Death of Printed Books May Have Been Exaggerated

New submitter razor88x writes "Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book's dominant form. 'We may be discovering,' he writes, 'that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.'"

Comments

Depends on the book

[evil_aaronm]

If it's something unwieldy or I know I'll be flipping back and forth between pages, or need to see multiple pages simultaneously, like Practical Electronics for Inventors, I'll buy the paper book. If it's a novel, or casual reading, I can go with e-book format. That said, I donated to a local library a lot of my old books: I hadn't read them in years, and most anything I need to know, now-a-days, I just Google for. For technical information, it's quicker to Google it than look it up in a book.

Re:Richard Stallman's Right to Read is Coming True

[EdZ]

This only applies to the Amazon Kindle store, not to the Kindle hardware itself. Plug the thing in, and it's a USB Mass Storage device you can drag-and-drop DRM-free ebooks (in .mobi and a few other formats) perfectly fine.

Re:Richard Stallman's Right to Read is Coming True

[nyctopterus]

Having just published an ebook, I can tell you that DRM is a choice made by the publisher. Amazon will happily sell ebooks without DRM, and are doing so with mine right now, I didn't check "provide copy protection".

Re:DRM-free largely stops at 1922

[vu2lid]

But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free?

There quite a few publishers with "DRM free only" e-books. For example:

http://www.manning.com/
http://oreilly.com/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/

Encourage them if you do not like DRMed books.

Re:DRM-free largely stops at 1922

[grouchomarxist]

Some more:

http://nostarch.com/
http://pragprog.com/
https://www.baenebooks.com/t-drm.aspx
http://www.dragonmount.com/index.php/News/book-news/new-drm-free-ebook-store-r401
http://lifehacker.com/5946956/grab-a-bundle-of-drm+free-ebooks-on-the-cheap