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Have eBooks Peaked?
An anonymous reader writes "At Rough Type, Nicholas Carr examines the surprisingly sharp drop in the growth rate for e-book sales. In the U.S., the biggest e-book market, annual sales growth dropped to just 5% in the first quarter of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, while the worldwide e-book market actually shrank slightly, according to Nielsen. E-books now account for about 25% of total U.S. book sales — still a long way from the dominance most people expected. Carr speculates about various reasons e-books may be losing steam. He wonders in particular about 'the possible link between the decline in dedicated e-readers (as multitasking tablets take over) and the softening of e-book sales. Are tablets less conducive to book buying and reading than e-readers were?' He suggests that the e-book may end up playing a role more like the audiobook — a complement to printed books rather than a replacement."
It's piracy! We need to make reading a felony!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think the word you're looking for is "plateaued". Does no-one do calculus any more?
Vendors are flogging tablets over E-ink; why get a one trick pony when you can have a multi-tasker.
Truth is, the one-trick pony feels much better on the eyes after reading for any extended amount of time. Staring at a backlit LCD just burns out your retinas, and changes reading from a relaxing experience to a tolerable situation.
Because they're charging the same price as a paperback, or hardcover, sometimes even more.
Om, nomnomnom...
You pay the same price, but then you can't lend them easily to your friends or resell them, you can't rent them from the local library, depending on the device used, annotating or marking the pages is not effective and can't easily be shared between two people reading the same book at the same time (keep slowly browsing through to get to the current page), and you need to have that device charged up (more or less a problem depending on the device type). Beside having it instantly and the lighting on the kindle paperwhite / kobo glow for night reading, there's not much to like :(
Of course growth will stop at some point. We're not living in a world with infinite resources and infinite people. Growth will be positive up to the normal point where the needs are satisfied.
What they need to look at is sales themselves. If they keep selling more or less the same amount of eBooks every month, then all is well and there's no need to panic.
Growth is the worst thing that can happen past the saturation point.*
* see also, human population on planet Earth
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As prices have risen, quite frankly, I might as well order a paperback. Much nicer to hold and read.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The traditional Kindle is a better reader than a tablet, but it's a one trick pony. If I'm making a choice between the devices, the tablet usually wins.
Perhaps it may have to do something with the price fixing scandal?
(I love it when publishers tell the public that e-books can't get cheaper because paper isn't actually that much of an expense and people need to get paid for the work, while the authors and translators are told in private that they can't get paid more because "paper and the printer shop costs too much".)
Ezekiel 23:20
Forgoing the DRM on music in Itunes did not kill the music industry, but that's what all the book publishers act like.
So all we're offered is lock-in, can't loan to friends, etc.
I don't even enjoy owning physical copies of anything, but with the digital copies I'm allowed to own outright and with as I please in private, I tend to buy (music), with the digital copies where they take every DRM step (movies) or go above that and lock me in (amazon, ebooks), I tend to either rent (netflix), get the physical copy and rip (DVDs), or borrow (Amazon Once a month or whatever library).
when there is absolutely no price benefit, why buy a non durable good? If you are browsing for older titles, it is actually more expensive to buy e-books.
I guess it has nothing to do with the fact a lot of ebook cost more than the Hard Cover. That cannot be it.
6. E-book prices have not fallen the way many expected. There’s not a big price difference between an e-book and a paperback.
THIS.
Also, perhaps this reflects a plateau in the number of people willing to invest in tablets or ebook readers? Do these numbers correspond to tablet sales, for example?
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Something not mentioned was Apple pushing the price of ebooks up often by 25%. In general the main reason I haven't switched is that from Amazon used I frequently can get print books much cheaper than the corresponding ebooks. At the time ebooks were surging ebook prices were crashing and there was a huge difference between the ebook and the printed book price. Perhaps, not unreasonably, many people prefer printed books and given a high ebook price there weren't be a cut over.
With paperbacks, my typical behavior is to buy the book, read it, and then donate it to charity (at a retail used-book valuation) for a tax write-off. Given my marginal tax rate (state and federal combined), the net cost of the book is about 65% of face-value.
