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Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Print Sales In UK
twoheadedboy writes "Book lovers are increasingly turning to e-books, and in the UK Amazon has announced it now sells more e-books than physical copies on Amazon.co.uk. Kindle books surpassed sales of hardbacks in the UK back in May 2011 at a rate of two to one and now they have leapfrogged the combined totals of both hardbacks and paperbacks."
Now an ebook.
So does the kindle support ePub yet ...?
(or non-latin scripts?)
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Another vindication for technological progress, and another steely blow to the right of first sale.
Yes, they "conveniently" ignore a market that has not traceable sales.
The majority of the people in the UK are illiterate
[Citation needed]
Seriously that's quite a claim and needs a bit of backing up. UK folk aren't all dribbling TV-addicts whose idea of literature is The Sun "newspaper".
For my own part, I'm a reader with a voracious appetite for new material. My shelves are always overflowing with books, to the point where it is unmanageable - therefore I have decided to buy a tablet PC, put the Kindle app on it, and buy my books in that way. I can have thousands of books stored on the device if needs be. I'll keep some of my more cherished paper copies, but the vast bulk will be going to the local charity shops.
Seriously that's quite a claim and needs a bit of backing up. UK folk aren't all dribbling TV-addicts whose idea of literature is The Sun "newspaper".
Given the circulation figures of The Sun, I think you're not doing a great job of disproving the grandparent's assertion.
For my own part, I'm a reader with a voracious appetite for new material.
If you put down your book for a minute and go and wander around for a bit then you might discover that you are not part of the majority.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Thank you - you nailed my point.
I don't think so, you could however use calibre to convert it and then get a friend to read the long words for you
I am quite thankful for e-readers as they have allowed me to read more books in a more convenient format by solving problems I was experiencing with paper books, namely: storage (I own too many books and carry too many books while traveling) and font size (I have an eagle nose, not eagle eyes).
For all the problems (DRM, bad typesetting) and the perception of (IMO hyperbolic) problems with e-books (oh, Amazon will know which page I am reading -- as if there was not a direct way to turn that off AND as if you couldn't just always have your Kindle with Wifi/Radio turned off), e-books are winning. Much in the same way that digital music won. There are just too many advantages.
The Kindle (or any other e-reader I've seen) can still use loads of improvements in typesetting quality, but just the fact that I can adjust font size and type are real deal breakers for me. Instant dictionary look-up is a God send for those reading in foreign languages, but it can also be improved, dictionary setting should also work per-book, so that I don't need to switch back and forth between language dictionaries all the time. It would also be nice if a new Kindle also did PDF reflow, but I doubt it, Amazon is likely to continue giving it its half-baked support that is just good enough to avoid users from going elsewhere.
How's the grading curve work these days though, surely only 30% SHOULD be getting A-C's?
Waiting for an amusing sig.
It's a fine example of where socialism breeds it's own suicide by providing for everyone regardless of the effort they make.
Why is that socialism? The U.S., which cannot be accused of being too socialist, has the same problem, while the pretty socialist Finland does not. Don't blame every social failure on Socialism, it's just a cheap excuse not to do anything about it!
You're confusing statistical ranking (the government's policy) with fair grading.
Everyone should be getting a fair education and A-C grades.
Are you stupid?
The current problems with education are the result of a National "one size fits all" Curriculum, a Tory measure, plus the privatisation of exam boards so there is a standards race to the bottom to maximise the number of students taking your papers. Also a Tory measure.
People whine about measures of 40+ years ago like the combining of comprehensives and grammar schools, forgetting that deciding people's future at the age of 11 was an absurd idea, and that all good schools put people into sets by subject according to ability (though, again, the NC and its offspring make this much more difficult than it should be).
And I say this as someone who went to a top fee-paying private school, having won a continuation and regular scholarship before my 13th birthday.
Of course, we could go back to pre-"socialism" literacy levels, back in the day when only the sons of rich parents or the wards of generous sponsors even had a full education... indeed, it probably wouldn't matter for people like me, as I naturally shine. But it would matter for people like you, because you don't seem very smart. Now shine my shoes.
No. If free eBooks are a big part of the sheer numbers, then so be it. Why throw them out of the statistics? If you want to know the revenue from paper books compared with the revenue from eBooks, you are looking at the wrong statistics. And even then there is a problem: You would have to remove the revenue from selling recyclable paper from the paper book sales, because the paper and ink are not part of the eBook sales.
having a Kindle touch, Kindle Fire, and even an iPad 2, I find myself reading almost all new books on the Kindle Touch. For two reasons, its so damn light and second because I can use it in full sun light.
