Slashdot Mirror
Ebooks Now Outselling Print Books At Amazon
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from CNN:
"As further proof of how digital media dominate today's entertainment, Amazon announced Thursday that its customers now buy more e-books for its Kindle device than all print books — hardcover and paperback — combined. Given that people seem to spend more and more of their time peering at glowing electronic screens, this was probably bound to happen. Still, the swiftness of this sea change — three-and-a-half years after the Kindle hit the market — appeared to catch even Amazon by surprise. 'Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years,' said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, in a statement."
I bought a Kindle but now I find myself exclusively buying used paper because it's waaayy cheaper (many books below $1, some $.01) and I can take the used book to the bookstore and get turn-in value which I can use to buy more books.
Consumers wanting to read books electronically can now choose from many competing devices, including Sony's Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and a variety of touchscreen tablets, including Apple's iPad.
They make it sound so easy and effortless! But they fail to address the matrix of which service and format is support/authorized for which device. You can blame it on DRM or competitor lockout greed or whatever but it's still a major inhibitor in my mind.
My work here is dung.
Are they counting in free books on this? Roughly 70% of all my Kindle books are free books. Classics that I'm too cheap to pick up for $5 from Borders... And out of the other 30% about half of those were just a few dollars or less.
Ive read these figures Amazon puts out, but they never clarify if ebooks are outselling used books as well. I would be willing to bet that Amazon sells many more used books through their marketplace than they sell ebooks. My guess is ebooks are just outselling new books which is a much smaller market. If anybody has more insight on this I would be quite interested.
....Hate ipad users.
I'd subscribe to several of the magazines if they would let me through the ipad app... Instead B&N nook get's my cash.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Get your free ebooks here! No need to enrich Amazon and Apple if you don't want to.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
My problem is what less printed material means for libraries, which is where I get almost all my print and audiobooks these days. Sure, they have Overdrive for electronic checkout of e-media. But the selection my library currently offers stinks, and the number of copies is limited!
I hope in 10 years I can still get a nice fantasy romance to enjoy, or take my daughter for a readalong...
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
I hate it when I find that I have to order the print edition and wait a month for it to arrive because the Kindle version is region blocked. (OTOH I wouldn't but any Kindle books if I couldn't strip the DRM off and convert them to EPUB because I don't own a Kindle.)
Could Amazon, by making the statement that e-books are selling better than paper books, be using marketing dishonesty to promote e-books?
Or, is Amazon's statement an indication that Amazon is no longer the preferred place to buy paper books? Since Amazon started, there have been many, many other bookstores that have started to sell online.
A paper book last forever. An e-book lasts until an electronic reader fails, and readers that use that format are no longer available. A paper book can be read by anyone. An e-book can be read only by people who have the kind of reader for which the book is meant.
In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s. The persistence of paper books is an enormous benefit to all humankind.
Which people could instead be getting directly from Project Gutenberg or Archive.org?
Amazon would've done everyone a service if they'd up-front batch converted _everything_ in PG's archives and made it available at $0.98 and then sent the royalties on to PG --- their catalog would be much nicer and cleaner, not cluttered w/ umpteen different but identical versions of public domain texts.
William
(who has had a hardware ebook reader for years and is still catching up on his classics reading and hasn't bought any books)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Enormous benefit? So what were all those 1600s books about?
Until today, I have never seen anyone read from a tablet, ever... but I see people read regular paper books and newspapers on trains/buses every day.
"peering at glowing electronic screens" I hope not. I hope they are using more merciful e-ink devices like Kindle. Wait, is there other way to read Amazon books? What is exactly "glowing" then?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Their device will take the plundered booty just at well as the bloated one.
The books said an enormous amount about how people thought and lived in the 1600s. History books are only summaries. The old books are actually what people wrote.
It's deliberately misleading. Most people around the world do not order their pulp books from Amazon US, but due to the limited international kindle markets, many of ebooks sold through the US site are not for the US market. I.e. they're comparing USA paper book sales to global ebook sales.
Are they counting in free books on this? Roughly 70% of all my Kindle books are free books. Classics that I'm too cheap to pick up for $5 from Borders... And out of the other 30% about half of those were just a few dollars or less.