With E-books, I can't do that "donate to charity", so the face-value is the net cost, which seems to be about 10% under the paperback price.
E-book prices need to come down by at least 25% in order to become economically competitive for me.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
How about: "all the people who want to read books on e-readers have them?"
Personally, I still buy all my books in printed format. I don't have much desire for an e-reader. There are some aspect of an e-reader which would be more convenient (like easily taking all my books with me), but I'm generally only reading one book at a time anyway. But the downside to e-readers is that I'd like to know that my books will be easily accessible in the future - not tied to a specific "Amazon Kindle" or "Nook" device. Let's not forget that a recent survey showed that the average person still prefers printed books over e-reader books.
It's pretty simple - ebooks are often priced more than the exact same paperback when you take into account sales and coupons (Barnes & Noble deluges me with coupons), plus the paperback has resale value that drives the overall price down even further.
The only reason I end up buying kindle books these days is either complete impulse buy (Must have it NOW!) or because my bookshelf is full.
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Pay what you want!
60% of the cost of publishing a traditional best selling dead-wood book is printing and distribution. With those costs zeroed by ebook publishing, prices have not come down. Add to this the DRM and onerous terms and conditions (you are buying a conditional license to read the book, you don't "own" it). It is illegal to lend the ebook to somebody, illegal to resell (also technically troublesome), probably also illegal to read aloud as that might count as public performance. So fuck publishers, DRM and eBooks.
I would suspect that it's more a case of users at the front end of the purchase curve tailing off after too many cases of "oops, I can't download it again because the publisher pulled it", crap I can't easily share it with a friend (who probably also has a different brand reader, even if their own reader supports lending), or even the... loss of the fun of "gee let's stare at the shelf and stare at my books"... Let's not forget the fact that there's no discount that one would expect in an electronic book since all of the print material publishing cost has been removed from the picture.
I know I initially purchased a few e-books but the novelty soon wore off and the price simply hasn't come down to where I go "$20" for this printed copy or "$20" for this e-book... just give me the print version that I can throw on the shelf and anyone in my family can read anytime they want.
The "fix" was never going to be more than a novelty.
Okay, to be fair, books are broken in several ways, mostly having to do with publishers and distributors. But eBooks didn't offer any improvements in these areas.
eBooks’ major problem is the whole copyright crap - No sharing - the time honored tradition of a book club dies, being smothered by lawyers. Book clubs become dens of iniquity full of felons - no different and receiving harsher treatment than a room of heroin users. Imagine the feds busting in on a room of suburbia moms discussing and sharing Harliquin romance novels. - We need movie. These very same book clubs that create best sellers are out lawed. Selling my books back to the book store in college after the class in now impossible. It’s so unbelievably short sighted it deserves to die painfully.
That's a way to stay on topi... oh, look the kitty!
... but hard-copy is stuff you would like to read again, again, again and retain memories.
I borrow 8 ebooks a month from my library for free, I don't read all day so that is more than enough for me. I usually get two books at a time, so I always have enough time. If I run out of ebooks, I just go to my library and get a physical one. If I see one I may like that isn't there, I note it down till it's available.
This is how most UK libraries work, if one person has the ebook, nobody else can get it until my 30 days are up, regardless of whether I have finished it or not. I have a cheap Nook and this works fine for me. I have never paid for an ebook in my life.
However, I do understand wanting a book which you read often to be a book which you can hold in your hand and keep. I have several which I keep with me, because reading a book via a Nook just simply isn't the same as having the book you always have known, turning each page with memories.
ebooks are great, but memories I doubt will be conserved when you read them with an lcd screen 10 years later. If I find an ebook which sticks with me I will usually buy a hardcopy.
Without a serious price advantage, I'd much rather have a physical book I can read, lend, give, or sell. In fact, I'd rather have the physical book in a lot of ways over digital.
That said, the convenience of an ebook is great. The reading experience not as much.
