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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 :(
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.
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).
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!"
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'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.
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
And I guess you get your internet connection free since you don't believe in paying for non-durable goods.
OP never said they "didn't believe in paying for non-durable goods," they said, "when there is absolutely no price benefit, why buy a non durable good?"
Completely different, and a sentiment I agree with.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
From your link:
You can lend a Kindle book to another reader for up to 14 days.
and
A book can only be loaned one time. Magazines and newspapers are currently not available for lending.
Only being able to loan a book to 1 person, EVER, and only for 2 weeks, doesn't really qualify as "loanable." At least in the sense OP is talking about.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
Unfortunately, since most books are selling less ~3,000 copies, almost very few books, e-book or otherwise, make a profit.
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 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.
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.