Exactly it said more units were sold not more dollars.. Cheap books are being sold for cheap or free to pump up the numbers. Additionally the "sales" figures are for amazon not the book market as a whole. You buy kindle books from Amazon so it focuses the demand and is not representative.
Also I wonder if they are including "new" books or "used" books in that comparison. The used book market is not insignificant but there are no used kindle books.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not about glowing screens.
I had over a thousands books in a personal library. Between moving to college, moving out, moving again, they were getting destroyed or left in my basement in totes all around the house where they once were proudly on my personal book shelf. I have some in the garage sitting for about two years now.
Kindle was the first time the medium felt satisfactory. I have a kindle and an iPad to get around the Matrix, but combined I am set for my book needs. No more replacing worn out books. No more complaints about having a house filled with heavy paper. Almost all my books donated to a fundraiser book sale for disabled people through arm twisting. Now I have two devices I can fit in my coat pocket that hold what once filled entire rooms.
I'll miss my books, but there is a time for practicality. My personal library was only created because my local one was a small rural thing that had to cater to the main s tream tastes of the area. The inter-library loan system, last I used it, took over a year to get the book I wanted to read.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Explain to me how you swat a fly or, in an emergency situation, rip out a page to start a fire with an E-reader?
where did they come from? like a spleen? do we need them? monkeys apparently did not.
the fake weather sucks again today. disarm. thanks again. fried fish friday, if nothing changes...
no, i see A LOT of kindles on the NYC subway. at least as much as paper book readers if not more. then there is my ipad 2 and other tablets. i can carry thousands of books on my ipad 2 and they won't clutter up my apartment either. in fact i'm going to try to start getting rid of some of my paper books because there are ipad versions of the media. in the case of cookbooks there are whole apps with video and detailed instructions that are easier to use than a book
OK, so this is anecdotal, and we all know the plural of anecdote is not data...
I buy lots of books, and I can barely remember the last time I bought a book from a source other than Amazon. Even the used books I buy I get through Amazon's marketplace. About 2 months ago I finally broke down and bought a Kindle. I bought it to use on my commute, with the idea that I'd finally get around to reading all the classics (which are free), but would rather buy paper books for anything else.
Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.
So for me at least, buying paper books is now a last resort.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
Could Amazon, by making the statement that e-books are selling better than paper books, be using marketing dishonesty to promote e-books? Or, is Amazon's statement an indication that Amazon is no longer the preferred place to buy paper books? Since Amazon started, there have been many, many other bookstores that have started to sell online. A paper book last forever. An e-book lasts until an electronic reader fails, and readers that use that format are no longer available. A paper book can be read by anyone. An e-book can be read only by people who have the kind of reader for which the book is meant. In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s. The persistence of paper books is an enormous benefit to all humankind.
I have no doubth this is true, having gone through the change from loving paper books to going digital myself (and buying more books than ever), and seen the same with friends.
I've gone through the same change in my view on and usage of paper books --> ebooks as I some years ago went through regarding music CDs --> digital music. I really lliked having a physical CD collection, that was mine, could be touched, looked at, lended and sold. It was what I was used to, and how things were suppose to be :) digital with all its possible issues could never replace that. I don't think that anymore. Now I love to have it digital only and wouldn't have it any other way (actually, about the only thing I use for music these days is Spotify, which is another transition, now my music files collection is gathering imaginary dust).
On books I'm halfway through same transition. I've loved everything about paper books, and proclaimed nothing could beat that. But I got a Kindle for present, and do increasingly love how convenient it is, how fast and easy I can get a new book if I want to read (do not have to wait for shipping or even shops to open next day), good for travel (smaller and lighter than any one book, can contain many), etc. And Kindle autosyncing the books I'm reading, including exactly where I left off in the text, to my phone as well is just damn convenient sometimes.
When I say half through - I still have bookshelves, with lots of books, and do buy paper books sometimes. But this I did with my music collection as well, now it is gathering dust in a box in the cellar. I can easily see the same thing happening.
Maybe something is lost. But something is definitely won too.
Many people who read a large number of books get them from a library.
Unfortunately, sometimes digital books are arranged that they cannot be loaned by libraries.
I ordered a book from Amazon. They gave me an option to get both an electronic copy and a paper copy as a bundle at lower price. I chose this bundle since I can download the electronic copy right away and I always find it handy to have a paper copy.