For me nothing beats being able to read outside without having to worry about glare and portability. While I am still a fan of hard cover books, having shelves of them, I am more than happy to own an e-reader version of them. Too bad publishers don't help the trend and follow a similar model DVD publishers do, where you can get a digital version without your hard copy.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
More than 50% should be getting C or above, as the GCSE grades go from A*, A, B, C, D, E and Fail - C and above is slightly more than half on the range.
I got a C at GCSE English, despite the fact that I read five or more books a week, wrote novella length stories, had excellent typing skills, perfect writing technique and had read all of Shakespeare (out of choice) by the time I was 13. Why didn't I excell at English? Because it had fuck all to do with "English" and a heck of a lot of more to do with "English Lit".
Unless the curriculum has changed a *lot*, it's all about reading "Of Mice and Men" (a book that I read in a couple hours, several times over) and then spending 6 fucking months dissecting it to find ridiculous hidden meanings and literary bollocks. I used to get into serious trouble during English because the class had to read it "together" a chapter at a time - which bored the fuck it of me because I could finish the chapter in a tenth of the time of everyone else and picked up the book I was reading for enjoyment. At the end of the day, Of Mice and Men is a shallow story that I wouldn't ever read out of personal choice.
GCSE grades don't show everything.
What am I reading today? "The Age We Live In - A History Of The 19th Century, in 7 Divisions", published in 1883 covering the period of 1813 to 1883. Fantastic social and political insight into the period by the people that lived there. C at English? Sod that.
Was about to buy a kindle book on Amazon when I realised that the kindle version was more expensive than the paper version! And it was not only for this particular book, but almost all the book are more expensive in Kindle version. This is insane! At least with a real book, I can give it to one of my friend and share it indefinitively. When they will come to more reasonable term I may resume to buy eBook but for the time being I'm not going to be their milk cow :)
Bullshit. The actual story is Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Print Sales ON AMAZON In UK.
Huge difference.
My wife has hundreds of classics which she downloaded but has not read. I have downloaded some things on a "free for today" offer, read a page and then just discarded them. I wonder if these are included in the ebook sales. TFA doesn't not say.
But sharing is communism! ;-)
No. If free eBooks are a big part of the sheer numbers, then so be it. Why throw them out of the statistics? If you want to know the revenue from paper books compared with the revenue from eBooks, you are looking at the wrong statistics. And even then there is a problem: You would have to remove the revenue from selling recyclable paper from the paper book sales, because the paper and ink are not part of the eBook sales.
If you include free books then you are probably including a lot that haven't been read. It would be equivalent of a book shop including books in their sales that people browse then put back on the shelf because they didn't like it.
Yes I've bought some books - mainly when they are "deal of the day" fodder or in the 99p or less price bracket. The rest are the "free" selection; classics or trashy sci-fi, thrillers and crime novels. My position on kindle books is only to buy when they are interesting and at charity shop levels.
On the other hand, I've bought a number of hard-back novels from Amazon in the same time period, because they're cheaper and more readily available than from local bookshops, either independent or a chain. Each time, the Kindle price for the book has been a pound or less lower than the hardback price with delivery.
£7 or more for a kindle book is a great disincentive to buy.
"Sure, more e-books are bought, but how many of those are read?"
You mean people put them on imaginary shelves so that it looks pretty?
Reading is sort of the point with e-books, their value as status symbols is nil, you can't impress people like with leather bound volumes, bought by the yard to decorate your condo.
You can't use them as paper weights nor use them to flatten dried flowers, you can't use them as door stoppers, you can't level old tables with them, you can't hide cash in them nor hollow them out to hide your stash.
I pasted a link below with other stuff you can't do with ebooks.
http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/27/cool-non-literary-uses-for-books/
Here in the USA you would have received an A++
Yes our grading system is that badly skewed, we don't want to make the morons feel bad so we give everyone A's and B's... I had classmates in CS classes that should have been ejected. They were in CS 112 and still did not know CS 102 concepts, the prof had to stop and teach remedial computing over and over.
and the funny part, in reality when you leave school, your GPA means nothing to anyone that matters. Your boss will not care if you got A's, all they care about is that you have that degree they can check off a list.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For us Of Mice and Men was summer reading and amounted to a single test at the beginning of the yeat. Our English classes were roughly 25% literature and 75% research papers. I was an A/B student when I bothered to do the work but damn when I got into college knowing how to write a good persuasive essay and cite sources gave me a huge advantage. Our school district had an awful history program (good luck finding a US public school that doesn't), but I am quite happy with our English program.
