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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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Bullshit. The actual story is Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Print Sales ON AMAZON In UK.
Huge difference.
"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.
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
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.
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!
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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.
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.
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.