This is a suggestion for not just ebooks but tablets as a whole. Phones too: Make matte screens rather than gloss. Or at least anti-reflective screens. I can't adequately describe the frustration of trying to use either device outdoors in the sun, but I have frequently enjoyed books in such circumstances.
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Only about half of the books I buy are even available in ebook format, and the price isn't always enough less to offset the fact that they have no resale value.
The convenience factor is only an influencing one if you read on the go a lot, which I generally do not. YMMV, of course.
If I could convert my entire library (several thousand books) to ebook format for no or VERY minimal cost, I'd probably do it, but that's probably what it would take.
I'll actually start with the Paperwhite, considering I own one. I rarely use the backlight feature and when I do, rarely at full. In daylight and full sunlight, it's completely unneeded and reading is awesome. Indoors as long as you have decent lighting, still not needed - same as a book. If it's dimmer, adding a little backlight can be nice just to get greater contrast, but it does make my eyes tired more quickly. However, whether that's the backlight, the general lack of ambient light, or the fact that most of those situations tend to be at the end of the day when I'm likely to be tired anyway, I can't really determine.
As for e-readers vs tablets.. e-readers were initially much cheaper and their very marketing prowess were the ease-on-eyes and the longevity of the battery (5 weeks into vacation, still haven't had to recharge my paperwhite), whereas the tablets were fairly bulky, pricey, with low battery life and not all that much you could do with them.
Fast forward to now, and tablets get reasonable battery life, are almost all thin and light enough to carry around casually, and cheap enough that I see people getting one for each of their kids to use in the car/etc. And adults, just as kids, don't use these tablets to read. Not because they're necessarily awful to read on, but because they find greater entertainment in playing games (candy crush seems popular around here, along with my singing monsters for those with ipads), watching movies/TV shows, or browsing (mostly youtube).
Personally I'd still love to see a best-of-both-worlds type display (I suppose velcro'ing an e-reader to the back of a tablet will have to do for now), but I suspect that most people would still be using the result mostly for interactive and video content. But at least if they wanted to read a book there's the eye-friendly display.
Just check the major stores; e-books are often more expensive than the paperback edition (and assuming you can combine a few orders to get free shipping where necessary).
The cost of an ebook is well over 99% pure profit for someone after the first 10000-20000 sales at $10 a book. (you have sunk costs of editors, proof readers, the writer, person who listed the book and maintained its entry on amazon.)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A "mass market paperback" costs $8-$9, while the same book in eBook form costs $10-$12.
The paperback helps keep the knowledgeable folks at my local bookstore (Mysterious Galaxy) happily employed. The eBook does not.
My local bookstore often hosts authors for in-person talks. The eBook store does not.
I share my paperback with friends and family after I read it. Can't do that with a DRM'ed eBook unless I share my eReader too (which is my phone and tablet these days).
Why PAY for an eBook if it costs more and does so much less?
The only place eBooks shine is for books that are out of print and out of copyright: Tens of thousands of books are available from Project Gutenberg for free and without DRM.
The predominant tablet also takes a 30% cut of in-app purchases, so not so enticing to sell e-books via the apps available.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
Who in their right mind pays the same amount of money for an e-book that they do for a paperback? The rich, and the stupid. Most others know they are being ripped-off.
Ebooks are way too expensive. Almost always, can find a used book for less than the kindle price. Frequently I can buy the new paperbook for less than the kindle price.
This doesn't even take into consideration the money I can recover reselling the dead-tree versions.
The brain dead, obvious, near optimal, pricing strategy is to sell back catalog kindle books at $3, just below the minimum dead tree book cost. This would instantly slaughter the used book marketplace, and capture all those sales.
But I listen to about 2-3 great books a month with audible.com. Expensive... and worth it.
And so do i.
Im currently reading three books, and i really appreciate beeing able to have all three of them, on me, all the time.
I enjoy reading on my smartphone, way more than paperbooks. Its brilliant reading with a backlit display.
Those distracting kittens would be a problem if Bush had let Cheney finish the job.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Almost every single programming book I have purchased are of poor quality.
