62% of 16 To 24-Year-Olds Prefer Printed Books Over eBooks

assertation writes "According to The Guardian, 62% of readers between the age of 16 and 24 prefer physical copies of books over ebooks. Reasons given were the feel of 'real books,' a perceived unfairly high cost for eBooks, and the ease of sharing printed books. 'On questions of ebook pricing, 28% think that ebooks should be half their current price, while just 8% say that ebook pricing is right.' The preference for physical copies was in contrast to other forms of media, such as games, movies, and music, where a majority preferred the digital version."

Comments

price

[aahpandasrun]

It's all about ebooks being too expensive. 10 dollars for a book that's 4 dollars online, or available at the library? Once kids figure out how insanely easy it is to pirate ebooks, they'll prefer ebooks.

Re:price

[assertation]

The article was about 16 - 24 year olds. They probably already know how to pirate. Ease of sharing was also another issue. Prices can be reduced, but the business model of eBooks seems to be based on reducing sharing, so that road block isn't going away.

Re:price

[Shinobi]

No, it's not only about price. It's about the fact that the book can be read anywhere, without needing a battery charge or anything. Even many kids think about that. It's also less stressful for the eyes than looking at a screen.

Re:price

[lgw]

Ebook pricing has gradually been coming down though. I think the early market (people who could afford tablets and readers when they were new expensive toys) just wasn't very price sensitive.

Ultimately, I think we'll see eBooks settle down to the same price as "real" books, before shipping. The per-unit cost of printing a book and shipping it in bulk to a distributer is a trivial portion of the price of a book. Most of the cost is in fixed costs (not per-book) that are the same regardless of media: copy-editing, royalties, marketing, and so on.

Re:price

[h4rr4r]

citation ?
I want to see a real study about this supposed eye stress people keep mentioning.

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[X0563511]

I'd make arguments for it being more environmentally friendly. No materials to work, and nothing to ship.

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[lgw]

I have the opposite take - without the need for all that paper, all the land used for tree farms would likely be used for something far less environmentally friendly.

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[Chris Mattern]

The per-unit cost of printing a book and shipping it in bulk to a distributer is a trivial portion of the price of a book.

I found one breakdown of printed book cost analysis analysis that put printing and distribution at 20% of a book's cover price, and retailer's markup at 40%. A lot of that retailer's markup is inventory cost--what it costs the retailer to store and display copies of the book. Even though the actual *printing* cost is only 10% of the book's price, you then have to pay for dealing with the physical form and getting it to the customer, which is much tougher than getting a computer file to the customer. At a guess, I'd say that 30% to 40% of the cost of a physical book is tied to paying for its physical aspects. Not so trivial.

Re:price

[bzipitidoo]

If ease of sharing is an issue, then perhaps they aren't so skilled at piracy. Same can be said of price.

Re:price

[X0563511]

Like feeding people?

Re:price

[lgw]

Ah, but that's inventory management at brick-and-mortar stores, which Amazon doesn't deal with (i.e., that's the reason the time of brick-and-mortar stores has largely passed). The per-book cost of a pallet of 1000 books delivered to Amazon has a different breakdown than the retail side.

Re:price

[lgw]

The world has a net surplus of food production as it is (and in America farming is very unfriendly to the nearby environment). Distribution is a different matter. Forests in America have been gradually reclaiming farmland for many decades now - you just don't need much land any more.

Re:price

[PNutts]

I'd make arguments for it being more environmentally friendly. No materials to work, and nothing to ship.

All the devices and infrastructure necessary to deliver and read them have an environmental cost, e.g., batteries, rare earth elements, waste from devices tossed when broken / upgraded.

Re:price

[evilRhino]

Do you only eat corn? If not, I think your metrics are incorrect. You can't measure food simply acreage of farms. There are specialty crops that aren't being grown on a large scale that could benefit from free land.

Re:price

[Savage-Rabbit]

No, it's not only about price. It's about the fact that the book can be read anywhere, without needing a battery charge or anything. Even many kids think about that. It's also less stressful for the eyes than looking at a screen.

I like reading regular books because I can arrange several of them on my desk or sit on the floor, arrange them around me and easy to flip back and forth inside any individual book or instantly context switch between books. With e-books flipping and switching from book to book is way more clumsy to do. However, e-books can be searched which is a huge bonus and I can even search for all books that contain a certain word of phrase using Spotlight on OS X/iOS. The biggest plus with e-books IMHO is portability. I have been converting my printed library to digital by a combination of buying ebooks versions of paper books that I own and scanning my old out-of-print paper books or downloading scanned books from projects like Gutenberg. Recently I put a stack of these paper books on a bathroom scale and measured the real-world weight of the library I keep on my iPad, it was well over 20kg. Basically I would not want to be without paper books but grabbing the iPad and knowing that you are carrying the contents of an entire 2m high bookshelf in your hand is undeniably cool and very convenient.

Re:price

[Luthair]

Stores also throw a lot of books in the trash (they tear off the front cover and return to the publisher), so while the per unit cost might be 20% there is additional cost to the publisher if the books don't sell.

Re:price

[AliasMarlowe]

The article was about 16 - 24 year olds. They probably already know how to pirate. Ease of sharing was also another issue. Prices can be reduced, but the business model of eBooks seems to be based on reducing sharing, so that road block isn't going away.

My own kids put it differently. It's the feel and smell and convenience of a book that counts. Above all, it's the feel of the paper as the pages are turned.

Having to use an ebook reader would probably diminish their liking for books (we're all bookworms). They have little or no interest in ebooks, although we have a good number of PDF books on topics which interest them. So accessing books with file-sharing tools is also not an issue. Also, the cost is irrelevant; we give them books whenever they want, and they also get lots of books based on their marks at school (this turns out a bit pricey, but it's worth it for the motivating effect).

Re:price

[Anonymous Coward]

I too like to spread my 'art' books, well, magazines, all over the basement floor to be able to flip from one to another as fast as my imagination will let me with one hand...

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[prelelat]

Depends on what you are using to read on. If I use my phone or tablet I get eye strain after a long read. If I read on my kindle 2 I don't have any issues at all with eye strain. I can read it almost anywhere I read a regular book as well(took it in the bath one time felt nervous the whole time). Real issue with it is the battery, which lasts forever if I have wireless turned off.

The real big thing I dislike about the ebook is the pricing is crappy and I can't really share my books easily(US has a way to loan out certain books but I'm Canadian)

I think the e-ink craze kind of died off though which is unfortunate for ebooks.

Re:price

[nabsltd]

Ultimately, I think we'll see eBooks settle down to the same price as "real" books, before shipping.

eBooks have settled down to that price, and often much cheaper, but it's still far too high.

First, with effectively zero cost for reproduction, every bit of the price should end up in the hands of people who did real work on the book (mostly the authors, with some for editors and middleman sales). If that happens, then a $4.00 price should be more than enough, as even best-selling authors don't get more than about $2/book sold. And yet, we still have many eBooks selling for $12. Sure, that's a deal compared to a new hardcover at $18-20, but...