Unless the curriculum has changed a *lot*, it's all about reading "Of Mice and Men" (a book that I read in a couple hours, several times over) and then spending 6 fucking months dissecting it to find ridiculous hidden meanings and literary bollocks.
Wow. That's exactly my experience with the same book. I guess we both went to a UK school when they were trying to knock out carbon copy thatcherites.
I remember being the only one in a math class who was willing to point out that if you had to round to a whole number 4.46 is closer to 4 than 5. Apparently the rule was to round off one digit at a time and always round 5 upwards. Not one of 29 or so other children was willing to agree with me because the teacher must be right even when he is clearly wrong.
I had a chemistry teacher who could barely speak English. We had to sit and pretend to listen even though we didn't understand a word. When I complained to my year head he just took the piss out of me. Clearly it was my fault this teacher could not speak English.
The UK education system.. The higher level were good but the lower mandatory levels were one crock of shit.
Just like to say; Socialism actually is the cure for this problem.
(problem: Dumb people breed more dumb people).
You see; if you live in an african nation where life expectancy is zero and you are uneducated.
You have as many babies as possible.
When you are educated (with that socialist tool called education thing you seem to hate) and given health care (with that government minimum level of care you no doubt despise) then you no longer suddenly need to have as many babies as possible.
The problem with poor communities breeding more dumb poor people? not enough socialism. They haven't been provided with enough care, they are too poor. They look out their car window and see the douche bags in ferraris, and go: "I'll never be that rich, so I just throw a brick through his window and steal his CDs - then go have more babies".
Tax the rich; give to the poor. Win-Win-Win. You get poor people that arent dumb, whoh then go and earn money.
Rich people *still* have more than the poor people, and so are still rich, but perhaps not *too* rich. (not as obviously I guess??).
But ofcourse, thats just some pinko-communist-trash-talk wishy washy crap, give you the american dream where the incentive to be rich is what everyone should do! I mean, I could be rich soon! down with my potential future richman taxes!!.
Seriously that's quite a claim and needs a bit of backing up. UK folk aren't all dribbling TV-addicts whose idea of literature is The Sun "newspaper".
Given the circulation figures of The Sun, I think you're not doing a great job of disproving the grandparent's assertion.
The majority of people don't read the sun. In fact, in the UK, the combined circulation for papers thick people read (Sun, Mail, Star) is under 10% of the country. Mail readers are thick, but they'll probably disagree, and probably read books in any case.
However, the UK does have a large TV viewership. Probably due to the fact we have relatively decent TV compared with the U.S. 75%-80% of us watch TV at some point during the week, and spend about 25-30 hours a week watching (it's higher at the moment due to the olympics, and seasonable)
People sitting on their backsides doing nothing has little to do with socialism. Socialism is about workers not welfare, welfare is meant to be a safety net to stop people sinking into abject poverty. I'd say the situation we've got is down to two things: the lack of low paid manufacturing jobs which has it's beginnings in Thatcher, and that aspirational culture that says I can be wildly successful without doing any work, which again has its roots in Thatcher but became far worse once the reality TV celebrity turned up. Once those people are your aspirational role models then you can wave goodbye to people putting any effort in while not wanting to do work which is beneath them because immigrants do it.
You buy two books from Amazon, one physical and the other for the Kindle. After you finish reading them, you want to pass it around your family and friends. To share the physical copy, you just ... hand it to someone. To share the Kindle copy, you must give Amazon that person's email address. They are then allowed to read it for two weeks. And you can only share it once.
Given the fact that Kindle books often cost the same or more than physical books, these restrictions make the Kindle versions a very bad deal for the consumer. Worse, in my opinion, than DRM on music, because you have to give up the email address of the person you are sharing your purchase with. Name me one other merchant who requires that you personally identify the person you share a purchase with. I'm not sure that's even legal, but even if it is, it's a horrible precedent.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Kindle readers buy four times the number of books they did before owning one, according to other data. :)
This is the actual thing that is good about the device... I even count the up/reading time of my kindle with uptimeproject
"Sure, more e-books are bought, but how many of those are read?"
You mean people put them on imaginary shelves so that it looks pretty?
