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.
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!
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.
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?
Fine, then explain to me how you can use a papaerback book to send an email requesting emergency help when your phone is lost, stolen or run down!
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.
Awesome! Just gotta wait an eternity for 2011 new releases to be on there. Hopefully Congress will allow their copyrights to expire by forever.
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.
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?
1: turn off the lights, flies will be attracted to the warm E-reader glow (apparently the editor doesn't use an e-ink-based device). BAM!
2: Overdrive the LED flash on your smartphone, or simply short the lithium battery. FOOSH!
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.
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 ----