ on one of these things, but it's just not 'there' yet for me. Maybe I'm a slow adopter.
I work for a medium sized book publisher and like many others we are scrambling to put e-books out. Six percent sounds about right, last year it was 4 and the year before that it was zero. From a publisher's perspective, we're still waiting to see how it all pans out. The suspicion is that this growth rate won't maintain itself and that there's a plateau somewhere. Where that is, no one knows, but no one that I know of in the industry is predicting any sort of e-book takeover in the next decade or two. So yes there's huge growth but no one's getting rid of their printers just yet. Publishers love e-books: no shipping, no warehousing, and most importantly no returns. Most books are sold to retail outlets on the basis that they can return them for a full refund if they don't sell. Since getting shelf space can boost sales you often see titles with an over 50% return rate. Also, for very little money you can take titles that are out of print or didn't sell well and put them out there. Titles once thought dead can now eek out a few extra sales.
'Many tech pundit wants books to die,' That hurts my brain. Yes, it's a quote - put a [sic] in there so I don't want to smash things. In an article about book sales, no less. Thanks. --Yet another grammar nazi.
...read it in the bath, drop it, write anything anywhere on the page, lend it to a friend, hold two or three pages open at once and see parts of all of them simultaneously, read it anywhere without worrying about becoming a target for thieves...
I'll still prefer the feel and longevity guarantee of a real book (how's that BBC Domesday Project reader getting on?).
The firm most likely to sell e-books still mostly doesn't, while every other bookshop on the planet sells almost exclusively real books. I am glad.
When E-books cost MORE than some hardcovers of course they don't sell. Put them back under $9.99 and I'll stop torrenting and begin purchasing again! The publishers are trying to use E-Books to support their print overhead - and have said as much. MacMillan and others are thieves so far as I'm concerned. As soon as they began setting prices vs Amazon the cost of E-books went through the roof. that they try to make them sound like a bargain because they cost less than LIST hardcover even though they cannot be traded, shared, or sold is a sad sham. some authors are starting to go it on their own and skip the publishers altogether - I wish some of the authors *I* like would do that. You know it's sad when a published author makes MORE money going through Amazon direct and selling for a pittance than they do going through a publisher!
Some reading:
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com/
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
http://www.teleread.com/drm/macmillan-ceo-tells-his-side-of-amazon-spat/
http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ Make sure to read ALL of the entries in this one - there are some truly stunning doozies! I wonder what planet this moron comes from?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I don't spend my whole life near a store that sells batteries or power outlets. I travel by bus, train, plane. That's where I want books, because there it's useless to depend on any technology more advanced than. "Flip to the bookmark, read." Real books are just an amazing technology!
Can I light a sig ?
Paula: What's that?
Blank Reg: It's a book!
Paula: Well, what's that?
Blank Reg: It's a non-volatile storage medium. It's very rare. You should 'ave one.
Paula: Stuff it!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
a $10 ebook nets them about as much profit as a $26 hardcover
That doesn't come as a surprise. The paperback version of a book is often cheaper than the ebook!
With a paper book, no one is going to take it from you unless you get mugged, and then, what kind of mugger takes your books? Maybe I'll start spending money on ebooks when I'm guaranteed they're really mine. But that will never happen.
3 years ago, ebooks were less than 1%. Now they're 6%. That's a phenomenal growth rate of 500%. The ebook market is exploding!! Buy some Amazon shares now while they're cheap!!
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
Agreed. They should correct the title.
I also own a Nook. I've been very happy with it, but I've always been a heavy reader. That said, I do believe that ebook prices are outrageous. I don't think anyone would really argue that they aren't. The publishers need to wake up, lest they find themselves in the same boat that the music industry did when Napster blew up.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Contrary to some other opinions around here - I have to say I love the convenience of reading ebooks on my phone. I catch the train to work and the volume of my reading has increased massively. Previously books were too bulky to slip into my suit pocket and I used to read a book once a month or so, now I'm finishing books once every couple of days.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
sorry, but I don't WANT a hardcover. Or an eBook.
I just want a nice cheap paperback.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Does this include any of the used book sales?
Does it include free downloads of ebooks?
What about cheesily photocopied / pirated books?
A while back, I wrote a book, Digital Audio Processing (Doug Coulter). Recently, Amazon has it as ebook form, perhaps without even informing my publisher, and certainly without telling me. It would stink without the code I copy-lefted on the CD that came with the paperback anyway. Though they sanitized the book of any way to contact me, my email address is all over that code which they didn't check. I've gotten emails from unique addresses in the ratio of about 20::1 over the sales my publisher claims. They are cheating, no question. Next time I will self publish and sell off my own forum or something, no point feeding those dishonest jerks any more. I now understand why Frank Zappa had such a hard-on about that whole business. They have reported zero e-book sales, but it's up there cheap. Pretty worthless without the nice code though, and I don't see how you get that off an e-book reader and into compilation, so it's a joke all around. At any rate, they make the RIAA look honest....just my $.02 worth, which is more than they've paid me after the advance. My opinion of those guys is unprintable, so I'll quit now.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
BOOKS RULE. Tech pundits drool.
Amazon's used books section contains some incredible deals. You can often find reference works and fiction for $4.00 (1 penny for the book and $3.99 shipping).
You never have to justify your alignment with a paper book.
Haven't had to "justify my alignment" since about 1992, back in the AD&D days.
BTW whoever formatted all those Gutenberg etexts in that annoying tiny bold italic font... FUCK YOU.
Seriously? "Only"?!? "Only 6%"?
We are talking about an industry that only really had a chance to take off in a practical way for about four years (since Sony introduced it's first e-ink reader). This four year old industry has already taken a 7% chunk out of an industry that is roughly 500 years old (depending on how you define it).
Is it as rapid as digital-only (i.e. no physical media) music overtook CD sales? No. But on it's own, this number is astonishing.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
From TFA:
And as for the death-by-2015 predictions of Negroponte, it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of ebooks will slow. The reason is simple: unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers.
Yeah. Because that's how all those MP3s got onto our iPods. We, um... ripped them from our CDs.
Breakfast served all day!
I like ebooks for when I'm traveling or out of the house. I prefer hard-copy for when I'm in one place for awhile (home). I like Baen's practice of including ebook copies with their hardcover books. I can relax in my easy chair at home with a nice printed copy in my lap, cup of java on the side, yet when I am elsewhere I can take the ebook copy with me on my smartphone and continue reading while at the doctor's office, or wherever. So, I think comparing one format with another is illogical and invalid. Given an ebook costs nothing (or next to) to produce, purchasing a hardcopy book should, in my opinion, include a free ebook copy.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Why does he get voted down?
I'm pretty sure eBooks make up 0% of PRINTED books sold.
I suspect though, that when they do figure out how to scale down, they'll be just as happy keeping the prices high.
And maybe raise them, citing lost profits due to libraries... I mean quiet pirate dens.
That is why I stocked up on crates of used Dan Brown books. Those literature majors will recoil in horror once I start pelting them with that mass market drivel.
Because ebooks are not purchased... they're stolen: http://dilbert.com/2010-09-18/
I think the most amazing part of the article was "citing the head of Microsoft's ClearType team, who says 'I'd be glad to ditch thousands of paper- and hard-backed books from my bookshelves. I'd rather have them all on an iPad."