Source code Monospace type font is lost, many times using the regular courier font. Syntax highlighting is also lost. That is totally unacceptable and makes the source codes unreadable. Last time this happened to me, I have actually downloaded the (much superior) pirated version of the same book I had just purchased.
Shame on crappy conversions.
Propaganda from the traditional publishers.
Once we get 8" ebook readers with flexible capacitive touchscreens and very light weight, we won't see any growth. These ebook reader innovation is stagnant so the ebook market is stagnant. Too much focus on Android tablets and Ipad development vs. eink tech.
The market share is still expanding, just at a slower rate. Most of us have a basic library of e-books already and are not buying as much as we used to. If the price difference between a electronic published and one printed on paper is not that great, then the tree dies. When a paper book is not one that I am going to read again, off it goes to the used book store for credit on my account. Try doing that with a e-book. Where is this survey getting its data? If the numbers are coming from Association of American Publishers and they (the AAP) are using the big 5's reports then this could be a GIGO problem.
Passionately Indifferent
annual sales growth dropped to just 5% in the first quarter
If growth is still positive (which at 5% per quarter it certainly is) then it hasn't peaked.
Sales aren't "softening", they are increasing. Only the rate of increase is softening, which means the market is starting to mature.
Sensationalist headline. Some people can't do math.
PRICE - They charge the same for eBooks than for paper books. Greedy Bastards.
Sales of ebooks for adults increased by 13.6%. That seems healthy to me. The sale of ebooks for children and young adults declined by 30.1%, but that decline wasn't about the format, because the sale of hardcovers to that segment declined even more. It is only the children/young adults market that produced the apparent weakness in ebook growth, and "Nielsen attributes this slowdown to the lack of a star performing title in children’s and young adult publishing in 2013 to replicate the success that Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy enjoyed last year." We may all be trying too hard to find reasons for a supposed trend when all that happened is that we had a year without Harry Potter or equivalent.
The problem with relying on Gutenberg is that you'll likely end up getting the impression that the world ended in December 1922.
Ebook readers just aren't good enough at the moment, at least for a lot of people. They have a ton of battery! But not enough, books don't need batteries and grabbing your reader to find it's out sucks. The screens aren't as easy to look at as a book either, we need higher contrast and higher PPI screens as well. And the interface just isn't as good either, as convenient as its been simply opening up a book and turning the page once in a while is still simpler and easier.
I had a Nook, loved the convenience of a new book nigh instantly anytime I wanted, loved being able to carry around one thing on a trip instead of several books. But when it broke it just wasn't worth it to get it fixed, not too mention ebook prices sucked.
Unfortunately, since most books are selling less ~3,000 copies, almost very few books, e-book or otherwise, make a profit.
I have a huge backlog of reading in front of me
Dozens of free books every day with some really good ones in there
Does anyone here ever buy a book that isn't published by a major publishing house? There are some really good self published books on Amazon. They only cost between 0.99 and 5.99 most of the time AND the writer gets most of the money.
People would rather play mindless games than actually read!
The more ubiquitous "pad" devices become and the more capable smart phones become the less individuals rely on that "outdated" reading thing. Instead they play the latest version of Angry Birds or Sudoku or whatever free time waster they are currently addicted to on their device. My son reads and of all of his friends only one other reads, out of approximately 30 or so casual friends. Its a sad commentary but there you go. *shrug*
Almost everyone I know with an e-book reader went nuts buying cheap books until they had a few hundred book in the unread pile. Unfortunately, they've got adult jobs, and thus limited time to read. Their book buying went from 10 times normal rate back down to the normal rate.
I think a lot of people in the industry were hoping that revenue per reader was going to stay constant, even if the readers were buying 5 times as many books at 1/5 the price. Now reality is sinking in. With cheap e-books, people *might* buy 50% more books, which is still a huge decrease in industry income. This is not a merry time to be a publisher, an author, or to have anything to do with the book industry.
However, once the publishers are gone, Amazon should do very well in the self-published market. Not with readers, of course - who has time to sift through hundreds of books to find the odd readable one. But with desperate authors who want to get promoted. I figure $25K to get a book to show up decently in the Amazon listings is going to make a lot more revenue than Amazon did from selling books.