...you can get a used copy of the book for $5 including shipping, which is just fine if all you want to do is read the book. If you're a collector, then you can expect to pay premium prices for mint condition hardcover copies.

Re:price

[lgw]

Well, there are special cases for everything in life. If you want to grow mint it's all about funding land that won't be overrun by kudzu for as long as possible, which is pretty random. But there's no shortage of arable land, in general, nor shortage of food (i.e., calories and protein to keep us from starving).

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[gmclapp]

I'll be your citation. I'm 24 and I prefer printed books because they are on paper. It's kind of nice to take a break from staring at a screen all day. Also, you don't need a special setting to read a real live book in direct sunlight, and finally, you're exactly right; I've never had to charge any of my books.

Re:price

[Greyfox]

Plus some random exec can't revoke your ability to read your printed book at a moment's notice.

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[Ksevio]

But in that case you also have to throw in shipping costs as well which aren't a factor for ebooks

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[DexterIsADog]

I've always found this odd - my view is that the content of the book is all that matters, and smell and physical feel of pages is irrelevant. I read many more books, on a wider range of topics, both fiction, non-fiction, including history, now that I can read on a Kindle, an Android tablet, or even my phone. If I find myself stuck someplace I didn't expect to have time to kill, I just pull out my phone and read.

As for convenient, I find the ability to carry around as many books as I want, browse, sample and buy more in any location at any time, to be much more convenient than paper books.

And this from a guy who enjoyed trekking into Manhattan from Queens as a lad to go to the big bookstores, the only place I could find all the s.f. I craved in the 70's.

Re:price

[thetoadwarrior]

That might be right, because it would take tight fisted d-bag to put up with the inferior format simply to avoid paying money.

Re:price

[lgw]

I think we'll see eBooks settle down to the same price as "real" books, before shipping

Re:price

[K. S. Kyosuke]

and I can even search for all books that contain a certain word of phrase using Spotlight on OS X/iOS.

This should be a *basic* feature, not an advanced one. And throw in some semantic search for good measure. Seriously, comments like yours make me wonder how much progress have we actually made since the 1980s. Why is the mobile software so atrocious in general is beyond me.

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[DexterIsADog]

...all the land used for tree farms would likely be used for something far less environmentally friendly.

Um, what? Where in the world did you pull that from?

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[fluffythedestroyer]

Don't need any studies for that. Some people's eyes are getting hurt or tired after some time and others not... it depends on the person. You can do the test yourself, just play(or work) on a computer screen for 12 hours starting at 10am till 10pm and you'll see for yourself. If your eyes hurts or getting tired then your affected by this problem.

One solution to this on the computer is to use the program called FL.UX which is free and it modifies your computer's display to adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

So reading a boook on a PC wont be a problem for me but using anything than that could be a problem as I know lots of people with this kind of problem. For me, i don't have any problems with that. i could stare at a screen for more than 12 hours straigh and my eyes wont be tired, stressed or anything like that. I recently had my eyes checked and they're in full heath as well

Re:price

[lgw]

Printed books have an extremely low cost for reproduction, is the thing. Charlie Stross wrote a great explanation of the common misperceptions about publishing. Looks like he just updated it last week, It's definitely worth a read before pulling numbers out of your ass for how much a book "should" cost.

BTW, best-selling authors often get less per book sold than mid-tier authors. Most titles don't "earn out" their advance, so the author is making more per book than the per-book royalty (of course, that's far less total money).

Re:price

[cbeaudry]

Actually, ebooks have INCREASED significantly in price over the years, and sharply when APPLE forced itself into the market.

Ebooks where going for 2-5$ when first introduced on Amazon. And gaining ground. But publishers where not happy with those profit margins.

So Apple came in, and took the market by allowing the publishers to fix the price and Apple would take a fixed margin.
I believe Apple has recently lost a price fixing case with the DOJ about this subject in the past year.

Books however are still stuck at a price above paperbacks which is preposterous.

Re:price

[DrLang21]

Frankly, ebooks are a pain. When I'm reading, I frequently flip back to previous material that I've read for reference. Or I flip to a topic I am looking for. With physical media, this is relatively painless. With ebooks, you get lost. There is also the problem of not knowing exactly what you are looking for. You can't search for it because you are not quite sure what you are looking for. You flip through pages until you find keywords that jog your memory but had not previously considered.

Re:price

[0123456]

BTW, best-selling authors often get less per book sold than mid-tier authors. Most titles don't "earn out" their advance, so the author is making more per book than the per-book royalty (of course, that's far less total money).

Real best-selling authors (e.g. the Stephen Kings of the world, not someone who just got on the NYT list for a week) get much better deals than the crappy ones mid-listers can negotiate.

Re:price

[praxis]

Having a preference does not necessarily mean the exclusion of the other. I fall into the prefer printed book category (though for a different age demographic) but I own a good number of both. I prefer printed books but I have been working on reducing the size of my physical library because ebooks take up less space and I want fewer physical possessions to worry about.

Despite my preference for one, I use the other more but use both quite a lot.

Re:price

[chispito]

It's also less stressful for the eyes than looking at a screen

Argh. You're comparing books with tablets, but ignoring dedicated e-ink ereaders. A reader with e-ink does not have this problem. The battery problem is virtually non-existent. A charge lasts a week of heavy reading or a month in most of my usage.

Re:price

[nospam007]

" I'm 24 and I prefer printed books because they are on paper."

Yes and they can be hollowed out to put your dope in and you can fix a wobbly table with one.

" It's kind of nice to take a break from staring at a screen all day. Also, you don't need a special setting to read a real live book in direct sunlight,"

With eReaders too. They are e-paper, not LCD screens and they are front lit if you want to.
You can change the font, the font size and if a word is unknown to you, you tap it an an explanation is shown, or a translation, or the wikipedia entry or...
You can use some special fonts for dyslexic people if you need to.

" and finally, you're exactly right; I've never had to charge any of my books.""

An I can balance 500 ebooks on my middle finger and nobody can secretly take one of my ebooks and take it to the bathroom.

I reclaimed a full room when I donated all my paper books that I had read in 45 years. I never ever gave one away before, so there were a couple of thousand.
Get Calibre, it's a total GUI catastrophe but it gets the job done, beautifully.
Also, flipping pages makes no noise, my wife loves that.

The only drawback is that I'm a pirate and so now I have 75.000 books to read and I have no time anymore, so, Ciao.

Re:price

[cheekyjohnson]

They probably already know how to pirate.

I think you'd be surprised at how horrendously incompetent most people are. I'd say young people are nowhere near as 'tech savvy' as some people like to claim they are, to the point where they have difficulty doing much beyond accessing their Facebook pages and using a few specific programs.

Re:price

[Mashiki]

Like feeding people?

Hardly. Where most tree farms are, the land is unsuitable for farming, it's either excessively hilly, or too cold for normal crop rotations to work properly.