That should require a Ballmer chair throwing or two. Not only is it an Apple product, it has no ClearType on it, so the praise given is even more unusual.
Call me a luddite if you like but I prefer real paper books. I stare at a screen long enough during most of the day and don't want to look at it more as I read for fun.
/dTd
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Agree. Nook owner here too. But when the ebook price is just the same as the paperback, I go for the latter. I think they even use recycled paper in some degree so is not as bad. And I'm geek enough to feel proud of my collection and showing off my bookshelves. I can't do that with an e-reader!
Isn't it kind of useless to compare overall sales, when only a fraction of printed books are available in ebook formats? Of course total sales are going to be greatly skewed towards dead trees. I'd really like to see a book for book comparison, though im sure printed books will still "win", I believe that the gap would be quite a bit smaller. That gap is going to be there though, at least until publishers truly start embracing the technology rather than just placating customers they otherwise fear they would loose completely.
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
I completely agree -- the main thing that's holding me back from buying an e-ink device is a complete lack of decent typography in the software. If ebook readers want to be treated in the same category as real books, they have to look like real books, and that includes the basic typography rules you've mentioned. It's not hard ... I don't understand why even large companies like Amazon haven't invested in this simple, obvious step. The hardware is there now, it's only the software that is completely lacking.
Mind you, I've noticed that print publishers are becoming more and more compromised in terms of their typography too -- ligature marks are rapidly disappearing, meaning that even in print we now get fugly "fi"s half the time. Drives me insane! :(
From this guy's experience it seems the publishing industry is doing a pretty shitty job of it too -> http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
He's doing it on his own and doing FAR better. His return rates are low, he stays on the "shelf" forever, and he doesn't have to work his ass off promoting like he used to. He gets a greater cut of the profits and makes more money doing it himself too. the publishing industry had better wake up quick, folks like myself who see ebooks at prices nearly as high and sometimes HIGHER than print books aren't happy. A 9meg torrent can contain an entire author's library but honestly I'd rather buy and support authors - and I used to! That changed when you guys jacked prices to the Moon....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
What comes after early adopters? On-time adopters and late adopters. Tablet sales are expected to explode over the next year, and pretending that the market is saturated just because the early adopters have already adopted seems willfully ignorant. My impressoin is that e-book sales aren't about to slow down, they're about to speed up. The summary suggests that 6% is somehow a disappointing percentage of the total market for new books. That's ridiculous. 6% is an astonishing accomplishment given how few people own e-book readers or tablets.
BZZT!!!
Amazon is no longer setting the prices of books. Amazon would LOVE to drop them BACK to where they were but cannot because the Publishers now set the prices! Look at most any Kindle book on Amazon now and note the "This price was set by the publisher" statement just below the price...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
GOING to find themselves? Dude, an entire author's collection can be had for 9megs on a torrent server. Folks put collections up because single books are so damned small it makes no sense to torrent them! Look into Calibre to manage things BTW.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
They may have numbers equivalent to some fraction of Printed Book Sales, but they are assuredly not any part of a category that requires printing.
actually, you just own the wrong reader... my kindle dx has nicely optimized justification (like a real book).
We have best selling authors who are making 50% of their revenue on ebooks. Sure that's not all authors, or even most authors. But some authors, especially ones who target this new medium, are seeing some pretty tremendous numbers. Stephen King had pretty significant numbers for Ur which was ebook only and marketed pretty heavily.
I contend that your wife's decent but not spectacular ebook sales have more to do with marketing strategy than the viability of the ebook medium.
For me there are two categories of books - "average" books that I like, but not incredibly, that I get as ebooks, and there are those that I really treasure that I get as hard-covers. It must be something about the physical nature of books that ebooks just dont do for me. Admittedly a part of me is also always preparing for the post-apocalyptic scenario where there is no power - you dont see e-books giving you a 2% increase in skills.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
How about a compromise where you give print on demand rights to book stores and they print the book as demand requires. No inventory bother for the publisher. I believe Amazon can do this now, and it would be interesting to see if UPS stores could do so also. It seems like thats a way to eliminate the downsides and keep the upsides.
I says "6% of printed book sales", that would imply that for every 100 physical books sold, there are 6 ebooks sold. But then it says 6% of the total market, which means that for every 100 books sold, 6 are ebooks, and 94 are paperback/hardcover.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
When a kindle type device costs $19.95 is made generically by 20 different companies, and can be run on solar cells.
Editing, mainly. Most authors need one or more editors, or at least a collection of "beta readers." I own a literary agency, and I have to tell you, of the best authors we handle, there isn't a single one of them that hasn't handed us a manuscript with glaring errors in it. Some authors are terrible with spelling, grammar -- and yet are compelling storytellers.
Ideally for the authors and the readers, this will settle out as a service offered the authors, rather than an artifact of the path to a physical object, but right now, the publishers have a death grip because they control the majority of the market, which is still printed matter. There is little purpose for them (other than editing) to even exist in the realm of e-books; and that's why they're trying to use print to gather in every book's e-rights. The last thing they want is an author out there going right to the e-store and bypassing them entirely - but that's what the economics here clearly indicate is the optimum path.
Next, you do, generally speaking, need a store. If every book were sold from its own website, it'd be very inconvenient for buyers. A store where you can browse many books is better in too many ways to be overcome by individual web sites. So that middleman will continue to exist as well.
Physical book publishers are literally (sorry) in the position of buggy whip manufacturers at the very beginning of the motorcar era. Other than tabletop photo books, their reasons to exist are beginning to go away. Considering how many fine works by new authors they have prevented the public from seeing, while publishing the most awful dreck simply because an author had sold material in the past, I have to say... good.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I went to Borders last night to browse books, even though I own a Nook (woohoo, we should form a club). I found a paper back I was looking for, that was $1 more than the ebook version. I had a small qualm, and bought the paperback. Why? If the book sucks I can trade it in at a used bookstore, but with the ebook I'm stuck with it, and can never even regain a fraction of my costs.
I love my Nook, and I'm really happy with Barnes and Noble (their tech support is among the best I've ever dealt with, had a cracked bezel, they sent out a replacement with a mere five minutes of talking to some nice woman, with no hold time, and let me keep my Nook in the interim. Almost unheard of.), but I can't stand the fact that I don't actually own the books I buy.
That and there is nothing like a real book, sitting on a real shelf.
It also is a bit silly how expensive ebooks are. I find it odds spending more for an intangible thing than for a real, physical, object. Not that I do, if the book is cheaper in a physical copy, I will always buy the physical copy.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I love Calibre. I softrooted my Nook within a few weeks of owning it, and Calibre is the only way to fly!
As far as torrents go, I've only gone that route with books that I already physically own. Mind you, that does account for quite a lot on my Nook.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
I've just purchased a Kindle 3, and though I've only read one book on it so far I've been very impressed with its layout of text. I was actually walking home the other day and thinking about how I never even noticed a difference between the layout of the pages in the ebook and what I'd expect from a regular book.
I obviously can't comment on how the Kindle compares to the Nook, since I've never tried a Nook, but for what it's worth I think the Kindle's layout engine is just fine.
The article claims that Amazon accounts for 90% of ebook sales. Amazon itself only claims 80%. Apple claims 20%. Barnes & Noble claims 20%. Huh.