The freaking paper copy of the book arrived 3.5 months after I placed the order. This is truly not acceptable and that is the reason I think paper book publishers themselves are the reason behind their own doom.
They do region block paper editions, or at least try. There's efforts by the publishers to make it illegal to import books from other countries if the publisher hasn't released them in your country yet. The "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" series is a great example of this. If you wanted to be ahead of the curve, you got a friend to bring back "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" when they were in England, before it was available in the States.
The problem I have with such dystopic predictions is this:
Assuming
- grid electricity is gone
- tons of hardware that needs it is still lying around; okay some may be damaged or unusable (EMP blast), need to connect to servers, etc. but the majority of it WOULD be fully working (and most data-centers would be mostly intact, if not connected externally, even in the case of nuclear blast).
You're seriously telling me that NOT ONE PERSON knows how to, say, charge a set of AA's without using the national grid? That no-one has tiny solar chargers and radios? That no-one has a car battery and/or engine (fuel is another matter but with the engine components you can certainly make a generator from any rotational motion).
Hell, we were able to do things like that in the 17th/18th centuries with ZERO knowledge of electricity even existing as a source of energy or what it was at all. And you can read data off chips with an LED and a battery if need be - not fast, not fun, but similar things are done every day in the emulation ROM-recovery fields.
Hell, give me a couple of copper cables and a couple of household chemicals and I can charge a battery for you - it won't be pretty or efficient but it'll work. The Egyptians were doing it BC, for instance.
You could argue that the knowledge of electricity would be lost if enough people died but damn, you'd have more to worry about than reading Shakespeare if that's the case - food for a start would be something that if you didn't start sorting out in the first few days, and doing it well, would mean you'd have nothing to after a month or so (do you know how to farm wheat etc. on an scale big enough to feed your extended family year-round?).
Paperbacks are inherently more susceptible - solid state and magnetic storage is pretty damn hard to destroy on a national scale , but paper? It burns very nicely, thank you, and has done on nation-wide scales in the past. Not to mention the way it ages. Not to mention rotting. Not to mention fungus, water, staining, or even just plain old falling out of the binding.
Paper has advantages but has just as many disadvantages as electronics. And worrying about Shakespeare's sonnets at that moment would be pointless - for a start, your entire countries food and transport networks would be down. You'd be lucky to survive the month if you live in a crowded city.
I can't really justify spending $10 to $12 on a novel, especially when it's just going to eat up space at home. So my choices are a) do an inter-library loan which saves me money and clutter and does nothing for the author or b) buy the book for a buck.
I'm talking about the small press stuff here. If we're talking about a mainstream author, it really doesn't feel like my financial contribution matters for squat. I don't feel like I'm supporting a local business going to a McDonalds even if it's owned by a local franchisee. I go to a local diner, I feel like my contribution is more noticed. Same goes with the small press stuff. I listen to the Weird Things podcast and one of the hosts put out a novella on Kindle for a buck. I bought it. Hell, it's just like buying a candybar from a band kid, they get a donation and you still get something back. Win-win.
Publishing has little interest in small press and midlist authors. I'm really interested in seeing if the reduced overhead allows niche writers to flourish.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
just saying...
Finally, a good point about these figures. Too bad you had to waste it by posting AC.
Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.
Q: How the hell do they justify that???
A: But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me
If the convenience was worth less to you than the price difference, you'd buy the paper version.
At some point, the supply of books in Gutenberg will stop increasing. Every 20 years, the United States Congress enacts a 20-year extension to the term of copyright. The Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect in 1978, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act went into effect in 1998. So once all notable books in the English language published between 1600 and 1922 are in Gutenberg, where should Gutenberg go from there? You might claim that there are enough pre-1923 books that a human, and for this reason one shouldn't need any copyrighted books, but I suspect a lot of people will disagree with that. For example, pre-1923 books don't talk about post-1923 inventions.
You're buying only Kindle books, and paying the premium. That's how they justify that. Any other questions?