Re:price

[lgw]

Maybe - but the point is that per-book royalties tend to be low compared to the per-book equivalent of an advance that doesn't earn out. Heck, if the book flops, the advance can me more than the price of the book, per-book. But editors are pretty good at predicting book sales, so that rarely happens.

Re:price

[swillden]

I like reading regular books because I can arrange several of them on my desk or sit on the floor, arrange them around me and easy to flip back and forth inside any individual book or instantly context switch between books. With e-books flipping and switching from book to book is way more clumsy to do.

You just need more e-book readers.

Re:price

[ifiwereasculptor]

I'm with you. I strongly prefer printed books due to lots of small reasons, like being virtually mug-free, not running out of batteries, providing conversation material (even when sitting on a bookshelf) etc. However, space has been a problem. My shelves are packed and nowadays I think none of us apartment dwellers has enough space for a proper library. So now I'm considering biting the bullet and getting Pynchon's latest novel on ebook form.

Re:price

[asmkm22]

I think that, if ebooks were priced properly, they'd see more usage on tablets and maybe phones (screens are getting pretty large). But yeah, there is currently no real value in ebooks.

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[sjames]

I guess you have either never read a paper book or an ebook, one of the two. If you had it would be painfully obvious.

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[sjames]

The 40% is the cost to the publisher. They generally don't do orders of less than a pallet.

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[lgw]

Tree farms are very environmentally friendly as farming goes - they don't involve intense fertilization or ever-higher-dose insecticides the way, say, corn does (or for that matter, a golf course). And since those trees spend a lot of time growing before the harvest, they do the nice things trees do for the atmosphere. I'm not so sure about the soil, as that's all about the tree-fungus symbiosis, and I'm, not sure haw fast that happens.

Or were you under the false impression that paper was made from old-growth trees? Trees for paper are just a multi-year crop, farmed like any other crop.

Re:price

[WuphonsReach]

There's a big difference between "books that you consume" and "books that you reference".

The former category in things like fiction or biographies or anything that you read sequentially from start to finish work very well in electronic form. With the advantage that you can carry around weeks worth of books without all the bulk and heft of paper copies. The better of the early readers that used the e-ink screens would get battery life measured in weeks, not hours. This meant that you could charge them up at the start of the month, leave it on the nightstand by your bed, and be sure of a few weeks of reading pleasure at bedtime before you would have to go looking for a cord.

Their downside was the speed of the e-ink. It was fast enough for sequential page turning, but that was about it.

The second category of reference works is a whole different kettle of fish. You need search (which means keyboard input of some sort) along with fast bookmarking, highlighting, linking between topics, etc. That's much harder to pull off. I greatly prefer paper copies for reference works like programming documentation or books that teach specific technologies (Spring, MVC, Java, JavaScript, CSS) where I can mark them up, highlight sections, attach bookmarks to pages, etc.

Re:price

[Trimaxion]

Agreed. Random access on the e-readers I've used sucks compared to flipping a few pages on a paper book. I'd never want to read reference material on my Kindle

That said, for linear content (novels) I love my Kindle and haven't bought a paperback novel in years.

Re:price

[painandgreed]

Frankly, ebooks are a pain. When I'm reading, I frequently flip back to previous material that I've read for reference. Or I flip to a topic I am looking for. With physical media, this is relatively painless. With ebooks, you get lost.

Yep, PDF readers need a flip function. Something like a bar that you can put your finger one as a representation of how far through the book, but instead of jumping to where your finger is, it starts flipping pages. SLow for the first few then speeding up to fast, but still slow enough to scan the page. If going through a lot of pages, the middle parts between the beginning and end flip past be too fast to scan, but then as you get near your finger the flipping slows down again.

Re:price

[zippthorne]

I like to refer back to earlier bits, too. Ebooks are great for that, though, because my bookmarks have a snippet of the actual text I want to be able to snap back to. Sometimes with a note by myself. With physical media, I can't search the text, or have a page of highlights to review and jump to. I don't have a built-in dictionary, either, that's a separate device.

I will say it took me a while to figure out the input model the the touch Nook uses for highlighting. There are endpoints, but you can't drag them both. Instead, the initial word is a pivot, and you can drag to points before or after that word. I think. It definitely does not work like tablets do.

Re:price

[rakslice]

What about the old chestnut: "You can't grep dead trees?"

Re:price

[BlackHawk-666]

You guys know you can place bookmarks into the ebooks on your Kindle and just jump to them whenever you want from a menu, right? When I read a book, if I see something I might need to reference later, a tap near the top of my screen is all it takes to mark that page. Let's not forget the brilliance of being able to jump straight to the index or table of contents and hyperlink to the info I wanted to find...or search the entire text of the book.

Honestly, I can't see a reason why I'd ever want a paper book again - except perhaps for a really high quality print of fine art.

Re:price

[BlackHawk-666]

I buy all my books now as ebooks and for me at least, I don't see any issues with the price of them. In fact, I typically save anything from 20%-80% off the cost of the book on paper at retail. Typical textbooks I buy are about 1/3 the price of paper ones. If anything is true, it's that there is no real value in paper books.

Re:price

[BlackHawk-666]

And that cost is reduced to zero when the device you use to read them is something you already bought or would have bought for other general uses.

Re:price

[dbIII]

Eink is OK on the eyes, keeps a charge for many days worth of reading and I actually find an ebook more convenient than a paper one for things like reading during lunch where keeping a paperback open and turning pages is more hassle than just touching the screen to change pages. Portability is better than a book beyond a few hundred pages but of course they are a lot more fragile.
That's why I like them but of course I see them as a useful thing for some situations (eg. reading novels outside of the house) and not a total replacement.

Re:price

[dbIII]

Yes and they can be hollowed out to put your dope in

I hollowed one out to put my Kobo eink reader in. The cases were stupidly expensive and frankly crap for protecting against a drop so I got a diary past the midpoint of the year for nearly nothing and cut the pages inside to fit.

Re:price

[DexterIsADog]

I know where paper comes from, thanks. I'm just admiring the leap you make from the comment that ebooks save the need to harvest trees for paper to a poor environmental choice for that land. If we didn't need to keep expanding the acreage of tree farms for pulp, then we wouldn't need to clear the old growth in the first place, would we?

Re:price

[DexterIsADog]

I do still buy some physical books, such as art books. And the illustrated version of "The Story of Salt" isn't much good on an ebook. But for text-only, I much prefer ebooks. I'm not saying anyone else needs to, should, are foolish not to, etc.

Re:price

[EvanED]

A reader with e-ink does not have this problem.

I would change that to say may not have that problem. I borrowed an older Kindle from a friend a few months ago to evaluate and read several chapters of A Song of Ice and Fire on it, and I wasn't impressed. I mean it was pretty nice, but I still prefer physical books over it. The contrast on the Kindle was lower, and even though the screen isn't a glossy screen, it is still much more glossy than paper. The paperwhite he got to replace the one I borrowed seemed better, but it still had the gloss problem.