It'll just suck if you want to read anything.
I read that after I posted. It said the average book made less than $300.
Of course "average" is always a danger. We can't guarantee a profit to books as some (many) (most?) are probably not that good. So you have a lot of zeros in there from books which are essentially vanity efforts.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I think the obsession with William Shakespeare is that a lot of memes of the past four centuries have come from his plays. Just as geeks are expected to be familiar with plots of and quotations from certain movies in order to keep their proverbial geek card, anglophones are expected to be familiar with plots of and quotations from Shakespeare's plays to earn what I'll call their "anglophone card." Now the problem with my high school English department was that not only was Shakespeare overrepresented but also the only plays we studied were six of his tragedies, not any comedies or histories.
Oh noes! A drop in growth.
That doesn't mean adoption isn't still growing, or even that it's dropping, it just that it's not growing as quickly as before.
The cost of an ebook is well over 99% pure profit for someone after the first 10000-20000 sales at $10 a book. (you have sunk costs of editors, proof readers, the writer, person who listed the book and maintained its entry on amazon.)
Any more those are all often the same person, even when publishing through an established company.
Disposable income is less, so 'luxuries' get pushed down the list.
Pretty simple.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
troll
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
6 bucks if I buy the ebook now.
The paperback was 3.50 at the time it was released.
They better rebuild all those used bookstores because we are going to need them. Heck, even
a used bookstore tried to sell the used paperback for more than the face value.
Gimme a break.
The dang books. So much for convenient when it skips 20 pages somewhere else.
I have certainly bought ebooks.
But... I went to look for a book which has been out for a few years. I could buy a paperback for $8 if I wanted to drive somewhere. Or... I could buy an ebook for $12.
That's gonna cut back on sales a fair bit.
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Since the recent attack on alt.binaries.e-book.technical it's all downhill from here.
It's simple demographics. Who does the most reading? Older people. Who buys the most tablet devices, younger folks. Simply put, young twits don't read but us old farts do and when we do, we like read words printed on real paper, not e-paper. Besides, if I fall asleep in my chair and my book slips and falls to the floor, I lose my place. If my e-reader/tablet hits the floor, there is a chance that it breaks the screen (and before anybody says buy a case for it, well, if you are going to make it as thick as a book, why not buy a book?).
In short, like many things in the tech world, ebooks didn't live up to the hype. Maybe it was the pricing. Maybe it was the devices. Maybe it was the marketing. Maybe it was the . But in the end all of those maybes are really just another way of saying that the publishers misread the demographics. It's really simple If you want to sell books (paper or e), you have to look at who is the biggest consumer of books and then put it into a format that the consumer wants. All of the advantages of ebooks don't matter if the consumer wants a real book. It's plain and simple.
i.e. even speed reading is slow speed and has no way to improve beyond a little. The net result is the global consumption of words is limited by literacy which is declining.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
I do most of my reading on an iPad. I occasionally buy a book from iBooks, but. Re often buy a hard or soft copy book and then torrent the ebook. There is and always will be an appeal to having books on a bookshelf. If publishers would start bundling (even for a higher price), I would pay for both. Music and movie companies have adopted this policy, why haven't books?
Because buying an electronic edition for twice the cost of a used 'good as new' copy of a book is _incredibly_ dumb. Baen was actually charging the exact same amount for an electronic copy of David Weber's new book as the hard cover.
For some reason, all the prices on new ebooks have jumped to $10 to $18 or so, at the minimum. So pretty much all of the prices are highway robbery.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
No one thinks to ask?
Are books sales going up to replace declining ebooks sales?
If books sales are also declining which one is declining more?
Quite interesting that some comments on here relate to _your_ ability to profit from someone else's work (ie to resell with no profit share, or to reduce your tax liability, disguised as charitable donating). These were unmanaged side-effects of traditional publishing, due to a book's physical nature, but something which they'd have to reinvent as a managed competency, to keep you happy, in the digital realm.