Reading is sort of the point with e-books, their value as status symbols is nil, you can't impress people like with leather bound volumes, bought by the yard to decorate your condo. You can't use them as paper weights nor use them to flatten dried flowers, you can't use them as door stoppers, you can't level old tables with them, you can't hide cash in them nor hollow them out to hide your stash.
I pasted a link below with other stuff you can't do with ebooks.
http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/27/cool-non-literary-uses-for-books/
You convinced me: unless I can print it, I'm not going to buy an ebook ever.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Except the stat says 'sells' more ebooks than physical, not 'distributes'. Sells implies an exchange took place, not a gift/give away.
I'll take a free ebook on a whim, and might not ever read it. Or I might read part of it and not like it.
Another thing to be careful about is that this is one on-line retailer. B&N, with it's physical stores, would be a much more interesting case if it started selling more digital editions than dead tree.
I don't read AC A human right
Otherwise you could claim any device supports any format so long as you convert it first!
"You're confusing statistical ranking (the government's policy) with fair grading.
Everyone should be getting a fair education and A-C grades."
Giving everyone a good grade regardless of whether they deserve it is what has led to the mess we have now where the grades are increasingly becoming meaningless and employers and top universities are ignoring them. If you want to go that be nice to everyone and make them feel good about themselves by giving them all good grades liberal lefty route then fine , but don't expect the real world to take them seriously.
Can you back up the ebooks? This is *absolutely crucial*. A year or so ago, Amazon pulled existing copies of "1984" by George Orwell because of a licensing dispute. It would be naive to think that a government will not take advantage of this "kill switch" (and it doesn't even have to be a government to be scary, if a company can censor information that's just as bad). If you can back them up, on the other hand, then all is good. Doesn't matter if they're DRMed either, as long as you can load them back onto the reader, we're probably not headed for dystopia.
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Since no one else sells Kindle books, that means 10% of all "book" sales are Kindle. Not over 50%. Ignoring other ebook formats, of course, but so did TFA.
Obviously number of ebooks has gone up, but they don't "surpass print sales in the UK" without a lot of qualifications added to that statement.
Faulty logic. You're comparing their readership to the entire population (including babies). Instead try comparing it to other newspapers. The Sun's circulation is around 50% greater than its nearest rival, and the only papers with a circulation over 1 million are The Sun, The Mail and The Mirror.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Except brick-and-mortar stores don't really offer e-books, and Amazon is a skewed sample as they're pretty much the champion of digital book purveyance. So no, not fairly indicative at all I'd say.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
eBooks should be a CONVENIENCE format AS WELL as your paper copy.
It should NOT be REPLACING your paper copy.
Anybody who buys an ebook without a paper copy is just a mug and is welcome to jump blindly off the cliff to the CLOUD.
My parents came in with this leaflet about FREE CLOUD from the purchase of a new computer and asked me to install it lol.
FOOLS.
You can pry my paper books from my dead cold hands.
You obviously haven't had a shelf full of books fall on you recently. I had to cut back on book purchases because I didn't have physical space to store them all and I re-read books over and over so I don' get rid of them. I almost never bought hardbound editions for the same reason (plus the expense, of course). So having them in electronic form instead has been a real life-saver.
On the other hand, when I "buy" a book, I expect it to STAY bought. If Amazon or B&N does a "Borders" and goes belly up, I would be greatly displeased if a major chunk of my libary evaporated overnight. So I make it a policy that anything I do buy has a crackable DRM scheme AND that I should be able to offload the book onto a generic file storage system of my own.
I wonder how you measuring literary merit? A lot of people would love to have an agreed measure. For what it's worth, I'm finding an eReader (not a Kindle, but it could be) very useful indeed for the set texts on a university English Literature course I am studying at the moment. Not least because I have to go abroad on business during the course, and I would much sooner carry all the set texts on an eReader than weigh down my baggage with dead trees. I also use it for the books we read in the two book groups I belong to.
Of course, only a minority of people in any country are enthusiastic about reading and good literature (whatever that is). But all those people reading books you don't approve of? Guess what? They must be literate or they wouldn't be reading. "Illiterate" doesn't mean "sometimes reads stuff I don't like".
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Jesus Christ that sounds familiar. I got into trouble for doing science work during an english lesson where we were taking 5 weeks to read through Animal Farm, a book I finished the first evening we got it. Not to mention having to then go through the painfully obvious allegorys in it.