(And don't consider me some book snob; I actually do embarrassingly little pleasure reading.)

Re:price

[lgw]

It's the myth that will never die: that paper comes from old growth. Maybe some forests were still being cleared for the first time for paper 30 or 40 years ago - maybe. But the vast majority of paper comes from land that has been tree farms since most of us were born, and will be put to some other commercial use as we need less paper. Tree farming is about the most environmentally friendly commercial use for land available, though I guess grazing land for cattle isn't bad either.

Re:price

[xSander]

I've read many paper books and have owned an e-ink e-reader for 1,5 years now. E-ink has a lot of advantages: no bookshelves full of books, the books always weigh the same no matter how many pages it has, they're generally cheaper than paper, no shipping costs, etc. I can also tell you that since it also uses indirect light, there is NO (extra) strain on the eyes whatsoever. You can also adjust the font or font size to your liking, which makes it ideal for elderly people too.

By the way, I recently got a tablet and tried to read a book on it. That was much less pleasant, even with white letters on black background. Because of the bigger screen and colors, it is suitable for comics though. Until full color e-ink readers with screens bigger than 5" come along.

Re:price

[Rande]

Actually, before Apple, the publishers were making exactly the same amount of profit, because they were selling them at a fixed price to the retailers.
However, Amazon was quite happy with a ~2% profit margin, and so were selling ebooks quite cheaply.
But this could give an impression that books were not as valuable as the publishers would like, and so were quite happy to collude with Apple when they wanted their 30% profit.

This impression of value is why garment labels hate grey imports. The market will bear $100 labelled jeans even though it only costs them $8 to make, _if_ there is an impression of exclusivity/value. But this impression is broken when a grey market seller decides to sell the same product for $50 - the same price as a lower tier label.

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[itsdapead]

Frankly, ebooks are a pain. When I'm reading, I frequently flip back to previous material that I've read for reference.

Sounds like you're talking about reference books.

I find my e-reader great for 'linear' reading for novels etc. but useless for reference, for the reasons you state,

However, the competition for printed reference books is surely not Kindles et. al. but the web? I wonder how many of the people surveyed rely on Wikipedia, Google etc. for reference?

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[Nuke Bloodaxe]

They probably already know how to pirate.

I think you'd be surprised at how horrendously incompetent most people are. I'd say young people are nowhere near as 'tech savvy' as some people like to claim they are, to the point where they have difficulty doing much beyond accessing their Facebook pages and using a few specific programs.

I agree, and I do work at a school.

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[Man Eating Duck]

I guess you have either never read a paper book or an ebook, one of the two. If you had it would be painfully obvious.

I have read many thousands of pbooks and 505 ebooks in my life. I find that the E-Ink display on my reader is slightly different from paper, but equally easy to read. Nothing painfully obvious about it at all for my part. Add in the convenience and it's a no-brainer. YMMV.

Re:price

[sjames]

The e-ink probably makes a big difference there.

Re: price

[zippthorne]

Searching for text using the built-in text search feature in ebooks has been more productive for me than flipping pages in real books.

Re:price

[gmclapp]

You sound mad. I probably couldn't continue practicing as a professional engineer if I smoked...

Also, having read books for 45 years puts you well outside the target demographic for the survey making your opinion irrelevant. Have a nice day.

Burn an Ebook?

[donut1005]

I posed a question on social media recently asking if deleting an Ebook is akin to book burning. Very few saw a parallel. Most were appalled at the idea of burning a book but had no problem with deleting an Ebook. The reason they would not burn a book but were ok with deleting an Ebook? Not for the preservation of knowledge, not for passing on history, not for any other archeological reason. Just because they had a sentimental connection via their senses, the touch, the smell.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[Laxori666]

Also it requires way, way more effort to print and bind a book than it does to copy a file. Once it's in digital form it's essentially valueless because the bytes are so cheap to store and transmit. This is why I think media in the future will gravitate more towards a "voluntary payment" model. That is, it'll be more successful to have millions view your work and a small % of them pay, than to try to get everybody who views your work to pay.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[jbolden]

Humans build morality based on sacramental associations. Book burning is an activity only bad people do. Deleting ebooks is an activity both good and bad people do. Ergo: book burning is likely a bad thing while deleting ebooks morally neutral.

That seems like a sensible analysis where one is appealing to sociology for the determination of good vs. evil.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can easily re-download an ebook. Deleting an ebook is closer to putting a book in a bookshelf than to burning it.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[AK Marc]

Depending on how you bought it, you still have it (just stored in the "cloud" rather than on the device). So as the AC says, deleting it is more akin to putting it on the shelf. At worst, it's putting it in the trash. Have you asked whether throwing out a worn old book that was well-read is the same as burning it?

Now, when Amazon mass-deletes books from devices remotely, that'd be considered closer to an old-fashioned book burning, I'd guess.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[mlts]

Voluntary payments work in smaller ecosystems. However as things get bigger, the tragedy of the commons starts happening. This is why an honor system peach stand in the middle of Maine works, while one near a busy city likely will be relieved of its fruit and cash box... perhaps just removed completely.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[amRadioHed]

It's entirely different because people don't burn books just because they are done with them and are trying to reduce clutter. It is always done as an act of censorship, too prevent others from being able to read the books. Removing books on a public source such as project Gutenberg or a library server maybe would be closer to what book burning was about.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[pr0fessor]

There is a big difference between going to the library and burning books you don't want others to read and deleting a ebook off of your device to make room to download more ebooks from a large repository of ebooks {you've not deleted it from the repository just your device you can still download it again}.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[PNutts]

I posed a question on social media recently asking if deleting an Ebook is akin to book burning.

Another good reason to stay away from "social media" sites.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[Minwee]

That's right. When you burning books at the library it doesn't smell as bad.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[umafuckit]

The reason they would not burn a book but were ok with deleting an Ebook? Not for the preservation of knowledge, not for passing on history, not for any other archeological reason. Just because they had a sentimental connection via their senses, the touch, the smell.

Aren't you hypothesizing there? I think the aversion to burning a book is more likely to be tied to the fact that, historically, book burning is one of the first symptoms of oppression. It's often followed by imprisonment or slaughter of the people associated with the doomed books. So book burning is an act that carries emotional baggage. The same can't be said of file deletion.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[asmkm22]

Part of the problem is because of how book burning is basically a reaction to the Nazi's practice of it. With that scenario, it wasn't so much that they were burning books that was offensive, but that they were essentially burning pieces of a culture that couldn't be replaced. These days, books are very replaceable. You can go burn a dozen random books at your home without actually having done any cultural harm, thanks to a larger proliferation of the publishing industry over the last 50 years. People might still instinctively balk at your for it, even if they don't understand the real context. Even still, not a lot of people really care anymore, with most considering flag burning to be more offensive.