The author needs to draw a graph then have a good think about what "Peak" means.
OK, I haven't RTFA'ed, but the summary here makes no mention of the price of e-books, which is hugely relevant considering that an e-book cartel has been caught price-fixing! My classic example of e-book overpricing was the e-book version of hugely-selling Steve Job biography, which turned out to be more expensive than the hardback. How can any bookseller justify that situation - it *surely* costs more to ship a hardback (this price diff was on Amazon) than an e-book?
I did eventually buy an e-reader once the Nook Simple Touch hit 29 pounds here in the UK and it's quite hackable (runs an old Android that you can root/install apps on), but I ended up putting Droidfish on it and playing chess (it's really a rather good dedicated chess handheld :-) ) and using my Nexus 7 for document reading.
If e-books have peaked it probably has much to do with the increased sale of tablets.The increasingly common "jack of all trades, master of none" devices make for a painful reading experience. There are a few excellent e-readers still on the market and for those who travel across land and sea such devices are a boon (assuming that you enjoy reading in the first place).
I have an enormous library of book, worth many 10.000$ if bought new. I long stopped counting the book themselves, but rather count as linear meter of book shelves. If all that was in eBook I would have more place yes, but my narcissic self would not be able to show a nice private library to my guest. I could not lend of those as eBook. When I die, my ebook collection would die with me. My book on the other hand can be resold, gifted, lent, burned for heat, shown in a proud voluminous number of shelves or whatever.
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E-books are way too expensive. For e-books there is no production involved whatsoever en only one unmanned store. There is no need for distribution centers, no need for transportation. The whole chain of stores, employers, &tc is greatly reduced. This must be reflected in the price thus e-books should cost just a fraction of their paper cousin.
...e-tablets and e-books are. I'd so much rather a bound hardcover or softcover book, printed on paper. When I finish it I can store it in a bookshelf or give it away. Plus, holding and reading a real book is just plain fun--with the added benefit of not making me look like a trendy twit with a tablet.
If the sales are stable it just means that the time when everybody fills up his ebook shelf with some elementary stuff (textbooks, references, books you will always read) are over. The time where the peak in the grothw rate was coincides with important scientific and technical publishers offering textbooks
Since the education market is just starting to turn more to e-books, more people will be exposed to them as children in elementary, middle, and high schools. This is going to mean that more people will be exposed to e-books earlier in life and get into the habit of using them because the note taking and sharing options are getting more powerful with e-books. As you have more people who grew up with e-books reach adulthood, I think that sales with climb significantly.
I think the figures you cited are way off. There is a lot you have not accounted for.
I see them on Amazon all the time. Usually for around $1 to $7.
Maybe this is the way the industry needs to go?
Your hardcover would enter the used bookstore market and your ebook would remain with you. It would cut their sales.
Because they use acid based paper and the book literally browns and fragments in 20-30 years. Forget about giving your favorite books to your children.
I don't buy many ebooks, mainly because I can often get the same book on paper for the same price (or less!) than the ebook. With the drawbacks of the ebook (difficult or impossible to share, may be disappeared at any time, cannot resell, etc.), I am not willing to pay the same for the ebook as I am for the paper book.
I do own a kindle and have read a few books on it. But overall, there's just something about the paper book that is a better reading experience.
What I do like about ebooks is that I can keep one loaded on my phone, so I always have a book available on the spur of the moment when I have an unexpected 10+ minutes of idle time.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
When I buy a book, I want a book that will be there the rest of my life, not a book in a DRM scheme on a device that will be obsolete in a year or two.
from pirate bay and you might have some news
Stop the advertisement-driven madness of "I HAVE TO READ BOOK X NOW!!!".
Read from the massive catalogue of what's out there for free and never pay for e-books. This is how I recommend you go about it:
1. Get your e-ink based reader (I recommend the new Kobo Aurahd).
2. Head over to one of the many sources of out-of-copyright books like http://www.gutenberg.org/. Browse and find stuff you may like. Also keep an eye out for CC-licensed books around the web.