Well yea, publishers are certainly struggling with this whole thing and how to pull it off. Part of the problem at the moment is both legal and technical. On the legal side, publishers who have been around for a while have a huge backlog of stuff that they'd like to release. However, no one was thinking of electronic rights even as recently as a decade ago. So every single contract has to be reviewed to determine if the book can be sold electronically. For us that meant manually reading about 10 filing cabinets full of contracts. On the technical side, there's huge confusion about how to produce these things. EPub is emerging as a standard but there's tons of formatting issues and to date we haven't found any silver bullet to turn a PDF or InDesign file into a beautiful looking ePub. You can pay an off-shore conversion house, but you get what you pay for. Publishers have a ton of experience working with printing presses and have developed a process to publish a quality product. None of that in in place yet for e-books. So yes, for sure, there are authors out there who, if they do the right things and get their stuff in order, can do much better. Will Wheaton would be a good example. But you're probably not going to hear a lot from those who tried and failed and trust me ... publishing is awash with failures.
On the price point business, your point is well taken and rational. However, remember that an author who self publishes and fails isn't out much. If it doesn't sell at price A he can bump it down to price B and see what happens since his overhead is ... almost nill. Authors who get a publishing deal tend to demand advances and a fairly large percentage of books never recover that advance in full. That's one of the big reasons you're paying $14.99 for a book that cost 50 cents to print. Failure is expensive for a publisher and the market is extremely fickle. A publisher just hopes that every few years they get a book that sells like crazy to make up for all the others that were dead on arrival.
My wife is a bestselling young adult author. The highest number she's heard on digital sales from her peers is 6% (IIRC), and "less than 1%" is the more common answer.
Emphasis mine. I think that's your answer right there - people don't spend over $200 (which, until very recently, is what they cost) on ebook readers for their tween/early teen kids. They're not renowned for being great stewards of their stuff.
What early adopters? The early adopters were using the Rocketbook and its RCA follow-ons, ten years ago. These Johnny-come-latelies with their Kindles and Sonys and Nooks are the early majority. (the pioneers had loaded books onto their Radio Shack Model 100s and read them two lines at a time.)
Never mind the stewardship bit. Kids go through a lot of books. Most of these aren't bought, they are checked out of the library.
Breaking the ebook reader isn't the problem, filling it up with payware is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
why would I want to buy books and music that is tied to either a particular hardware platform and/or DRM scheme, at or above (or even near) cost of the physical media? Whenever possible I buy CDs or dead tree edition books. Occasionally I have bought DRM-free tracks from Amazon (I don't want to buy iTunes tracks because even though you can get DRM-free stuff from there it's inconvenient to move things between different devices), but overall I prefer physical media, which I can chose to sell later in the second-hand market if I so choose.
Its the same deal with e-textbooks. I teach university-level biology, and when the publisher is asking $100 for the e-book and $120 for the hardcopy, how can I recommend the ebook in good faith, especially when the publisher even outsources their DRM technology?
NO CARRIER
I did it for all of Harry Potter and then nothing else for years - and yes I owned multiple hard and soft copies of that series. Then earlier this year prices went through the roof and some books were no longer available anymore! I was reading a book+ a week and traveling so like I did with music I turned elsewhere. Music I now get from Amazon for my iPhone, not encumbered and a decent price. When books return to being reasonable I will probably do the same. These guys really are being dumb, thankfully some of the authors are a little brighter. I wish more of them had tip jars....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
"The fact that, despite the relative novelty of the medium, and endemic resistance to ebooks, they've already captured a sizeable percentage of the venerable book market says quite a bit about the future."
But they aren't exactly new. They have been widely available for over a decade. Now that 6% doesn't sound nearly so impressive.
"The vast majority of the reading public doesn't own an ebook reader."
The vast majority of the public probably doesn't buy the vast majority of the books. I don't own an ebook reader because it makes no economic sense. If I regularly bought new books I might seriously consider it. A small portion of the public buys a large amount of books. If you can get them to buy ebooks then you can get a significant market share. Whether or not you can get the rest of the public to do so and how long it will take it is difficult to say. But I won't until it doesn't cost extra.
The suspicion is that this growth rate won't maintain itself and that there's a plateau somewhere.
By any chance did anyone at your company work for a newspaper 15 years ago?
Except for the new releases, eBooks should be priced at an average cost of a used paperback copy in good condition, and certainly not a buck more than a brand new, printed paperback, like many e-books are priced today.
Why the hell is this story tagged "Apple?" Because the word "iPad" is in the summary? Come on Apple fanbois, this is low, even for you.
-- Cheers!
Honestly? This sounds a GREAT deal like the music industry. I think we all know how that is turning out! Actually, for the authors it's worse. Music is megs big per song, squish it too much and it sounds like crap. I believe that music is probably easier to make too although I will admit I could be wrong. anyway, a single BOOK can be as little as 700K. Think about that. Megs vs K file sizes. An entire set of works by an author can be had in minutes.
Now then - as a publisher you now have multiple competitors that will happily split profits with independent authors. They even sell devices geared to display this. This is not quite so organized in the music industry - someone like myself couldn't pick up an instrument, record something, and put it on iTunes or the Amazon store but I COULD do that with a book. There are obviously markets for music like that but nothing like either of those two stores yet. Amazon really did something bold there and Apple followed - sorta'. honestly Apple slowed adoption and their store apparently sux so far but oh well.
Sorry man, but I really do think you're working for the guys making buggy whips. They will have a niche but it will shrink as others eat their lunch. Paper won't disappear overnight and shouldn't disappear completely but I suspect that these guys so deeply invested in printing are going to be in for a rude shock before too long... The good news is that depending upon your skill set you can do the same thing - just for different customers directly and you too may make more money if you try. If you read the comment responses to the blog I linked you'll find lots of stories about this I believe.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
LaTeX does what you want (you can change page size with a recompile of the source), but it has DRM issues (who needs an ereader as an expensive dvi viewer?). Also, is it the fault of the ereader, or of the ebook format(s)?
a dual media purchase just like you might buy vinyl + 320k mp3 in one package, would be welcome.
Allow us the convenience of a digital form at no additional cost, and provide additional benefits such as a translation or original version, just like we get with DVD movies. Give me the hard copy as well, so I don't need to own and carry fragile, environmentally hazardous computers, and have the superior durability and flexibility of paper.
Then interest will surely pick up!
and that's a real shame, haven't they learn anything from the evolution of digital music?
geek page at KY speaks
is that while my co-author and I split 15% of the wholesale price (about half the cover price) on physical books, we get something closer to 50% of any ebook sales... and, I think, if the ebook was bought direct from the publisher, that's 50% of what was paid. So even though e-book sales are a pretty small portion of total book sales, on the last statement I got from my publisher, ebook sales comprised a rather large portion of the money actually paid to me.
Many of the "e-book" titles available on Amazon would never make it to the printed stage.
There is a growing contingent of $2-$10 "photo books", little more than hastily thrown together erotic photosets, some at web resolution, some inexplicably converted to greyscale (and poorly). Amazon has quietly become a supplier of zipsets that you can read with any Kindle app, and is including them in their sales figures. I won't link. They're easy to find.
I have to wonder if this influx of titles really took off after Apple started banning "Babe photo" apps. (Except the corporate-sponsored ones.)
For me there are two categories of books - "average" books that I like, but not incredibly, that I get as ebooks, and there are those that I really treasure that I get as hard-covers. It must be something about the physical nature of books that ebooks just dont do for me. Admittedly a part of me is also always preparing for the post-apocalyptic scenario where there is no power - you dont see e-books giving you a 2% increase in skills.