With ebooks, there's very little at risk of being destroyed since everything is basically just a copy of something else, and easily replaced. Not to mention intangible. Ebooks also lack any sort of personal association, and don't really do much for creating fond memories. I have several books that I read as a child (Dragonlance, for example) which to this day bring back memories by simply picking them up or smelling the musty pages. Even though that particular book isn't culturally significant or irreplaceable, it IS significant to me due to my own personal experiences. I don't think the same could be said if I had first read that book on an eReader or tablet or something.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[Laxori666]

I'm thinking more of the Kickstarter model. You try to raise a bunch of money and then, if you have enough, you write the book or produce the TV show or whatever. Then once it's produced anybody can see it for free. You could provide non-digital incentives to the people who fund you early, like going to meet them in person or writing them into the book or the show or whatever.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[sjames]

Or, due to DRM, the ebook is pre-burned.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[mjwx]

Humans build morality based on sacramental associations. Book burning is an activity only bad people do. Deleting ebooks is an activity both good and bad people do. Ergo: book burning is likely a bad thing while deleting ebooks morally neutral.

That seems like a sensible analysis where one is appealing to sociology for the determination of good vs. evil.

I dont see a "book burning" under it's colloquial definition to be an individual activity.

When I think of a book burning I think of huge fires in Berlin streets with Nazi's throwing on hundreds of copies of undesirable texts, not a single person burning a single book to make more room in his bookshelf.

So I do see a parallel between book burning and a mass deletion of an ebook by a publisher (it has already happens, most ironically to copies of Nineteen Eighty-four) because they are both forms of censoring books and ultimately, control.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[jbolden]

There aren't individuals burning a single book, they just throw it in the garbage. Burning books is meant to draw attention, it is inherently a political activity.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[mjwx]

There aren't individuals burning a single book, they just throw it in the garbage. Burning books is meant to draw attention, it is inherently a political activity.

Which is exactly what I meant.

And this is why I see a mass e-book deletion to be akin to a book burning, whether the aim is political or just to increase profits.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[jbolden]

Interesting point about data vs. books.

Re:Burn an Ebook?

[jwhitener]

Digital copies are completely different than physical goods.

The peach owner is deprived of peaches when that one bad person steals from the stand. Digital copies of peaches not so much.

The band Radiohead and others have tried a "pay what you want" system and it has worked for them on large scales.

Picard Syndrome

[Russ1642]

There's already a name for this - Jean Luc Picard Syndrome.

Printed books

[Anonymous Coward]

To give some arguments that I don't see:

Printed books don't break when shoved into luggage.

Printed books have infinite "battery life".

Printed books don't get stolen like electronic devices.

I break a book, I just lost that particular book - well, no. I can still read it. I lose it, all I lost is one book - not an electronic device and all the other books on it.

At least some poor slobs (printers, packagers, truckers, etc ...) are making a living making these things (at no extra cost to me) as opposed to content creators who knock this off and make an infinite number at no additional cost (put it into the computer and infinite copies without any effort.).

Re:Printed books

[Anonymous Coward]

I read far more since I switched from paper to reading on my phone. It doesn't hurt my eyes, I can carry hundreds of books with me absolutely everywhere I go, it automatically "bookmarks" where I am, I can do text searches, etc. I get something like 10 hours of reading before having to charge my phone, and dedicated ebook readers can get far more. I personally don't get the obsession with paper books.

Re:Printed books

[geekd]

I can't fit 500+ printed books in my pocket. For me, that's the big deal right there. I have limited physical storage space in my house, and I read about 2 books a week.

Re:Printed books

[X0563511]

Nevermind all that pollution and energy/resource consumption involved in producing and shipping those books...

Re:Printed books

[hawguy]

To give some arguments that I don't see:

Printed books don't break when shoved into luggage.

My 4 year old kindle (with keyboard) has been shoved in luggage countless times and hasn't broken. I replaced it with a paperwhite kindle a few months ago because I wanted a backlight, but I still use the old one from time to time. An eBook reader may be more fragile than a paper book, but it can withstand the rigors of daily life just fine.

The kindle is especially nice for reading at the beach or hot tub -- I just put it in a ziplock baggy to keep out the sand and water, and can read with ease. If I drop it in the water, it floats on the surface -- no need to wait days to dry it before continuing to read (if it's possible at all, and the pages aren't stuck together)

Printed books have infinite "battery life".

I'm still averaging a month of battery life on my kindle, and I can read while charging. It's not infinite, but it may as well be.

Printed books don't get stolen like electronic devices.

Someone broke into my car once and took my backpack with several books (and dirty gym clothes), they rifled through the glove compartment, but they didn't take the kindle that was tucked into a door side pocket. I'm not aware of any anti-theft devices built-in to books, so they can get stolen like everything else. Admittedly if I left the kindle on the seat next to a book, they'd likely have taken the kindle before the book.

I break a book, I just lost that particular book - well, no. I can still read it. I lose it, all I lost is one book - not an electronic device and all the other books on it.

I buy most of my books through sources other than Amazon, and I have a backup copy of all of them, if my kindle breaks or someone steals it, I don't lose any books, not even the one I was currently reading. And Amazon can have a replacement kindle at my door in 2 days.... or I can run the Kindle app on my phone and pick up right where I left off.

At least some poor slobs (printers, packagers, truckers, etc ...) are making a living making these things (at no extra cost to me) as opposed to content creators who knock this off and make an infinite number at no additional cost (put it into the computer and infinite copies without any effort.).

Why do you think that you're not paying to support the entire print industry when you purchase a book? Where do you think the money comes from to pay them if it's not built-in to the price of a book?

Re:Printed books

[nogginthenog]

Printed books don't break when shoved into luggage.
Nor does my Kindle. It's travelled all over the world.

Printed books have infinite "battery life".
My 3 year old Kindle 3 still holds a month or more of charge.

Printed books don't get stolen like electronic devices.
Fair enough, but I doubt a Kindle has great resell value.

I break a book, I just lost that particular book - well, no. I can still read it. I lose it, all I lost is one book - not an electronic device and all the other books on it.
Just download it again from Amazon etc.

Re:Printed books

[Saethan]

I replaced it with a paperwhite kindle a few months ago because I wanted a backlight

Joke's on you, you got a frontlight! :P

Personally I read my books on 4 different devices... a laptop, galaxy s2, nexus 7, and a kindle paperwhite. It's very rare I'm not within 10ft of one of these.

Re:Printed books

[Saethan]

Sure, battery life in a ebook reader is finite, but it last literally weeks. Unless you are shipwrecked in a deserted island, thats a non-issue for most of us.

Don't forget solar chargers for low-powered usb devices are in the ~$40 range, last I checked, in case you want to take your whole library on a cross-country camping trip or whatever. :)

Re:Printed books

[plover]

The last time I traveled to India, I brought 4 kilos of textbooks with me. I would love to have had ebook versions and not have to have portaged those pulped trees across three continents, but part of the presentation was unveiling the stack of books to say "this is what we need to work on". Showing someone a menu of book covers that subtotal to 10MB doesn't quite deliver the same effect.