Paperbacks are inherently more susceptible - solid state and magnetic storage is pretty damn hard to destroy on a national scale , but paper? It burns very nicely, thank you, and has done on nation-wide scales in the past
Huh? When has an entire country burned down? Did Liechtenstein suddenly catch on fire one day?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Some books with the same text as a PG book might have original illustrations. Other books might be translations or "retellings" (condensed versions).
True story about the paper books. We have old engineering drawings on microfilm here at work. They're about 50 years old, but it's FILM. you shine some light through it, and there your image is. We don't have any CAD files from 10 years ago, that's for sure. Also, they didn't say anything in the article if the sales calculations were by units, or by cost. - www.awkwardengineer.com
An e-book lasts until an electronic reader fails, and readers that use that format are no longer available.
No, they'll just be converted to the newer formats. ePub is just XHTML plus a couple of XML formats. Converting it is easy.
In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s.
That's really useful to people who are thousands of miles from there. Besides, Oxford is building their own digital library.
Dilbert RSS feed
don't forget screen readers they must work with any ebook.
Similar yet different issue with Janet Evanovitch novels, the Stephanie Plum series. Even more stupid: I can buy the first, second and third book, 12th too, from France but, god forbids, not the fourth, fifth and so on up to 11. Region lock crazyness in all its splendor.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
I have kobo books and mobipoket installed on my Blackberry Torch and the convenience is amazing. If I'm waiting in line at the post office I can read a few pages of any number of books. I always have my phone but would never carry a seperate ebook reader or paper copy. I don't have the same aversion to a glowing screen as some people have. After all most of us stare at a computer screen all day and don't complain about it. However, ebooks are still WAY overpriced. As much as the convenience is higher for the ebooks, there are some serious disadvantages to most of them. DRM, lack of portability, inability to share etc. If the price would come down on ebooks I would buy a lot more of them. As it stands now I feel dirty paying the same amount for the ebook as I could for the paper copy and as a result I've only actually paid for two ebooks.
-Xoltri
> publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???)
First, consider maybe they're not charging a premium, but book sellers are trying to shift very old stock at a loss, in an attempt to recoup any of their investment.
Secondly, in the UK e-books attract sales tax (VAT), which paper books do not; this is a lot of what pushes UK e-book prices over paper editions, but it does depend on whether you're including that in the cost.
Thirdly, they're taking a risk (or, were) that the cost of converting a book to e-book format will pay off.
Two months later I have been completely converted to the Kindle. I now don't even bother looking at books that I can't buy on the Kindle. It kind of sucks, as a lot of publishers charge a premium on Kindle books (how the hell do they justify that???), and other books simply are not available. But the convenience of reading on a Kindle trumps the disadvantages for me.
Same here.
So for me at least, buying paper books is now a last resort.
The only print books I consider buying are professional books I need for work and can't get on the Kindle.
What I really find amazing is the Slashdot vitriol on e-books. I really get the impression that is all just a bunch of young people who:
-- don't own loads of books;
-- who never had to move said loads of books to another house/flat;
-- who never thought out the costs of having all that paper stored in a shelve.
-- have eagle eyes and don't care about small & crappy fonts
Not to mention the convenience of getting new books while travelling.
Amazon is currently only selling books that were published in $current_year or before, where $current_year increases. Project Gutenberg, on the other hand, is fixed at 1922 due to the effects of successive copyright term extensions. Digitaldc appeares to claim (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that a book published before 1923 can always substitute for a book published between 1923 and $current_year.
I resisted for a long time. I read a lot of books and liked the feel of a real one. I can drop it from 2 meters high and just pick it up and find my place again. I did not like the idea of books having DRM and not being able to loan them to a few close friends or trade them in for more at a used book store or donate them to the library. Then there was the whole George Orwell fiasco with Amazon, quite ironic that 1984 was one of the remotely deleted titles.
What finally convinced me to switch to e-books was the adjustable font size. The older I got, the harder it was for me to read many of the books I wanted to, and large print editions are not available for every title. With the Kindle I was able to increase the font on any of my purchased books to the size that was most comfortable for me to read. I still buy technical books with lots of diagrams and illustrations that do not translate well to e-book formats but most of my reading for pleasure is now done with an e-book reader.
Please see replies to this other comment.
A few points .
Bye Bye Libraries and Second Hand Book shops, Bye Bye lending books to friends.