3. Go forth and indulge in http://libgen.info/ or a similar e-book piracy web site and get your fix, because, well fuck 'em.
Maybe you won't find every damn book you desire to have right now, but you will find so many good books that are more than enough to last you a lifetime.
Enjoy the reading and the savings.
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If we're talking about self-published books, it seems likely that the median self-pub book makes about 100 sales. The median for a published book is probably about 2-3K. (Hard figures are almost impossible to come by.)
I've long stopped equating popular with good. They're not opposite, but if you ignore the not-publishable-quality books, I'd say it's orthogonal. As for sales, the main problem for self-publishers is that there's 100,000 books self-published each month. A book that sells 30 copies is not necessarily bad, it's that not enough people will read it (even for free) for it to ever get word-of-mouth, even if it would be good enough to succeed.
A fundamental problem for the industry is that hard-cover books only cost a little more to print than a trade paperback. The main reason for hard-covers at all is that many readers can't handle the fact that they're paying three times a much to read the book immediately. The HC gives the rabid fan who's willing to pay to read it right away an excuse to themselves as to why they're willing to pay so much. (You'll note that they stop selling HCs as soon as a paperback comes out.)
With e-books, it's harder to get consumers to pay a substantial amount up front for what will be the same good in a year. There's no convenient myth that the reader can latch their willingness to pay onto, and thus there's a lot more resistance to paying a substantial amount up front. And unfortunately, the extra money from hardcover is what keeps the industry alive.
Huh? But the story says ebooks only account for 25% of sales. Yes, but that's the dollar amount. Look at unit sales. The majority of units sold are ebooks; they just happen to be a lot cheaper. We've just reached the point where more than 50% of actual books sold are in the ebook format. MOST books sold in the US are in the ebook format and the Kindle was only introduced six years ago. That's an amazingly quick adaptation. Wool by Hugh Howey for example is only $6 for the ebook five-parter omnibus edition. At Amazon, it's $9 in paperback and $18 in hardcover. You can find examples where ebooks cost more but even from major publishers they're usually equal or less. Self-published authors of course have ebooks for $3 or $2 or free all the time. This also doesn't take into account the literally endless downloads of public domain titles. You can access literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of titles for free. I've downloaded the complete Dickens and the complete Twain for just a dollar or two each. So ebooks already are preferred a majority of the time and we're probably undercounting by how much. This trend will continue and probably accelerate if and when Barnes & Noble goes out of business or just continues taking away floor space from books and giving it to games and stationery and the like. I do prefer a dedicated ereader to even the best tablet. I never thought I'd abandon print but when you're trying to read a doorstop like the recent Winston Churchill bio or Game of Thrones or War and Peace et al, the idea that anyone could argue print is more convenient is absurd.
I used to buy eBooks via Amazon Kindle and read them on my iPad. Then two things happened:
1. Amazon increased their eBook prices to the point that you're better off buying a second-hand paper edition.
2. Under pressure from Apple (for their mandatory 30% cut of IAP), Amazon decided that you can no longer buy eBooks through the Kindle app on iOS, you have to go through Kindle on Android or their main web site.
Print is reserved for very, very special books. I've spent way too many decades moving boxes of books. Putting my entire library on one microSD card with a backu in the cloud is simply too awesome. My books are on my Kindle (eInk, you heathens!), my phone, my tablet, my desktop and nearly any other device I want them to be on. My custom made bookshelf at home can't even hold all my books, despite my ex-wife absconding with a good portion of them.
And before you say it, and I know someone will, I have books from the 60s with yellowing, cracking pages. Books are hardly forever, most are printed on completely shit paper and with bad ink and type. Some also have pretty crappy bindings (one would think that would generally be solved by now).
I have a goal to be rid of most of my physical books by the end of 2014. I already ditched most of my CD collection and most of my movie collection, yet my access to music and film are better than ever.
The last five books which I attempted to buy were not available for purchase in eBook format. (two of them previously were, but no longer are!)
Can someone please explain to me why it is that "publishers" don't want free money?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All