You're going to burn the hard-covers as fuel? Not a bad plan.
In a perfect world, books needn't go out of print. Every work ever committed to digital media should be available online for purchase at a fair price - maybe $5 per title.
Hell, the distribution would be virtually free, just a little storage and some bandwidth. And they'd make sales that they otherwise wouldn't. And we could find the old titles we love without having to shell out $30 + P&H for a 20YO mass market paperback that'll fall apart if we read it more than once.
Oh, and no DRM. Obviously.
That's what it'll take to get me onboard. "I may be some time..."
Them's fightin' words
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
As pragmatists everyone will eventually transition to ebooks. The current selection of nooks, kindles, or iPads may not necessarily be enticing enough today to bring the world to their door, but that just means there's time to speculate. Textbooks needed to make the transition a decade ago, but remain extremely timid, and will most likely be some of the last publishers to transition, but in doing so they will effectively herald the beginning of the end for books. Of the current major failing points, we have a few: devices; formats; protection; permission, piracy. The most successful so far with these issues has been Apple, but time is starting to show wear on their model, too. It will be interesting to see how all this progresses, especially in light of how breathtakingly easy it is to copy and paste text.
Pretty soon, some wacko American pastor will want to burn electronic copies of the Koran.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But if e-books are being printed physically, then something is really off. I mean, it is pretty astounding that there are that many ebooks printed. what?
Here in Belgium, i bought a book for 9€, and i saw it in epub format for 16€, with DRM...
One is cheaper and i can give it to my mother, another is expensive and is limited to one e-reader. Which of them do you choose?
lernu.net
What I've discovered in the recent years is that I don't need 10 000 Books. Not in a private Library, be in dead tree form or in electronic form.
What I do need, is the attention span and the concentration to stick to those good books on the topics that interest me. And finish them one at a time. Java Programming, Cooking, Philosophy, or a good Stephen King or the latest William Gibson, Vernor Vinge or Neal Stephenson. And have the time to reread those that are very good, interesting and/or difficult to understand.
I used to pack up quite a few books on whatever trip I went and even if it was just going on a 2 day trip. Roleplaying Sourcebooks, various OReillys on my current PL of interest and then a novel I was currently reading. I've come to notice that that was waste of time, since I hardly ever got to actually finish one, besides the good novels. Given, that new German PHP Cookbook is a 1200 Page ... Cookbook, and not something you read from back to back like a novel. And those type of books are quite close to pointless in paper form and best delivered in electronic form. ... But I don't need an E-Book reader for that. I use them on the box I'm currently programming on and carry them around with me on a USB-Stick.
The latest novel I'm reading will hold out a few week - and I'm fine carrying that around in paper.
As for my library I had and partly still have: I have been reducing it bit by bit and am aiming for a sweetspot of maybe 50 - 100 books, comic albums and RPG Books included. That is more than enough to read and more than enough to lugg around when I move.
Maybe I'll get an eBook reader some day, the Kindle 3 looks impressive. But it's not that I really need it. Because what goes for Books certainly goes for electronic gadgets and computer games too.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The hardware isn't all there - the resolutions on the current readers are still at the barely acceptable level of 150-200 dpi. Better resolution would certainly improve the legibility of proper ligatures and kerning and particularly small script and drawings, not to mention graphical effects. This is why laser printers went quickly from the 300 dpi of early printers to 600 dpi and higher. Professional printing presses can easily provide 2500 dpi, which gives a much cleaner look for script and graphics on real books than is possible on an e-book.
"People are cheap and don't want to spend more for an eBook than the mass market paperback version"
Sounds like you've got shares in an eBook company, my friend!
Perhaps, people are *sensible* and weigh up the cost-benefit analysis and take the best option. "Hey buddy, I've got 2 identical products here, one costs $5 and one costs $15. Which one do you want?". Err.....
Probably people are looking at similar priced products and weighing up which one works best for them. There's a huge number of people once you step out of the computing and shiny-shiny ooh new geek toy communities that are unlikely to be interested in ebooks for a long time if ever. They'll be considering the whole technology package and how it fits into their lives. Most people in developed countries have come across a lot of technology in their daily lives now. They'll compare ebook readers to other technologies and factor that into their purchases of books in whatever format. "So if I want my book in ebook format, I've got to put down a couple of hundred dollars on another device before I can even open the first page of my ten dollar book, and it will probably last only a couple of years then break and I'll have to get another one, I am going to have to think about chargers and batteries, if it breaks will I be able to get all my books off the old one onto the new one in five minutes, can I read it on the beach?" - a lot of factors in there before ebook formats as technical packages get as good as 5 dollar books.
"Dancing numbers" and the illogical sums. From TFA:
Hardcover+paperback: 29,3% ebooks
Amazon sales: 90% of total
If 90% is 29,3%, then the 100% is.... wait... it's not the "6 percent" MIT says! They used a Pentium 1 to do the calculus?
The 1984 debacle showed that real books have an extra advantage over virtual ones: Amazon, Microsoft or the government can't censor them or steal them back without physically breaking into my house.
That and there is nothing like a real book, sitting on a real shelf.
I used to think that about CDs, but after I ripped them all I just found the CDs an annoying waste of space. Likewise the bottom of one of my cupboards is full of books that I need to put into storage somewhere, and the top of it and the shelf next to my bed are covered in books that I haven't got around to yet. If I could put them all onto one device, I would.
I've bought one eBook as an experiment so far to see how I enjoy it. I certainly won't miss not having the extra space if I get into them.
When you buy a book, you aren't paying so that you can have a physical object, you're buying for the story. Now I agree that eBooks should be cheaper than they are, but after a month or so I became totally at ease with buying MP3s instead of CDs. I keep backups, but even if I lost everything and the backup, I'd feel justified in torrenting all of my music to recover it.
Note that you can also check out eBooks from certain libraries these days. I think that is a great way to go if you read a lot.
which is totally what she said
Then buy the paperback and quit whining. Eventually eBooks will be cheaper than the paperbacks anyway, and if you really want a paper copy you could print it yourself. When they have flexible e-ink eBook readers I don't see why you'd want to print it anyway, beyond experiencing some form of nostalgia. Personally I read books so that I can get the content out of them and into my brain, not so that I can lovingly let my sweat absorb into the pages.
which is totally what she said
Comment removed based on user account deletion
BTW whoever formatted all those Gutenberg etexts in that annoying tiny bold italic font... FUCK YOU.
If you want Gutenberg texts sanely formatted, go to FeedBooks. They typeset them with TeX for your eBook reader's screen size, with configurable text size.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
My single biggest complaint about my Sony Reader is that they've put exactly zero effort into this. Sony officially moved away from their proprietary BBeB ebook format a while ago and adopted EPUB, but their EPUB implementation doesn't even support justified text. I've found myself using Calibre to convert EPUBs to BBeB format because, although lacking all the things you mention, it at least displays justified text.
Of course, this is only possible because I can strip the Adobe DRM that comes with most EPUB ebooks relatively easily.
What I've started doing now is buying Kindle ebooks, stripping the DRM and converting them straight to BBeB, simply because they're so much cheaper. It's rather ridiculous and I'm considering just getting rid of the Sony and buying one of the new Kindles.