Seriously though - I dont own an e-reader , Kindle or Otherwise (unless you count my phone) - I really like the idea of an e-reader - But I really dont like the implications this has for the social aspect of books.
I think I speak for a lot of people in this case and for this reason I dont think there will come a day when real books dissappear.
From a techie perspective however - the idea of having a device able to display fat , heavy , techie books on a lightweight device with an e-ink display - is a very appealing idea as the real things are bulky and heavy to cart around. Any idea whats the best e-reader for this type of material ?
N.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
A paper book last forever.
95% of the books I read, I'll only read it once. Why do I need it on paper?
A paper book can last forever. But by far the majority of them do not. When you walk into those big libraries with the old musty tomes, you're only seeing the survivors. The vast number of books that didn't survive are, of course, not there.
Every time I move, I cull my books. I used to take the ones I'm not keeping to a used book store, to get a few bucks for them. But these days so little is offered for used books, that it is literally (puns always intended) not worth my time to bother with them. So I throw them away. (The few, expensive, leather-bound books I own, I keep of course. Perhaps some day they'll end up on the shelf at some big library.)
Whose fault is it that you don't have CAD files from 10 years ago? Someone went through the trouble to archive your drawings on microfilm and make sure they were in a safe, accessible place, but apparently when the world went digital the procedures didn't get updated. I don't think the format is really the issue.
You can't really wave away an issue like this though, there is something about human nature that makes us much more careless with electronic information than we are with physical objects. Though I must say that I myself was pleasantly surprised when I found the first mp3 I downloaded the other day- in 1996. Alongside it was some papers I wrote in high school.
Honestly, all I took away from your post is that you don't like e-books. That's perfectly fine, of course; I prefer the tactile sensation of a real book myself, and I certainly understand and agree with your point about old books and preserving history.
But honestly, none of that is keeping me from getting a Kindle and buying e-books. My issue is the price. I am getting less rights to my property (or should I say licensed acquistion), have to pay a $100+ premium in terms of buying a Kindle to begin with to realize any sort of portability comparable to a real book, and can only lend it one time for 14 days--if the publisher allows it. (That last one is a particular problem for me, since my brother and I often share books.) In return, I am asked to pay the same price as the paperback I would otherwise buy, and that doesn't sit well with me.
Still, as I struggle more and more to find room for my books the Kindle and e-books are looking better and better.
There may be many online book sellers, but very few offer the long-tail catalogue of Amazon.
Here in the UK, Amazon is rarely any cheaper than other book outlets. It is the range on offer that makes it compelling.
Is Amazon counting porn? No, seriously. The last report before Amazon stopped admitting the numbers was that over half (54%?) of Kindle sales were Harlequin quasi-porn and the like. The increased privacy, discreet nature of the transaction and storage, make the device a natural market for adults-only material. A big part of why Kindle is dominating dead tree, is because the porn industry is once again leading the charge into the new format.
Now consider: What if you want to hear music performed in the 1600s? Nothing doing. Recreations only, and good luck with that being done right, too. But ever since we've developed recording media - from wax cylinders and paper piano rolls onward - we've got performance records of increasing accuracy. Basically, from the early 1900's, we've got a *wonderful* record of music. We've even been able to go back and significantly reduce the noise in those early recordings. Today, with digital formats, the scope and depth of musical (and now too visual) performances in formats that are able to "forward" themselves easily and without error, the entire landscape has changed. I own recordings that were made in the 1970's (yeah, I have a turntable... I'm old) and I also own digital remasters of those recordings, and in most cases, the remasters are *far* better (unless some recording engineer got in there and compressed the living hell out of it, in which case it's definitely second string... current standard practice for compression is abominable.)
This is just beginning to happen for classic written material; the benefits to history and society are impossible to determine, but they will definitely be huge. 200 years from now, every book that makes it into electronic format will be available to anyone who wants to read them (again historians, mostly, the general citizens will probably be LOL'ing about most of our present social concerns and the ideas in present SF by then... but the point is, the works *will* be available to anyone.)