This. Someone I know buys quite a lot of ebooks, hardly any physical books, and certainly doesn't spend a lot of time reading. As for the motivation, I guess people buy a book sometimes because they like the idea of reading it. At the time of purchase you haven't read the book, so the main instant gratification is in allowing yourself the possibility that you might have the kind of life that would allow you to read the things you are interested in. The fact that you never seem to find the time doesn't detract from the instant buzz of the buy.
Korma: Good
Nice to see the haters are out today - having a nice time are you?
I understood the books I was reading very nicely thank you - I just didn't give a fuck about English Lit (and I still dont). And no, they weren't separate subjects when I was taking GCSEs (mid 1990s) - it was just "English". English Lit was a separate subject at A-Level, but not at GCSE.
Do I have to sit through months of dissection of Of Mice and Men that the class is walked through just to get to some pointless hidden meaning? No, I don't really - the book was obvious from the very first time I read it, I just didn't care for it much.
Its a contrived story with no real ongoing point in life, it has no depth of any real meaning and "technical mastery" is just another load of rubbish for those self important people who like to read more into something than is really there - if that offends you, then I don't really care. And I'm far from a "teenage" critic.
As for reading aloud - its boring and ridiculous to sit there and listen to 25 other teenagers trying to butcher any book, when I have no problems reading it myself. Infact, I have no problems reading it aloud - I've become quite a public orator since my school days when I want to be - its the fact that others reading it aloud for me does nothing for me. How about that? Want to explain to me how listening to others stumble over the most basic of phrases and sentences is going to improve my personal understanding of the work or my ability?
Fine, you got top grades in GCSE English - I guess that means you care a lot more about English Lit than I did. What does that have to do with an "inflated ego"? Not much. What does my point have to do with being bitter? Again, not much - its just that "English" as taught today (as in my day when I took GCSEs) has little to do with mastering the various technicalities and abilities of the written and spoken word, and much more to do with contrived, manufactured investigations into so called "literary classics".
So how about you go back to the literary classics you seem to so love defending, and let us out here in the real world get on with our lives.
I personally prefer that paper book in my hands. Nothing quite like the paper, and smell of a good book. The problem of course is the one you already mentioned. The other of course is that ebooks cost more than paperbacks, until that changes I'll just stick with paperbacks. Heck, I've seen hardcovers that cost less than ebooks, and that's saying something.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well, do enlighten all us poor slobs as to what these precious freedoms are that we are giving up, and why we should care about them.
I've been reading the whole Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, in preparation for the release of Brandon Sanderson's completion of the series this next year. I discovered that I'd misplaced a copy or two of the middle hardcover books that I bought over the past 20 years in the fourteen book series, so I bought the missing copies on Kindle. At first I didn't expect to enjoy reading it, but after discovering how to zoom the font, and the relative light weight (considering the size of the Wheel of Time books are huge) I have decided I will no longer buy books of paper. My family all shares the same kindle account with multiple kindles in the family, so we don't have to bother with the restrictions that come with borrowing a book. I can have multiple copies out at once this way. Unfortunately I have hardcovers for the last two in the series, so I have to lug them around, but I've been sorely tempted just to buy another copy of the book in ebook form because it's so convenient to have.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
On the pricing, if you like the sort of books they sell, you should check out baenebooks.com. Baen is a regular publisher of fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a military bent, which has for over a decade sold all of their books in electronic as well as print form. Single e-books are normally $4-6, with no sales tax or shipping (obviously). They also have a monthly bundle for $18 which includes six full novels, 1-2 of them new releases (usually available a few weeks before the books show up in stores) and the remainder older titles. $3 per book is a great price. It's often even better than that, because Baen tends to republish a lot of their older popular series in "omnibus" editions, so a single title of a bundle may actually contain a full trilogy. I've purchased bundles that contained 11-12 novels.
Also, Baen provides all of the major electronic formats, with no DRM, and encourages sharing your books with friends and families where "sharing" means "giving them copies". Baen also keeps all of your purchases on file so you can easily re-download books as needed.
Finally, Baen also provides an extensive free library so you can try out many of their authors and series at no cost, doesn't object to people sharing on-line copies of the CDs they put in the backs of some of their hardcovers (containing dozens of novels each, plus high-quality copies of cover art and other goodies), and provides free access to the first few chapters of all of their books, so you can try any book before buying.
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Baen, other than having spent more money than I like to think about buying their books. My Baen library runs to nearly 500 titles.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
As long as we are on the topic of ebooks, anybody know of a good ebook reader for *PDF*? A lot technical stuff that I have is in the form of PDFs, and I was wondering if any body had a good experience reading those on ebook reader.