Someone should bundle it. Gutenberg Project books with an e-Ink reader, with the content pre-installed on the device and on a DVD.
Also, e-Books won't take off until you get a "free" ebook version with any purchased book. Since so few books are in electronic format, you STILL have to buy paper books, so you can't carry "all your library in one convenient package". And, since they INSIST that you're now buying a license not the product (which makes me wonder why, when you torrent the content, they want to charge you with distributing the *license*...), the content SHOULD be available in electronic form when you buy the paper format.
Better: this way, as long as the price is no higher, this will probably spur purchase of the book readers, the ebooks (if they are cheaper than the deadtree version), AND the paper books (you're getting two books, one for reading on the beach, one for your gadget you just bought).
But the content industry is TERRIFIED of someone else POSSIBLY making money off their stuff, even if they weren't making money with it themselves and accountants EVERYWHERE consider someone else making money as theft from their company. So they keep the market fragmented because they don't want someone else making money (because that's THEFT!!!).
I hope the trend toward E-books is as slow as possible. It's annoying that my local universities are putting E-books in their catalog and restricting access to students and faculty. At least with a physical book you can go through the stacks and read whatever you want as a member of the general public.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It's the only avenue for haggling. You know, where TWO people come together and AGREE a price. The basis of ALL commercial activity.
Well since there is a monopoly, the only way you can agree a price is either
a) Full price
or
b) Free (torrent)
The price signal therefore shows what the sustainable market price is. If your books retail at $100 and as many books are pirated (from users who would otherwise have paid), then the REAL market price of your book is near $50. When reducing the price to less than that, you are not gaining so many new purchases, when reducing the price less than that, you are still leaving people's money on the table.
You see, it goes like this:
Provider: I will sell you this book for $14.99
Customer: Too much. I propose $8.99
Provider: Sod off, $14.99
Customer: OK, you can't have my $8.99.
Customer: (proceeds to get a torrent)
The provider LEFT the customer's money on the table. REFUSED to accept the offer or even negotiate.
Therefore the provider DOESN'T WANT that money and therefore CANNOT LOSE it. They NEVER HAD the $14.99 they wanted, that belongs to the customer.
But I guess you and the copyright holders want a communist style managed economy, rather than a capitalist free market one.
We have also dabbled our toes in ebooks - we have two smart-phones, one dedicated reader, and a library of maybe 50 ebooks (as opposed to a couple thousand paper books). Even at 50 books, I am already frustrated by the quality of the ebook software on all of these devices. Reading is ok - it's the library management that sucks. Even PC-based software like Calibre isn't much good.
Here's an example: Suppose you have a mass of titles by the same author, some are individual books, others belong to various series. You've just finished a book, and want to read the next one in that particular series. With paper books, I will have put the books on the shelf in the right order. Put the finished book back, take the next one to the right. With ebooks? The books are most likely sorted by title. The series information is generally not available. You wind up opening up several books, hoping that they list the series in the right order, or that you can tell from the publication date.
This is just one minor frustration among many. When I imagine having a couple of thousand ebooks in one library - gack, it's really a pretty horrible thought.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Printed books will never die out until ebook readers are good enough quality to read in bright sunlight, have batteries that last forever and are cheap enough to leave on the beach while you go for a swim.
Until I can use an ebook "like a book", I will never pay for one.
What do I mean - "like a book"?
- read it without batteries
- read it 150 yrs after purchase
- read it on a deserted island
- give it to a friend to read, get it back
- give it to another and another and 100 friends to read and get it back
- buy it used at a used ebook store for $0.50
- check it out from my library without needing MS-Windows to read it. DRM sucks folks.
- give away the readers and have free reader upgrades
Publishers have forgotten that we are customers and that for wide adoption to happen, convenience is king.
>ligatures
Please, please not.
I've always wondered whether they are some kind of rendering glitch and then found out people do it on purpose O_o
I would agree, it does sound a lot like the music industry although despite their own best efforts to destroy themselves they're still around. I would guess that it's easier to make a book than music but it's much harder to do it well. There's no formula you can run a manuscript through to determine if it's good or not. We're trying to not make any rash decisions and move at the right pace, not too fast and not too slow. I'm making an assumption here, so I apologize if I'm wrong, but it doesn't sound like you've worked with authors a whole lot. If your only interaction is via blogs then you're getting a very skewed impression. While a few will certainly jump ship, the vast majority of them have no interest. Remember, they sought us out, not the reverse. Self publishing isn't a new idea and this isn't the first piece of technology that's come along that 'threatened' the publishing industry. Each time there were a few successes and a much larger number of abject failures. Ever since the personal computer came into being we've been called the buggy whip industry. Again, to clarify, everyone sees the writing on the wall and nobody in their right mind is saying no to e-books. However, no one is making any rash moves.
Print on demand has become much cheaper these days and we actually do a lot of it already albeit internally. Rather than just put a book out of print we'll call it out of stock indefinitely but if a store wants it we'll print it as a short run via a POD system. However it is still limited in terms of print quality and cover, paper, and binding options. For novels this isn't a huge barrier but non-fiction, specifically expensive Academic books, would be a tough sell without a nice cloth binding. So until POD has true parity with what we can get from an actual press it won't fully supplant how it's done now.
I think an important distinction between the music situation and the book situation is that many people (still the majority) perceive the paper product as having more value than the digital one. In music it's a digital format either way. The only difference is whether it has lossy compression or not. A lot of people cannot hear the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a flac or wav version, but there is a niche market of people who can. Right now it is like publishers are selling 64 kbps MP3s for the same price as the uncompressed PCM version. Over the years, if and when cheap (say $50 or less) e-ink reader displays reach a point where they are virtually indistinguishable from ink on paper you may find more people making the jump to digital formats. For the moment they are not really comparable. I have only recently started purchasing direct download music because 320 kbps bit rate mp3s are finally available. I don't buy much though because I still prefer the uncompressed PCM versions.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
No one ebook reader can read all the different ebook formats. Typically, ebooks are not transferable between different ebook devices. I can possibly remove the DRM, and convert the format, but that is a headache at best. This may also affect the cost of an ebook relative to a real book. For example, if I want to read a "Nook" ebook on my Kindle, I am expected to buy the book again. I can get an ebook in ePub format from my local library, but I would not be able to read on my Kindle, I would be expected to buy a separate device for that.
This is really happening due to the difference in savings between the hardback and its ebook and the paperback and its ebook. During hardcover release the ebook is typically $10-$12 which is a savings of around $10-$15 depending on the discounts most book retailers place on hardcovers. Paperbacks are around $7.99-$8.99 and the ebooks released with them are $6.69 or so for a savings of about $2.30 at best. For hardcovers this is a good deal and if all you want is to read the book on the New York Times bestseller list then this is for you, but the savings for paperbacks hardly make it worthwhile. So for the person who likes to read some of the New York Times bestseller list or has a good reading group an ebook reader is gold, but for more casual readers that like to pick up novels that form holes in their repertoire, ebooks need a little work still. All in all, though, I see a good use for their existence.
While reading your comment, I realized that e-books are not picking up not because of all obvious limitations and curable birth defects you mentioned, but because of the increasing difficulty of the genre of written word itself.
The written language is nothing but a code not unlike XML code for multimedia presentation that each human renders into his head into pictures and scenes and the success of each book is hugely dependent on the ability of the large portion of readers to visiualize what is happening.