Oh, and printed books do tear, their spines break, and pages come loose fairly often out of a well-read reference book. If it gets water damaged, it risks mold and mildew. If a printed book is lost, it's gone forever. On the other hand, if an e-book reader starts looking shabby, you simply buy another container and the titles will transfer almost automatically into a shiny new machine. And if the battery in the e-book is dying, your iPad, iPhone, PC, tablet, or Android device will offer you an alternate reading platform until it's charged - even preserving the locations of your bookmarks.

All of the above notwithstanding, I definitely prefer my paper books for readability and the pleasure of their presence. Somewhere under a nearby stack of magazines and books is an uncharged Kindle that I haven't touched in months. I'm pretty much forced by my school to teach from an e-book on an iPad, and while the convenience and cost factors are definitely in favor of the electronics, it's still not my preferred way to read or teach.

Re:Printed books

[DogDude]

I can't fit 500+ printed books in my pocket. For me, that's the big deal right there. I have limited physical storage space in my house, and I read about 2 books a week.

So, then either, you don't go back to your house more frequently than once every few weeks, or you can't physically carry one or two books at a time? Either situations is sad, and I'm sorry for you.

Re:Printed books

[gmclapp]

You don't read 500+ books all at once. I understand if you have limited storage at your house, but you certainly don't mean to argue that you need to carry them all with you...

Re:Printed books

[X0563511]

You mean the multipurpose device I have that does far more than just read books? I see nothing wrong with using an existing computing device to do my reading on, too.

Re:Printed books

[hawguy]

I replaced it with a paperwhite kindle a few months ago because I wanted a backlight

Joke's on you, you got a frontlight! :P

Yeah, you've got me there, it is a frontlight, but it acts like a backlight in that I can read in bed without my clip-on booklight disturbing my partner.

Personally I read my books on 4 different devices... a laptop, galaxy s2, nexus 7, and a kindle paperwhite. It's very rare I'm not within 10ft of one of these.

Back when I was commuting by train/bus, I read a lot on my cellphone (which was convenient for one handed reading while standing), but now that I do most of my reading where I can sit down, I much prefer the kindle.

Re:Printed books

[thetoadwarrior]

and realistically who is ever away from their house long enough and with enough free time to warrant having hundreds of books on them? My laptop, a book and my mobile all fit in my bag. Given how many people drive these days it's not even like space should be at a premium anyway so putting up with a format most people don't find comfortabe to stare at for hours just because you could carry hundreds of books seems kinda silly.

Re:Printed books

[Agent0013]

This is the biggest benefit of ebooks to me. I have them with me wherever and whenever I am. I don't have to carry an extra book in my hand to lunch. Even a small paperback won't really fit in pants pockets, but my phone does. And if I find I end up having to wait in line for something unexpected, I will never be in a situation where I didn't remember to bring a book, it's there on my phone.

Re:Printed books

[steveg]

Fell as sorry for me as you like.

My ebook reader is far more "pocketable" than a dead tree book is. Believe me, I've been carrying around books of one sort or another (in pockets, in backpacks, etc.) for almost 50 years. I've had more than a few paperbacks shoved into pockets.

They're a pain in the butt. That's for just one. Two became very inconvenient. If I expected to finish one that meant I had to also carry the next one with me. Now that next book is always with me.

Do I need 500+ books with me at all times? No. Do I need at least 2 or 3? Yes. If I'm travelling then I need 5 or 6 (or more, depending on the trip length.)

Having 500+ is nice because I have a choice of what the next book is going to be. It's not essential, but it's nice.

In reality, it's more complicated for me. At any given time I've got at least 3 books in-progress, usually a couple in dead tree form (at fixed locations) and one ebook which I carry where ever I go. I finish 2 or 3 a week, but I don't always know when that's going to be. Having that next book handy is important to me.

Re:Printed books

[nabsltd]

So, then either, you don't go back to your house more frequently than once every few weeks, or you can't physically carry one or two books at a time? Either situations is sad, and I'm sorry for you.

I regularly read 3-4 books if I'm on vacation for a week, especially if I am not the driver of the vehicle that gets me to my destination. It's a pain to pack that many in my luggage, and to be limited to just those books. What if a book turns out to be really bad and I move on to the next one? It doesn't happen often, but about 1% of books I start I quit because they just suck.

With an eReader, I can have 20-30 books to choose from (yeah, they can store thousands, but I agree that having that many isn't much better than having a couple dozen) instead of being limited to what I brought with me.

And, yeah, I'm starting to really have space issues. I've only got about 1000 books, but the vast majority are hardcover (about 85%) and take up a lot of space. I'm looking forward to taking my non-collectible books someplace I can trade them in for ones I haven't read. Even at 5:1, I could easily get 100 new books that way.

Re:Printed books

[steveg]

I don't need hundreds. I do need multiples though. More than is convenient to carry around with me, especially if I'm travelling.

And I have an e-ink reader. It's quite comfortable to stare at for as long as I would stare at a dead-tree book. If I were using a tablet or a phone, yeah, you'd be right. I don't use those for long-form reading, though.

Re:Printed books

[steveg]

I don't read 500 books at the same time, but I do read sequentially, and carrying around more than one book is more hassle than I care to put up with. My book reader fits in my pocket more easily than one paperback does, much less two. That's not a marginal utility, it's pretty significant.

Frankly, if I did need to access more than one book at a time, I would do it like you do, laying physical books out side-by-side. Ebooks are not a good choice for reference books (at least for me.) For me reference books are used in a random access manner, and ebooks aren't particularly good at that.

Novels, however, are pretty much linear, so the paper and ebook experience are pretty similar. And there are conveniences to ebooks aside from the portability aspect.

Re:Printed books

[thetoadwarrior]

I agree e-ink readers aren't too bad but I'm giving them a pass until decent color e-ink options come out.

Re:Printed books

[steveg]

Probably depends on what you read. Other than the covers, none of my books have anything in color.

And I wouldn't hold my breath on color e-ink. Qualcomm's Mirasol was looking very promising, but apparently no one wanted color e-ink badly enough, so Qualcomm abandoned the e-reader market.

I don't think anybody is working very hard on color e-ink.

Re:Printed books

[sjames]

Admittedly if I left the kindle on the seat next to a book, they'd likely have taken the kindle before the book.

Or more to the point, if you leave the kindle on the seat they'll break in and take it. If you leave a book, they'll pass it by.

Re:Printed books

[BlackHawk-666]

Some people would break in to steal a pack of gum left on the seat of the car. I've known people who had windows smashed so the thief could steal two dollars that was on show in the centre console!

what about the other 38%

[quitte]

At first glance I was shocked at the acceptance of ebooks this implies. On further thought however (and without reading the article) this could as well mean that 38% don't read at all. Or have a more complex opinion than can be stated as a preference.

I refuse to believe that 38% of any population actually prefers those slow to flip through ebooks.

Re:what about the other 38%

[X0563511]

I refuse to believe that 38% of any population actually prefers those slow to flip through ebooks.