(E-ink based ebook readers, btw, not one of those Tablet-Reader combos like Nook Colour or iPad or whatever)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
I struggled with some of English and English Literature (they were taught together, so I don't remember which was which; there was poetry as well as Of Mice And Men). Much of my coursework was graded as B or C. However, towards the end of the year the teacher set me (only me) an assignment to analyse some factual writing -- articles from popular science magazines. I could do that, and easily got an A*. Apparently, stuff like that was on the syllabus but most English teachers didn't like it, so taught the alternatives.
My final grade was A, in 2002. The syllabus has probably changed a bit, but the way it is graded is changed far too much every few years to suit the politicians.
Oh, and it's actually A*, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and "fail" ("U", I can't remember what it stands for). A G is a pass, and you get a certificate, if you get U you don't get a certificate.
(There are noticeable differences between E, F, G and U, but I don't know whether any employer would care.)
Nice to see the haters are out today - having a nice time are you?
I understood the books I was reading very nicely thank you - I just didn't give a fuck about English Lit (and I still dont). And no, they weren't separate subjects when I was taking GCSEs (mid 1990s) - it was just "English".
http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/8938/1/6908_gcse_english_literature.pdfseems to think otherwise, but I'm not a teacher, and did mine in 2002.
its just that "English" as taught today (as in my day when I took GCSEs) has little to do with mastering the various technicalities and abilities of the written and spoken word, and much more to do with contrived, manufactured investigations into so called "literary classics"
After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:
English: ...")
- reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again and shouting out every "may", as in "it's is thought that immigrants MAY have
- reading a few poems
- "speaking and listening" -- a presentation, and listening to everyone else's presentation
English Lit:
- what you said
I don't remember where the Shakespeare and novels went -- probably some in both.
On this recent episode of Open Book on BBC Radio 4 a guest said that ebook sales in the UK account for something like 12-15% of total book sales. He said it was about 40% in the US, and that the UK numbers are pretty fuzzy because Amazon is the only significant player in the UK ebook market and they don't release their figures.
We can try to check this out for ourselves: If we guesstimate that Amazon accounts for 80% of UK ebook sales and (as per the grandparent post) 20% of total sales, and that their ebook sales are 55% of their book sales, we arrive at ebook sales being 13.75% of the total UK market. So this guesstimate lines up with the analyst's more informed effort.
Observation also suggests the same thing. I was in London in the spring and was astonished by the vast number of really good brick and mortar bookstores, far more than any American city I've been to. There's a handful of flagship stores in the US (the Strand in New York, the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, Powell's in Portland) that surpass what you can find in London, but no US city has anything like the bulk and variety of great bookstores that London does. This could just mean that they just haven't gotten around to dying yet, but it seems more likely that there are still very strong sales of hard copy the UK.
http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/8938/1/6908_gcse_english_literature.pdfseems to think otherwise, but I'm not a teacher, and did mine in 2002.
When I took my GCSEs in 1995, there was one single paper - and my GCSE certificate (having just checked) only has "English" on it.
I was in the upper bounds of the year, so I certainly wouldn't have been left out of any exams (if you could even be left out of a core subject!)
After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:
English: ...")
- reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again and shouting out every "may", as in "it's is thought that immigrants MAY have
- reading a few poems
- "speaking and listening" -- a presentation, and listening to everyone else's presentation
Didn't have any of that - poems were covered in lower years, but nothing at GCSE exam level.
English Lit:
- what you said
I don't remember where the Shakespeare and novels went -- probably some in both.
This was the only subject of any English lessons I had, and the only exam I took on the topic was orientated toward what I commented on earlier.
I buy around a 100 books a year from Amazon, all used from third party sellers. I think Amazon is comparing new book purchases the Kindle purchases but not taking into account the thriving market in used books. It would be a literally different story if these sales were included.
Does the public domain books that you "buy" and cost 0,00 also count as a sale?
You obviously haven't had a shelf full of books fall on you recently. I had to cut back on book purchases because I didn't have physical space to store them all and I re-read books over and over so I don' get rid of them.