Reader, like Cipher from Matrix, looks at the text, but all he sees is "blond, brunette".
In Matrix, the ability tor read that vintage green-on-black aesthetically flying code is available only to unwilling geeks trapped in the underground of Zion. In contrast to human batteries that have chosen the red pill, modern humanity have chosen the blue (screen) one long time ago, so the demise of book-understanding geeks is all but inevitable.
I used to read tons of books while I was still in Russia - it was more or less (video and TV was laughable) the only media available. Russia was Zion, and I was Cipher. In the West I found that blue pill of video and cinema, so i went back to my full time battery (powering our comcast and roadrunner overlords) in a comfortably numbing cradle of the chair+tv+lamp.
The slow start of e-book is an indication of the demise of the whole genre. IMHO. Or may be, I just want to justify my own permanent loss of the ability to read.
Paraphrasing (again) the Matrix: "Tell me, Mr. Mapkinase ... what good is a Kindle... if you're unable to read?"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I'm surprised the paperback was more expensive for you. With the exception of ebooks on special sale (those $1 offers), they often cost more than the paperback.
For example, B&N had two different copies of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (One was thicker but not as tall/wide as the other) - both were cheaper than the ebook version.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Forgot this in my other reply - As to owning the books that you buy, at least B&N's DRM is pretty benign.
1) The key is derived from your credit card number and name, so will never change for a book. (Could be frustrating if you change CC number though - not sure how their system handles key changes because of that.)
2) The key derivation algorithm has been broken, so you can decrypt the books that you own.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I predict the death of Nicholas Negroponte within five years.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Am I the only one stunned that we think eBooks may die because they only have 6% market share!? EBook readers have been around for a long time, but ebook sales didn't really take off until the Kindle in 2007. In ~3 years ebook sales have stolen almost 6% of market share (a guess that market share for ebooks was close to negligible pre-Kindle, but I bet it's not THAT far off). Are we so immune to technology churn that we expect a new technology to steal the market every 2 years? I think it's a sign that it's more than just technophiles buying books, and that there is a solid market for ebooks.
As for cost, don't forget that almost all book are formatted and edited for printing on paper, currently. To create an ebook copy, they need to go through more rounds of formatting and editing to make sure it displays correctly in assorted ebook formats, and there is a cost associated with that. However, I think most of their pricing is based on trying to avoid cannibalizing their print sales. Sooner or later a non-establishment publisher will realize that they aren't as important as they used to be, and become a service to authors for editing, printing, and perhaps some marketing, and the prices will come down accordingly.
Wait, so because you don't like the price, it's ok to download it without paying for it? Man up, if you don't want to pay for it, find something else to read.
There is no way that books will die. Those who prefer a digital format have undoubtedly already jumped on the bandwagon. It is a little bit like predicting that computers had heralded the death of paper and pen. Judging by my kids' back to school supply lists, Staples will be doing a heady business in them for a long time coming. Pam http://www.thatgirlblogs.com/
"broke down prices of ebooks "
Strangely though, it calculated marketing costs separately for hardcopies and ebooks. Marketing has always media-free component in it and I would just sum up all the marketing costs and divide it per copy sold no matter in what media format.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
In the UK, it seems very, very hard to find eBooks, and that can't be helping sales. I have a Sony PRS-505, and I have to visit 5 - 10 sites to find a book, and only if that is available. Some books have dismal sales because they only release books 1, 3 and 4 of a series as eBooks. If I can't get book 2, I'm not buying the others.
For a number of reasons, I can't buy paper books any more. It's mostly a space thing.
At the moment, it takes 30 - 60 minutes to buy many popular books. First, I have to buy an Amazon.com gift card with my real account. Then I have to use a proxy to hide my location and use a second account to use that gift card to buy a book on Amazon.com. Then I have to strip the DRM and then finally I can load it onto my reader. What a pain - If I could find the content, I'd pirate it!
To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, "The best thing about a book is that I can own it". I can't give away an e-book, or loan it to a friend, or (usually) check one out of a library. Until these things change, I'm staying with paper.
Not only am I a scientist, I play one on TV
I doubt if the automated typesetting used in ebooks is going to look as good as the human-tweaked typesetting in physical books for some time. On the other hand, automated typesetting gives the reader control of type size and spacing, which is enough of a benefit that I'm willing to go without the typesetting nuances for a while. I'd also like to see more choices of typeface available, and at least the option for the publisher to specify a "default" typeface. That being said, the serif typeface used by the Kindle is really lovely and eminently readable, and seems perfectly matched to the resolution of the screen.
No, probably not. But what sucessfull CEO has ever learned something recently? Learning and knowing is for the lower classes.
Rethinking email
I love my Nook, and I'm really happy with Barnes and Noble (their tech support is among the best I've ever dealt with, had a cracked bezel, they sent out a replacement with a mere five minutes of talking to some nice woman, with no hold time, and let me keep my Nook in the interim. Almost unheard of.), but I can't stand the fact that I don't actually own the books I buy.
Glad to hear it. My girlfriend had literally the exact same experience with her Kindle, right down to the excellent response. I really feel like competition is doing a lot of good here. That and, probably, the companies involved are smart enough to know that people won't buy e-books if they're not happy with their readers.
First off I just recently picked up a kindle 3 and I am loving it, but the reality is that for the general public its not worth it. If you read a book a month it takes a long time to pay off the cost of the Kindle & accessories and thats only if you buy new. If you shop at used book stores the kindle and other ebook readers offer nothing but convenience in terms of having 1 device with multiple books vs.storing/carrying multiple books. The paperback is a near perfect format for most people small, easy to carry and durable.
For voracious readers like myself and most of my family ebooks make a lot more sense than it does for the general public. Buying a ebook version of a new hardback saves between $3-10 a book depending on store discounts and pricing. Some new paperbacks are almost 50% less in ebook format than at the local bookstore. So when your spending $100+ a month on books the savings can add up quickly plus storing those books is a non issue. Of course you don't have any resale value but for us we don't buy the book planning to resell it.
The other issue of course is storage, for those individuals with either a small home/apartment or a large library storing books can become problematic. Of course moving to a kindle does nothing to alleviate current storage problems as it is prohibitively expensive to repurchase a large volume of books as ebooks. If ebook publishers dramatically lowered their prices on older books say 5+ years old they would see a dramatic increase in purchases. There are a number of series I enjoy that I already have in paper format and I would love to have the entire series in an ebook format. If they moved the majority of books older than 5-10 years old to say $2.99 I would be much more likely to repurchase entire series just to have them all on one device.
In any event I feel that the ebook market is still a fledgling market and that it will experience dramatic changes in the next 5-10 years.
"It also is a bit silly how expensive ebooks are."
Paying the same price for an ebook as a paperback is like paying full price for a photo of a famous painting.
I refuse to buy any of these ebooks until they stop being stupid with the prices. Does Apple have to come in and crush publishers like they did with the music industry when they stuck by their $15 CD prices and ignored mp3s for many years?
Or will companies like Overdrive.com put them out of business by allowing libraries to give out eBooks for free? My library allows me to borrow new ebooks for free using the overdrive software and it's compatible with the Nook and Sony Readers. Why bother buying when I can legally download for free? Since I never own my eBook purchase anyway I don't see the difference.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
There's plenty of examples out there of technology that has rapid growth in the first years and then levels off with slow growth. The existence of a plateau is the suspicion but at the end of the day the goal is to make as many e-books available as possible. Every new title we release has an e-book now so if tomorrow e-book sales jumped to 50% that would be fine with us.