When you venerate paper books as historical objects, you have it exactly backwards. They suck. Digital is definitely the way to go. And DRM... DRM is a joke; don't even worry about it. Doesn't work; can't work. I'm not suggesting anyone steal or improperly distribute textual (or other) materials, but I *am* suggesting that it's worth your time to break the DRM the very first thing after purchase. Then the work is properly storable and recoverable, easily backed up, and now a family heirloom rather than an immoral corporate "lend", just as it should be. And later, it'll be a historical document. One of millions upon millions. That is the way to go.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A paper book last forever. An e-book lasts until an electronic reader fails, and readers that use that format are no longer available. A paper book can be read by anyone. An e-book can be read only by people who have the kind of reader for which the book is meant.
OK, my wife and I own a lot of books, and I only have a few electronic versions but not e-books per se, they're PDF. As far as I know, paper does NOT last forever. Now it can last a long time of course, but it's definitley not permanent. (does this even need to be stated?) In fact, the electronic versions of books I do have (Truck/motorcycle repair manuals, etc) I got because I can have backup versions, and print out pages I need when in the garage. I think this story is more about e-book formats... but digital SHOULD last longer than paper. But either way, proper care must be taken to preserve it.
I bought my wife a first edition of "I know why the caged bird sings" when we were dating... I wonder what "first editions" of e-books will go for in 30 years.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What are we going to have instead? Besides, Isnt the searching for something to read a lot different in a bookstore? In a bookstore, you can find books you didnt know you wanted and were not expecting to be interested in. And there is no search or cover-art download delay. Are people going to bookstores and then buying an ebook once they have found the book they want? And are they going to ever offer ebooks at ridiculous sale prices like at a bookstore?
And how about the Linux mags with the CD? Now you have to download it? I guess the readers probably can do audiobooks.
Modern bookstores sell more than just books. What is going to be the replacement? Maybe coffee houses will expand and have bigscreens running blurbs about new books?
I've never researched Kindles, so went to Amazon and found at least 3 models, priced from $13x to $400. So which one do slashdotters prefer, and why?
Premium could be a convenience charge, you don't have to wait for the mail or drive anywhere. You could be on the beach in France and get a non-NY times best seller in english in 2 seconds. People are willing to pay for that convenience. Personally I don't want paper books cluttering my house. If the price is the same I might still pay for the electronic version assuming I can't find another way to "acquire" it. I simply no longer want the paper in my house and I have so many books I want to read that the chances of me getting back to some of the books that I buy for a second read is unlikely for the next few years. Why store stuff for 3+ years in case you might want to look at it again? People that do so have some signs of a hording mentality IMHO.
It might not be specific for 1600s books, but a lot of older books are worth reading. This goes as far back as the ancient Greeks, with the Illiad, theatre plays and the works of Plato and Aristotle.
A book like the Three Musketeers or Sherlock Holmes is very enjoyable to read as well. Jules Verne, Dickens, Shakespeare, there are many I could name.
Once you get past the swords, horses and carriages, a good writer or good story is still a nice read. Most books are about people, and they haven't changed much, only the technology.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
It's a lie.
A paper book last forever. An e-book lasts until an electronic reader fails, and readers that use that format are no longer available. A paper book can be read by anyone. An e-book can be read only by people who have the kind of reader for which the book is meant.
Absolutely incorrect.
A paper book, once lent to someone else, cannot be read by the original owner. An e-book lasts forever, and is NOT limited to a singular reader. You can read a purchased e-book on any internet connect computer. In the case of the kindle, you can read your entire library on your phone, on your kindle, on your laptop, on your netbook, on anything that can log in to your amazon account. You can do this because you purchase a license to a work, not a physical copy.
I have a Nook instead, but the principle should hold.
Project Gutenberg does a good job with books, not a perfect job. I find that a well-formatted version of, say, Jane Eyre, just looks better than the P.G. version, and has fewer errors. This is one reason I've bought stuff from Barnes & Noble: for a dollar or two I get a better reading experience. This depends on B&N actually cleaning it up, though. (I suspect this is what they've got from their classics series, where they reprint out-of-copyright classics in a nice format and sell them inexpensively.)
While I very much like having the Google books available, the quality is low. I suspect they were just scanned and OCRed, with no further cleanup.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Considering the vast amounts of pirated ebooks available online, I'm always curious as to why so few people mention the phenomenon at all. Mention music prices being expensive and you get dozens of comments about torrents, wink wink nudge nudge. But mention ebooks being too expensive and people start talking about paper versions, when huge and neatly categorized collections of hundreds if not thousands of ebooks are a btjunkie search away. It seems most people ignore ebook piracy completely.