That's a problem with the reader software, not the media. If they would stop locking ebooks down and instead just produce ePubs or whatnot, you could use whatever reader you wanted. An ePub is just a specially organized zipfile with metadata files in it, HTML, and CSS.

It doesn't need to be any more difficult to read than a static website.

Re:what about the other 38%

[hawguy]

At first glance I was shocked at the acceptance of ebooks this implies. On further thought however (and without reading the article) this could as well mean that 38% don't read at all. Or have a more complex opinion than can be stated as a preference.

I refuse to believe that 38% of any population actually prefers those slow to flip through ebooks.

Without more details on their testing methodology, the survey may mean nothing more than any other "online survey". Were the participants chosen at random, or were they self-selected (maybe people that prefer paper books are more likely to answer a survey about paper vs ebooks)? Were participants really a random sampling, or were they all in the same demographic (i.e. were they all wealthy white college students?). Were the answers randomized, or was the first answer always "I prefer paper books" meaning that participants that just wanted to click through the survey quickly as possible would chose it?

Re:what about the other 38%

[quitte]

No. This is an inherent limitation of ebooks where the paper books interface is superior.
With a real book I quickly get to know the book well enough that I can just flip it open at a good estimate of how far in I am by the the thickness of the stack I'm flipping. A scrollbar doesn't convey that kind of information anywhere near as well.
A book has a mechanical preference to pages that have been looked at for longer. If I simply flip it open at random it will flip open to a page that has been looked at more because of the binding becoming weaker.
A book has infinite fps. By flipping through the pages with my thumb I can look out for and actually find a diagram I'm looking for.
No matter how responsive and high fps the reader software gets - It will not have the physical feedback a book provides and that is actually useful to find your way through that book.

Re:what about the other 38%

[X0563511]

Try to do a CTRL-F search with a paper book. Have fun with that. Scrollbars do just fine at indicating both size and position. Bookmarks are interesting things, and so are hyperlinks. That last one paper books can't have either, the best they can do is remark what page something is on.

Re:what about the other 38%

[CrimsonAvenger]

If they would stop locking ebooks down and instead just produce ePubs or whatnot, you could use whatever reader you wanted.

Shameless plug - Calibre is an Open Source eBook manager for Windows/Linux/OSX that can, among other things, convert your eBooks to ePub (or any other standard format)....

Re:what about the other 38%

[0123456]

Try to do a CTRL-F search with a paper book. Have fun with that.

That's the one thing I really miss with paper books. I was looking for the source of an quote recently, which I'm sure I read in one of the author's books on my shelf in the last year, but I didn't want to have to hunt through a thousand pages or more to find it.

Re:what about the other 38%

[steveg]

Guess it depends on what you're reading.

I flip through an ebook exactly as fast as I read.

If it's a reference book where I need to random access it, then I stick with paper. For fiction I buy both, but probably read more ebooks, just because the reader is always with me.

Re:what about the other 38%

[Man Eating Duck]

With a real book I quickly get to know the book well enough that I can just flip it open at a good estimate of how far in I am by the the thickness of the stack I'm flipping. A scrollbar doesn't convey that kind of information anywhere near as well.

As for the scrollbar, I'm quite capable of parsing it if necessary. Normally you'll prefer to use the ToC, bookmarks or search to find stuff you read earlier in an ebook. Those features are handier to manage than a forest of small coloured bookmark-tapes (what is the proper name for those in English?) or "I'm looking for something that I remember to be about a third and a bit more into the book" IMO. The tactile feedback you mention is really just a workaround for the inherent lack of advanced lookup features in a paper book, but it IS handy for those who are not able to efficiently use the corresponding ebook in a proper reading application.

The clincher is, of course, that the hundreds of ebooks are available on your phone which you always carry anyway (or maybe your tablet), while a single paper reference book is maybe 0.5 kg that you're not likely to just have around wherever you go, much less your entire bookcase.

PS ebooks are no less "real" than paper books. Calling paper books real as opposed to ebooks (which are... what? Imaginary?) is just an abuse of language to elicit an subconscious emotional response, like the "real men buy real diamonds" campaign from DeBeers. The content is what's important in a book :)

Re:what about the other 38%

[quitte]

>Calling paper books real as opposed to ebooks (which are... what? Imaginary?)

Virtual is what I thought was the agreed upon opposite to real in this context. So what should I pair "virtual" with if not "real"?

Re:what about the other 38%

[Man Eating Duck]

>Calling paper books real as opposed to ebooks (which are... what? Imaginary?)

Virtual is what I thought was the agreed upon opposite to real in this context. So what should I pair "virtual" with if not "real"?

I have never heard anyone call ebooks "virtual" books. To distinguish most people use paper book and ebook. As for why you chose the term "real", I already addressed that above.

Information just wants to be free

[WillAffleckUW]

That said, we like authors and want them to get money. And books are more fun and don't have to be downloaded onto every device. If we want an ebook version we just get it FREE from the public library - usually when going on a trip or something.

Big Music - nah.

Most of the pirating going on is due to "region-encoding" or attempts to censor works or not distribute them in certain countries. No amount of legislation will stop that.

None.

Re:Information just wants to be free

[jratcliffe]

Most of the pirating going on is due to "region-encoding" or attempts to censor works or not distribute them in certain countries.

If that were true, you wouldn't see high levels of downloading of US cable shows, movies, and music in the US. Really, MOST pirating/copyright infringement/illegal downloading/whatever term you want to use is driven by a desire to get the content without paying for it. Certainly, there are cases where people use illegal/infringing methods to get content because it's not otherwise offered in their region, but that's not the primary driver. http://www.fastcompany.com/3001351/us-tops-league-bittorrent-users-says-report

Re:Information just wants to be free

[pr0fessor]

I know a few people who although they pay plenty of good money to the cable company still download tv shows that air on the services they pay for. Why do they do it? Out of convenience I imagine such as two tv shows that air at the same time or shows they missed.

Personally I use either the on demand feature or the networks website when I miss my show. {I've noticed recently that all my favorite shows are available at the networks website the day after they air this hasn't always been the case}

Re:Information just wants to be free

[WillAffleckUW]

Most of the pirating going on is due to "region-encoding" or attempts to censor works or not distribute them in certain countries.

If that were true, you wouldn't see high levels of downloading of US cable shows, movies, and music in the US.

Which is due to time-censorship, region-censorship, and big music.

I buy my CDs and DVDs from the artists when they perform - then they get half the take instead of 2 cents.

Re:Information just wants to be free

[fatphil]

I believe this was written from a US perspective:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
I've not heard of any widespread rethinking when it comes to content delivery, so presume it still holds.

While the primary role of the "distributors" is to *restrict* the distribution of their product in every way possible, which most of the times it is, copyright-infringing methods will always be the most convenient ways of acquiring shows.

Re:90% of students...

[Russ1642]

I have a couple book reading apps on my phone. I can lug around many books all the time and read them whenever I have a spare minute. I'd much rather have an ebook than a printed one.