I'm not a nook owner, but I started reading ebooks on my iphone. I have never bought an ebook, and as long as the ridiculous pricing scheme stays the same I don't expect to ever purchase one. I've taken public domain works and created ebooks from them and, even better, loaded some from project gutenberg. I've made PDFs of some printed works for my own use, but no novels yet.
The upside to reading on my iphone is that I always have it, and its collection of books, with me. Since starting this I've read the Three Musketeers and a good part of the sequels simply due to opportunity. The paper copy of Three Musketeers is still sitting on my shelf unread.
Its the opportunistic nature of it, the ability to read whenever/wherever I have the time to read, that I like. There are two Walter Jon Williams novels I've not managed to read yet, one of which is available through Apple's iBooks -- for what appears to be full cover price. Which I've already paid for. I could see paying a nominal fee to gain access to an electronic version, but to re-pay full price? No way.
Instead, I'll read from our rich public domain (it may not be getting any richer, but there *is* quite a bit out there, some even from the last century and, new or old, quite a bit that is very good). And Walter Jon Williams' writing will be just as brilliant when I manage to find the time to sit down and read the paper copy.
I used to think that about CDs, but after I ripped them all I just found the CDs an annoying waste of space.
This is true. I went through the same thing, and only recently discarded (most) of my CD cases (keeping the CDs in a large binder), my girlfriend still has a giant box of cases she hasn't gotten rid of. But then again CDs are a rather new medium, and are rather prone to "slop" (how many times have you realized that you have a giant pile of case-less discs sitting on your stereo?). Records, on the other hand, are still collected and displayed, and sometimes even framed. CDs don't have history or prestige, for lack of a better word.
Probably a "different strokes for different folks" issue here. I don't know if I can live without a wall of books (obvious hyperbole). I grew up with a dedicate library room, and probably spent a decent portion of my childhood staring at it, pondering the contents. In my den I have a full wall of psychology references and philosophy books (from college) that I still crack from time to time. And to be honest, I like the palpable feel of all that knowledge sitting 3 feet to my left. When me and the girlfriend finally bought a house together, our first project was mounting shelves, and combining our libraries (and scoffing at each others taste in books).
I honestly can't quite put my finger on it.
Though owning an ebook reader will/has drastically reduce the amount of books I buy in the future. I will probably only end up buying books I really enjoyed, and read first on my reader, keeping the so-so books purely digital. Two reasons, I like having the physical representation of the good memory (why print and frame digital photographs?), and I'm still dubious on the trustworthiness of ebooks. They seem rather ephemeral.
And, as of yet, ebooks don't have the ability to replace reference books, or books that require marginals, heavy book marking, and non-linear reads (like philosophy books, or textbooks, or any technical material).
That and shopping for books at a brick and mortar bookstore is still better than using an online store. At least for me.
As for the library thing... It is an awesome feature, I just wish there were more books available for that service.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Yep I guess we just think of things differently. I have something like 10GB of digital photos, and the only time I've printed any were as gifts, I've never actually printed any for myself..
I do like physical bookstores, it's easier when just browsing. I rarely read any more though. The only new books I'm guaranteed to read are ones by Pratchett :) That's why I bought his latest book as an eBook, to try to give the format a decent shot at me actually trying it out.. might start it tonight.
which is totally what she said
You are correct, around 90% of the time the paperback is cheaper than the ebook version. Which is absolutely inane. But I think the book was, perhaps, on sale online. It was only a dollar difference, which is laughable. If I hate the book, I can take it to Bookman's and trade it for perhaps $2, meaning it is a full dollar cheaper. Heh.
Though there are a couple site where you can compare prices for ebooks (ebookprice.info was the first in Google, though there was a better one out there), and often you can find decent deals. Never really a game breaker though. Using Cryptonomicon, there is a whopping $1 difference between all of the online stores (range 10.99 - 11.99), where the paperback is 8.99 from Amazon.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Does Apple have to come in and crush publishers like they did with the music industry when they stuck by their $15 CD prices and ignored mp3s for many years?
Sadly, a large part of ebook pricing is Apple's fault. They made a deal with the publishers letting them set the price. They used this as ammunition against places like Amazon. Amazon used to sell for 9.99 and below, but thanks to Apple letting the publishers feel emboldened, those days are no more.
Pretty much we rely on the ability of publishers to realize that their prices are stupid, and don't help business. Obviously this may never happen. As the various **AAs show, big media businesses aren't very flexible when it comes to adapting to a digital economy.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The situation here might change when the girlfriend breaks down and buys an ereader too. Right now we have a hard time sharing books when I purchase ebooks, for obvious reasons. I just finished (finally) reading China Mieville's Bas-Lag books, and eventually ended up purchasing the paperbacks (used, for around $3 each) so the girlfriend could read them. Not a big deal, since I really enjoyed them.
Yes, sharing ebooks is dubious, and can be illegal. Tough, I have no moral qualms about it.
Though there still are books that I can't get in ebook format. I recently completed my collection of Stanislaw Lem's books, and last I checked none of them are available digitally, and probably won't be judging from the increasing rarity of his books.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
If I have to buy a new eBook for each new laptop and each new OS, then a Paperback will still be a small fraction of the total eBook price.
Also, the Paperback doesn't need batteries or electricity to work. And it's great for throwing at cats or dogs when they do bad things.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The books should be priced at .99 and authors should make money on t-shirts and concert tours.
I drank what? -- Socrates
And what percentage of sales do ebooks have in the second-hand market?
--
Sometimes technology is not the answer you have been looking for.
Negroponte is talking rubbish. No more printed books in five years? Very unlikely. Yes, there will be fewer one color books around but I can't see the demise of full color illustrated books any time soon.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Time for you to start learning to read proper, grown-up writing and stop sounding out all the words, then.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Correct, I've not worked with authors other than to read end-product. However I love to read A LOT! I began having issues buying books when their price crept up past the $4-5 range for paperbacks - I began buying used. Then Costco and other discount pipelines became available and I could get hardbacks for pretty reasonable prices. But my bookshelves overflowed and I really hate to get rid of books. I found out about the Kindle, tried it out, and began reading more than ever! Then this row with Amazon began and next thing I knew books that I'd been paying $9 or less for now cost $12 or more. I'm sorry but when I can read a book in a matter of a few sittings over say 2-3 days that is just way too much - I guess I was spoiled. So, I no longer buy from the publishers and my reading has gone way down.
I know multiple people who own Kindles and many who are interested in them come to me asking about mine. When I travel on airplanes people ask me about it pretty often and I'm always happy to show it off. However now when I show it off I have to advise them to go look at book prices BEFORE they buy. Because while the Kindle price has fallen into a range where many can afford it the book prices put it out of reach - you cannot goto a used book store and buy an e-book.
Every single person I know who owns a Kindle reads more now than they used to or did before prices forced them to be much more picky about what they buy. Frankly it's pretty sad...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Why would you need to rebuy it each time? Amazon's Kindle is multi-platform (annoyingly no Linux yet so I only have it on my Android phone), and even keeps the page you were last at synched across devices. It's not intended to lock you in to one device. And if you buy DRM free eBooks you can put them wherever you wish..