Never had that happen. But having moved 9 times since college, it certainly gets old packaging and repackaging and carrying a wall of books. I realized a couple of moves ago that half of my books had been in boxes through several moves, and decided it was time to get rid of them. That was a tough choice, as I hate giving up reading material, and I would have been thrilled if those hundreds of pounds of books could have been condensed into a few weightless magnetic bits on my computer.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Here in the USA you would have received an A++
Not always. His experience sounded just like mine here in the US in high school. Grades were more about being able to write about what the teacher wanted you to say rather than any technical skill or ability to construct your own clear coherent ideas. I even got in trouble for correcting the teacher on Arthurian legend and she got really made when I showed her the relevant text (ya, right, argue with an 80's D&D nerd about Arthurian legend) and found teachers marking points off because I was using vocabulary they were not familiar with. That being said, I did get A's in college while the rest of the class floundered because I could write a simple five paragraph essay and their HSs had not even taught them that.
Don't get me wrong, I live in the Now, and always have an eye down the road for Later but my heart relishes the comforts of Then. From what I observe around me, this is hard-wired into us.
I don't like the idea of books, film and music being only available as ethereal data. I double dislike the idea when one factors in "cloud" storage, and a vendor's ability to remove things from that cloud.
Can you imagine? "License" "Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt" now in 2012, watch it a bunch of times, then in 2022 try to go to it again only to find.. "Due to violation of Federal Decency Code #A113 paragraph 1313, this title has been removed for your own protection." I *can* see this happening. Good thing I have it in hardcopy here.. You want it? *come and get it*
How about availability? Can you get, 50 years from now, an e-book of some low-run title from some unheard of author? Cinemas are starting to find this out right now.. "Oh, you want "Everybody Sing" (1938, Judy Garland) in 4k DCI? So sorry, we don't have it.. but we do have the last 35mm print known to exist.. what's that you say? You sold your film projectors in the Great Physical Purge of 2012? So sorry to hear that! We can offer you the latest by Michael Ba"----*CLICK*
Speaking broadly, aren't we headed for a possible Digital Alexandria, or a Digital Book Burning Party? Didn't one of the major e-bookstores remove Tom Sawyer from reader's devices? What would prevent this on a much larger scale? What would prevent a government from declaring a title "verbotten" and having the e-vendors pull it from all readers' devices and zap it from the cloud?
I can't think of a world where all the world's books, music and film are sold and contained in "the cloud." I may be getting old, so I may have a skewed perspective on the physical world.. but there's little comfort to be found knowing that I have Mahoromatic on my hard drive, vs. just looking over my shoulder and seeing the 8 books sitting in my shelf, snugly surrounded by other obscure titles that no one in the mainstream cares about. A shelf full of books, film and music is a good sign. To me, anyway.
And yet, as I say all this, one of my back-burner projects is to build a home media server and stuff it with bit-for-bit copies of all my music and film. The physical media itself would remain, right where it is, lining the walls of my favorite room.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I'm not up to date with my publishers, but that sounds a lot like what TOR is doing. The store was scheduled to launch in April, and it's now launching sometime in Summer 2012 (hopefully it hasn't been mothballed). I still have old PDFs of Sanderson's works from when they were emailing them to anybody who would sign up for a newsletter.
We'll see... Tor has been talking about Baen's model for many years now. Several years ago they actually started down the path of providing their books through Baen's site, and put a handful of books for sale. Then they stopped and started several times. I'd love to see it happen, because the combination of Tor and Baen would cover 95% of my fiction needs.
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I like ebooks. Convenient to get & search and you get modern functionality (font size control, updates, smart indexing, etc). What's not to like? Only one thing: Giving up paper copies means giving someone else control of your library.
Even if you "download" ebook content and keep it out of the cloud, how are you going to read it? Oh, just use a networked device which.... oh, right, that's a fail because devices in the future will not even display forbidden content (and will report your attempt). Never happen because devices like that don't exist and besides people wouldn't stand for it? I was once told no one can possibly keep track of the websites you visit because that mechanism didn't exist and besides people just wouldn't stand for it. How'd that work out?
Only paper can be hidden and read back later without electronic intermediation. That means ONLY PAPER CAN BE HIDDEN. History tells us all unhidden documents are eventually taken. So use your ebook to read the latest thriller/romance/pulp. But PRINT ANY BOOK YOU WANT TO GIVE TO YOUR KIDS.
I love my Kindle Fire, I can make notes, mark pages, read in the dark, buy a new book when I'm done, read the classics for free etc. I will always choose E-book over paper. Lets face it (In the free world) attempts at censorship or governments tracking your reading habits are not a real concern. Will it ever happen, sure in Iran or China, but the free world would strip power from anyone stupid enough to try that.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Why do people use the term "dead tree" so much? It certainly isn't faster or more efficient to write than "paper". If you don't like paper books that's fine, but I personally don't like trying to have conversations with people that drop words that are such a sign of obvious bias of opinion.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not really following the thread too closely, just saw the term "dead tree" one too many times.