Why?
I almost refuse to read real books anymore, I just prefer the ebook so much. I wonder how many people who don't like it are reading on some shitty iProduct or on an ebook reader that doesn't use e-ink. Reading ebooks on LCD sucks. My wife has a Nook Color, I have a Nook. I lost my Nook, and didn't think twice about buying the old school Nook instead of the Nook Color. The NC is a great (as in cheap) Tablet, but a shitty ebook reader as is anything with an LCD display.
The other problem is those assholes are raping us over price. There's no good reason an ebook should be priced like a hardcover basically forever. It's silly.
The real books amazon sells are much more expensive so this statistic isnt really proving anything. Of course people will buy 99 cent books more then $50 books.
I'm posting from a plane cruising over Montana right now, and without turning around I can see my laptop, a MacBook, an iPad and four Kindles. That doesn't count mine in the seat pocket.
That's from a pool of 15 seats I can see.
I would guess on my walk to the can a few minutes ago there was at least one Kindle open in every row of the plan, missing maybe a small handful.
I don't doubt Amazon's claims in the least.
And if you're concerned about your book not being readable, virtually every format out there is cracked these days. You can future-proof your collection by ensuring you archive them in an unprotected format. (And keep in mind, stripping DRM for the purpose of interoperability is legally just fine, so you're not in any morally abiguous place doing so...)
I would like to point out this figure seems to only refer to sales by Amazon...not sales through the hundreds of thousands of used book sellers that use the Amazon marketplace. The used book market is MUCH bigger than the new book market. I would be willing to bet that the number of hardback and paperback books sold via Amazons websites (i.e. by booksellers other than Amazon) is 20-30 times that of the ebook market. These statistics Amazon throws out are misleading particularly to people who are not in the book industry and are merely a marketing tool as many others have said. Ebooks have nowhere near the market share that traditional print books do.
- "Tower of Bable" problem. I can only read ebooks that are in a format for that reader.
- Kindle books are too expensive. Some kindle books cost twice as much as printed formats
- Kindle does not work well in dim light. I am more likely to read in bed than in bright sun light.
- Kindle is a unitasker. I don't want to carry around a seperate device for everything.
- EBooks can not be loaned, or sold. I have sold books for more than what I spent on them, can't do that with a kindle.
- Printed books are more rugged, can be dropped or whatever.
I've become a huge fan of our local library in the past couple of years, after discovering that they're part of a network of hundreds of municipal libraries that shares their collection. The result is that I can get my hands on almost anything that is fairly mainstream, as long as I'm willing to wait a few weeks for it to come from a few miles away. Of course, this doesn't work with technical material, so I find myself reading tech stuff on my iPad. I've also noticed that the library is only good for physical books. Borrowing an eBook is a nightmare -- I need a DRM-infested client app, and then I have to place a virtual "hold" and wait in line for someone to check in the book I want.
Will take a hit due to this in the long run. Your cute convenient PDF/ebook/mobi/bla format of the month wont be around in 1000 years for our successors to read. Hell they may not survive 5 years since they are now copyrighted digital bits to be restricted, modified and deleted by the powers that be on a whim.
Sure they have their place and i have them myself, but if we lose books altogether, we as a society will lose our link to the future and past.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A paper book last forever.
Before there was "bitrot" for digital files there was plain old "rot" for everything else, pressed paper books no exception. Those interested in the immortality of books need look no further than the library of Alexandria and the damage to the store of human knowledge done by its destruction.
A paper book can be read by anyone
Though very old, writing is a technology like any other. At a lower level on the technology stack you could say that "A paper book can be read by anyone who is literate and sighted." While it is true that ebooks require an electronic storage device as opposed to a paper one, those electronic storage devices are also capable of reading ebooks aloud, sharing information and culture with the illiterate and blind people in our own societies and preserving pronunciation and accent information for future generations.
In the Oxford University library in England, I found books in the old books room that were published in the 1600s. The persistence of paper books is an enormous benefit to all humankind.