I keep my phone and laptop charged up as a matter of principal, the battery thing doesn't seem like an issue to me. e-ink devices also last weeks, don't tell me you can't keep that charged up..
As for the cats and dogs.. um. Okay.
which is totally what she said
Yeah I noticed Amazon was advertising Stephen Fry's latest autobiography for Kindle, I previewed it and in the introduction noticed it's a sequel.. and the first section wasn't available as an eBook, which is quite annoying considering I'd rather read them in order.
I've bought a couple of second hand books recently too, I have no problem with that, though presumably it will be very illegal to resell eBooks. I have no problems if you want to share your eBooks either, it's up to you ;) I've never tried audio books but that might be an interesting way to share eBooks.. could be kind of like watching a movie together.
which is totally what she said
You're new to this, aren't you?
I've been involved in computing since the 70s.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I don't mind DRM as such, at least not for the reasons most people cite. It doesn't bother me that I can't resell a book after I read it. I'm not a book dealer, and the prices of used books are generally so low that it is hardly worth my time to sell my old books. Yes, I'd regard a mechanism for loaning ebooks as a plus, and I'd probably pay a few cents extra per book for the privilege, but it's not a big deal. I don't loan all that many books, and as I upgrade my ereader, I expect that I'll eventually have a "loaner" ereader or two that I can use for that purpose.
My only real real concern with DRM is the possibility that my vendor may go out of business and take my library with him. No, it's probably not that huge a risk with a major vendor such as Amazon, perhaps less than the risk that my physical library will be destroyed in a fire or a flood, but many major companies of the past are now defunct.
I'd like to see the industry work out some sort of insurance/backup system. Perhaps there could be an industry-funded cooperative database that maintains a backup of my library, with some mechanism for providing access to users if the original vendor goes down. I'd certainly be willing to pay a bit extra per book in return for that assurance.
Sorry, but I don't think I'd want to read a book written by someone who doesn't use his shift key.
Free Martian Whores!
"MIT's technology blog argues that ebook sales represent 'only six pecent of the total market for new books.'"
When people have the option of paying $x for a physical object or (0.9)x for some electrons that represent the physical object, they're probably going to pick the physical object.
When the price of ebooks reflects the cost of manufacturing and publishing them, they'll sell better.
New to what? Pointing out when people are wrong about something?
which is totally what she said
To clarify: I already pointed out how Amazon are multi-platform and multi-device, and if it did arise that I had to get a whole new format to suit some other device, I would have no ethical qualms about re-downloading the book illegally, or using a converter program to change the format.
If you've been involved in computing since the 70s then you should have noticed that things can and do change, and in the realm of digital media things generally have slowly been getting better and more open over time - however much the publishers try to screw people over.
which is totally what she said
Your physical device - either computer or reader - won't last that long.
My paperback, on the other hand, works fine.
In fact, I have some paperbacks from my mom from back in WW II, that are still very functional.
My point stands.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Depends what you mean by won't last long. I'm waiting for an eBook reader that I think I'd want to keep for a long time, say 5-10 years before the next upgrade.
The important thing though is that the content be accessible on any device for the remainder of my lifespan. It is very unlikely that I will ever have a time in my life where I won't own a laptop, tablet, phone, eBook reader or some other as yet uninvented device that I can use to read eBooks. Having been in computing since the 70s I would have thought your situation similar.
which is totally what she said
My point is total lifetime.
Read the top of the thread.
Utility is an economic meaure, which is expended over time. An eBook, by actual existence, has a shorter utility period and thus a higher cost per time unit.
Let alone the price of electricity. That ain't free either.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
and to date we haven't found any silver bullet to turn a PDF or InDesign file into a beautiful looking ePub. :/. PDF is a format that stores data in a "printer ready" form. Going back from that form to a form where things are assigned meaning is rather difficult. Worse there is no gaurantee of thier being any information on how to map the character codes used in the document to unicode (some of them may not even map to unicode at all)
I doubt there will ever be one
Depending on how the pdf was created it may have helpful metadata but many PDFs won't (hell it's perfectly valid for a PDF to just have one big image on every page).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well, for me the utility is not all about cost. Again it's similar to the CDs vs MP3 scenario. I'd pay more for an MP3 player because it can hold all my music in a very compact, yet accessible, way - likewise eventually I'll be doing the same with all my books, movies and games :)
which is totally what she said
Does gluing pieces together constitute a derived work?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It is really a very very good article, GHD Hair Straighteners and CHI Flat Irons onlinestore - ghdhairsiron.com. Discount GHD Straighteners, CHI Hair Straighteners, CHI Nano Ceramic Flat Iron hot sale. Include CHI Original Flat Iron, CHI Earth Flat Iron, CHI Pink Dazzle Flat Iron, CHI Camo Flat Iron, CHI Classic Flat Iron, CHI Digital Flat Iron, CHI Guitar Flat Iron, CHI Turbo Flat Iron, CHI Wee Flat Iron, GHD Kiss Hair Straighteners, GHD Mini Hair Straighteners, GHD MK4 Hair Straighteners, GHD MK5 Hair Straighteners, GHD Precious Hair Straighteners, GHD Radiance Hair Straighteners, GHD Salon Hair Straighteners and GHD New Hair Straighteners - Choose Your Destiny - GHD Green Envy Hair Straighteners, GHD Blue Serenity Hair Straighteners, GHD Red Lust Hair Straighteners, GHD Purple Indulgence Hair Straighteners. We provide good service, our GHD IV Hair Straighteners, CHI Nano Flat Iron, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron free shipping and fast. Buy CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Original, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Pink, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Thermostat Blue, CHI Flat Iron Dazzle, CHI Flat Iron Pink Dazzle, CHI Digital Ceramic Flat Iron, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Guitar, CHI Turbo Flat Iron 1", CHI Turbo Flat Iron 2",
It is really a very very good article, GHD Hair Straighteners and CHI Flat Irons onlinestore - ghdhairsiron.com. Discount GHD Straighteners, CHI Hair Straighteners, CHI Nano Ceramic Flat Iron hot sale. Include CHI Original Flat Iron, CHI Earth Flat Iron, CHI Pink Dazzle Flat Iron, CHI Camo Flat Iron, CHI Classic Flat Iron, CHI Digital Flat Iron, CHI Guitar Flat Iron, CHI Turbo Flat Iron, CHI Wee Flat Iron, GHD Kiss Hair Straighteners, GHD Mini Hair Straighteners, GHD MK4 Hair Straighteners, GHD MK5 Hair Straighteners, GHD Precious Hair Straighteners, GHD Radiance Hair Straighteners, GHD Salon Hair Straighteners and GHD New Hair Straighteners - Choose Your Destiny - GHD Green Envy Hair Straighteners, GHD Blue Serenity Hair Straighteners, GHD Red Lust Hair Straighteners, GHD Purple Indulgence Hair Straighteners. We provide good service, our GHD IV Hair Straighteners, CHI Nano Flat Iron, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron free shipping and fast. Buy CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Original, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Pink, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Thermostat Blue, CHI Flat Iron Dazzle, CHI Flat Iron Pink Dazzle, CHI Digital Ceramic Flat Iron, CHI Ceramic Flat Iron Guitar, CHI Turbo Flat Iron 1", CHI Turbo Flat Iron 2",