Of course, but compared to about every other Western country, they are the least socialist.
Baen was pretty much DRM-free from the get-go - a personal decision by Jim Baen himself, who alas, is no longer with us.
TOR has been working on it, but as I understand it, there were existing obligations to be cleared. Effective July 2012, however, all new TOR offerings are supposed to be DRM-free. Sadly, older purchases are not generally convertable.
I was looking on a bookseller's catalog today and noticed that the latest in a series of TOR books offered by them carried an explicit notification that due to publisher stipulations, that the book in question would NOT contain DRM. So kudos to TOR!
I believe you'll find that only socialists feel that American isn't 'too socialist'.
Just like only covert Muslims feel that Obama is not a Muslim?
Your problem is that you''re conflating digital books with cloud. A lot of people make the same mistake because companies like Amazon want them to feel that way, but this is plainly not true. A digital book that you own and can transfer freely is still far more convenient than a paper book in most respects, and all readers on the market today will happily read such books, no DRM involved. I have about 300 books legally purchased with no DRM. They're "in the cloud" in a sense that I can always re-download them from the seller (so long as they're still around). But otherwise they're just files that I can copy wherever I want. I don't have paper copies for vast majority of them, and I don't see why that's a problem.
Baen was pretty much DRM-free from the get-go - a personal decision by Jim Baen himself, who alas, is no longer with us.
Yeah, Baen never did DRM. Jim Baen felt it was unnecessary, counterproductive and an insult to customers -- and he's been proven right on every count. A visionary man in many respects.
TOR has been working on it, but as I understand it, there were existing obligations to be cleared. Effective July 2012, however, all new TOR offerings are supposed to be DRM-free. Sadly, older purchases are not generally convertable.
Ah, very interesting. Does this mean new purchases of old titles will be DRM free?
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I selected it to 'spice up' my word choice. I then edited my post a bit and the portion that mentioned paper got chopped, but I didn't change the dead tree.
I have better than 10 LARGE bookcases full of books, and many still in boxes. Unfortunately, I had to move fairly recently(for work) and the new house is somewhat smaller than the old one(despite being much more expensive). As a result I feel confined; I've deliberately chosen to limit my acquisition of new physical books while trying to figure out which ones I'm willing to part with. The books are fighting for space with my other hobbies - computers, woodworking, firearms, rockets, etc...
It doesn't hurt that I find the ebooks easier to read(on average) than the paper type; I have (slowly) deteriorating vision, and being able to mess with font size helps. Heck, I find reading on an LCD Monitor easier on the eyes today. Can't really explain why. I used to read a paperback a day, on average, as a teen.
I don't read AC A human right
London may itself be a bit of a special case due to the large number of Universities, and cosmopolitan residents that are perhaps more inclined to enjoy the heft of a physical wad of paper in their hands than the cold and clinical smoothness of an e-book reader.
As for myself, I definitely prefer a paper copy of a book. Something I can stick on a shelf, give to my kids to read one day, lend to a friend, resell if the urge ever hit me and something I can leave in a bag on the beach without worrying about someone stealing it. Most of those things are made much harder, or more pointless, by having e-books.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
The freedom to resell or give away your copy of the book
The freedom to keep your copy of the book even after the supplier (or someone with the ability to put pressure on the supplier) decides you should no longer have it
The freedom to keep your copy of the book after the vendor dies.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I see you didn't answer the 'why we should care' question. Don't you also give up those freedoms by borrowing a book from a library or friend?
If you are going to say 'but you paid for the book', so what? We pay for lots and lots of things that aren't permanent. If you go to a concert, show, or movie, you pay and don't have anything permanent. Same with eating. Why do books have some sort of special status that means we are 'ignorant masses' if we don't recognize the need for those 'freedoms'?
On the other hand, I think I gain a few freedoms with ebooks, but I don't consider people to be 'ignorant' if they don't agree with my choices. For instance:
Freedom to purchase and begin reading a book at any time
Freedom to not have to find somewhere to keep the book (either while reading or when done with it)
Freedom to not have to find a way to dispose of the book when I am done with it
Freedom to carry all my books with me when I am going somewhere
Freedom to not cause damage to the environment every time I buy a book (making/recycling paper, printing, transportation are not exactly environmentally friendly processes)