Is the persistence of those particular physical objects what has enormously benefited humankind, or is it the knowledge and information they offer? While I can imagine scenarios where studying the physical books is of value to historians, I think we can likely agree that most of humankind will benefit only from the content of the books and will likely never know of or come into contact with the physical specimens in the old books room of Oxford's library.
What value then do books add to the persistence of human knowledge? Stone tablets are more durable and cell phones are owned in large areas of the geographic and socioeconomic world where owning a library is simply infeasible.
If we want to preserve knowledge, it seems to me that digital technologies offer us a larger scale, more ubiquitous, distributed, self-correcting, mechanism, for spreading and maintaining knowledge than ever before. While it is true that the current crop of format spats is making it difficult for consumers, the net effect is clearly in the right direction. And as all of the formats continue to converge on html, those incompatibilities gradually disappear and we are left with the native format of the web, which is the most universal and accessible format for displaying formatted text since the advent of printing.
I generally buy my eBooks from WebScription, which is mostly Baen SciFi, or FictionWise, which is everything else. Both are much cheaper than Amazon and both offer non-DRM'd books, often in multiple formats. Sure, their site design is not as snazy as Amazon or Kobo or even Diesel, but I can find what I want and get it at a reasonable cost with no DRM most of the time.
I started with Kobo, but, at one point, I bought a book listed as "mobile", which I assumed was suitable for an eBook reader in a venue without WiFi, but discovered that, by "mobile", they meant online. Even though I hadn't read a page, they wouldn't refund my money, so I looked elsewhere, discovered WebScription and FictionWise and haven't looked back. Both are, not only cheaper than Amazon, but also generally cheaper than Kobo as an added benefit.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
/Apple iPad commercial
Howard Houghton, der Direktor aus der Fairfax Staat chefärztlich Krankenversicherung Info-System, erwähnt dieser Person gewarnt, dass Senioren nicht zu verzögern Kontakt mit dem Leistungserbringer., mbt schuhe günstig , "Sie wollen tatsächlich früher, es zu tun, als nach aufgrund der diesem speziellen regularions leicht könnte aufgehoben bekommen ", er / sie erwähnt. "Die Gesetzgebung verändern könnte, genau, warum nehmen Sie sich bitte eine Möglichkeit? "Auch Ärzte haben auch eine Reihe von Schwierigkeiten zu verstehen, was genau überprüft neben Prüfungen sind in der Regel keine Kosten sowie für die oft Individuen. Medicare hat sich die Zahlung aller Preise für viele Produkte, bei denen am besten bewerteten Bewertungen in den Ough gewonnen. VERTISEMENTS. Abschreckung von Dienstleistungen Unternehmens Power, ein Beratungs-Reihe von medizinischen Fachkräften. Dennoch bei Individuen erwerben all jene Unternehmen manchmal im Vergleich zu geraten oder vielleicht nicht über Bedrohung Variablen Tests bekommen die tatsächliche Labor können sie die Zahlung-Preis werden alle co., mbt Sandalen Kisumu Damen , Manchmal Bürger können Senioren dennoch zahlen muss in Bezug auf den Arbeitsplatz gehen, unabhängig davon, ob dieser Screening-Prozess oder vielleicht Experiment sie erhalten in der Regel kostenfrei.
So the question I would pose is: how many Kindle users.buyers were the sort of people to buy lots of print books before? It seems like it would be a relevant factor is the majority of kindle adoptees were people who were less likely to buy print editions in the first place, but find the convenience of the kindle sufficiently advantageous that they have embraced it whole-heartedly. As is traditional, I base my curiosity on anecdotal evidence, which boils down to: I know of three people who have bought a Kindle, and each of them relied heavily on libraries or simply abstained from reading due to perceived inconvenience in the print media. One of the Kindle owners I know takes advantage of being able to scale up the fonts (iirc) to make it easier to read, something print media can't do, obviously. One of them is a full time working mom who likes to read but can't find time to do so....and the Kindle is sufficiently portable that it frees up time for her she didn't previously know she had on when she can read. The third owner of Kindle is an avid user of the library, and she takes heavy advantage of the lower cost or free books available on Kindle now. Hmmm....I just realized I don't know fo any guys who've adopted the Kindle. Weird.