Re:90% of students...

[rubycodez]

most of my classes in early 80s did not require the textbook to be present, has something changed?

I sold the textbooks of subjects for which I did not care, and have a couple dozen of the useful ones in bookshelf three feet to my left

Sample Bias

[ZombieBraintrust]

Half of the respondents were sourced through student moneysaving website Studentbeans.com, and half through a broader youth research panel.

You ask people at a money saving web site and they will choose the cheeper thing. Used books are way cheaper than ebooks. If you asked Amazon shoppers you would get a different answer.

Re:Sample Bias

[davecb]

That should bias the respondents toward even lower-cost alternatives, such as "steal this book". It should also apply to used CDs, etc, something that they did no report.

Re:Sample Bias

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just that, but being students mainly of college age, most of them are using books in a utilitarian fashion (think textbooks) whereas the other forms of media being compared really have no such use. It would be a more meaningful study if they restricted the books in question to recreational reading.

Re:Sample Bias

[JanneM]

Used CDs and DVDs are cheaper than downloads too, and people still prefer the digital version.

That's okay

[paiute]

Look at it from the other side. 38% of a very desirable demographic using a product that has not been around that long. It's been 500 plus years since the Gutenberg Bible and only 6 years since the Kindle came out. I think that 38% is pretty damn good.

Re:That's okay

[Luthair]

0.001% of respondants prefer the Town Crier.

Books have more value

[AK Marc]

With a physical book, I can display it (coffee-table books).
With a physical book, I can loan it out easily. If it doesn't come back, I'm out no more than the cost of the book.
With a physical book, I can use it for component materials (burn it if I'm cold, prop up a table leg).
Physical books are "scarce", a first edition Harry Potter e-book will never be worth more than list price. Unknown how much a signed eBook goes for.

The point is, physical books have more value, thus should cost more. The price points for physical books is about right. So that means eBooks are overpriced. If I had to pay equal amounts for a book or an eBook, I'd pick the book every time. An eBook is worth about as much as a used book (1/2 to 1/10th original price). That's the price the books settle in at over the long term when the supply exceeds demand, which is the initial case with eBooks, as supply is infinite.

16-24 year olds

[dysmal]

This is also the same age bracket that thinks PBR (http://www.pabstblueribbon.com/) is good beer.

Re:16-24 year olds

[assertation]

It is also the age bracket that will inherit the world. If they don't like eBooks, eBooks will not make it

Re:16-24 year olds

[climb_no_fear]

How may 16 year olds like a fine glass of Bordeaux? Few. How many 40 year olds? Probably many more. I'm not saying that they will like eBooks as they grow older people's tastes change as they mature and if you don't know for sure how they will change, your statement may not be valid.

Re:16-24 year olds

[zippthorne]

It might have won an award, once. Where do you think it gets its name?

Im older but...

[3seas]

Real books are much easier to reference/tag pagers and skim, easier to get a general idea of where information is, etc.. Electronic media fails totally on teh easy mental image of where information is.

Re:Im older but...

[Agent0013]

Reference or learning material is definitely paper book for me. Reading a sci-fi novel at lunch time or whenever I find myself waiting in line or with time to kill for some reason, the ebook is always in my phone in my pocket ready to go.

Re:Im older but...

[olau]

Or perhaps you could just do what any long section of text does on the web - structure things in a hierarchy so you start off by seeing the hierarchy, then visit the first node, then go back to the hierarchy, then visit the second, etc. (or see part of the hierarchy as you traverse the leaf nodes, or whatever). And color code links to stuff you've already visited.

Really, navigation should be a solved problem by now if you think just a little bit beyond the limitations of paper books.

Wrong question

[SuperKendall]

Ask them if it's OK to delete the last copy of an eBook and see what response you get.

Still too much

[coats]

With real books, I can donate them to charity when I'm done with them. Given that the general retail rate for used books is 60% of face value, that means the donation is worth about 30% (taking both state and federal tax deductions into account), so my effective printed book-price is 70% of face value. E-books need to be priced fairly against that.

Re:Still too much

[lgw]

Well, you can make up whatever price you want to for the IRS, but my used book-club hardbacks are worth about 10 cents each. Other than books-by-the-yard, used bookstores have little interest. Have you tried actually selling these books, or are you going by made-up numbers (honest question)?

I don't know anyone who counts resale price of used books in their book buying decisions - it's mostly "bring in a box of old books for one new one, now what else do I buy while I'm here".

Re:Still too much

[coats]

60% of face value is the going retail rate at used bookstores in Raleigh NC, Durham NC, and Charleston SC. At least for paperback SF.

Re:Still too much

[lgw]

Yes, the price they sell at. Which has little to do with the price they buy at. Paperback bestsellers and book club printings are nearly worthless, because of supply/demand in the used market.

And don't they have "Half Price Books" there? I though that chain was nationwide.

Re:Still too much

[coats]

"Price they sell at" is how big a tax deduction you can claim. Which was the point.

Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[zooblethorpe]

citation ?
I want to see a real study about this supposed eye stress people keep mentioning.

A real study would be good. At the same time, I haven't run across anyone in my personal life who doesn't prefer reading a dead-tree book over an ebook. Ebooks are certainly more convenient in many ways, especially once you factor in portability. But many (most?) ebook readers these days that I see around me are backlit (as they tend to be tablets), which does lead to a certain amount of eyestrain and can cause circadian imbalance.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[h4rr4r]

Any citation for that?

I want to see a proper double blind study done of this.

I look at an LCD all day, then sometimes some more at home. I do not suffer from any eyestrain I can detect.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[MemoryAid]

I want to see a proper double blind study done of this.

How do you do a double-blind study on screens?

"You will be looking at either a back-lit screen or a book--we won't tell you which until after the study--and then we will ask you questions and examine your eyes to determine the effects."

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[PNutts]

How do you do a double-blind study on screens?

Maybe he meant force people to use either one or the other and see who goes blind?

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[h4rr4r]

I was more thinking tricks with lighting in the room to hide it as much as possible.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[zooblethorpe]

Any citation for that?

Nope; as noted, "I haven't run across anyone in my personal life...", so this would fall under the "anecdote" category. :)

I want to see a proper double blind study done of this.

I look at an LCD all day, then sometimes some more at home. I do not suffer from any eyestrain I can detect.

Similar to the anecdote/data duality is the fact that not everyone is affected by things the same way. You may be one of the lucky few or lucky many who aren't negatively impacted by looking at an LCD all day. I know that my nearsightedness is markedly worse at the end of any workweek where I've been staring at the monitor all the time, and that my eyesight is noticeably improved after spending several days not staring at something only a couple feet away. YMMV, and all that.

The impact of backlit screens on circadian rhythms has been studied, if memory serves. Some quick googling pulls up a goodly number of hits, including a couple actual studies just in the first page of hits. Changing from regular web-wide Google to Google Scholar produces more hits for studies.

And more specific to eye strain are these hits. I haven't waded through, but the number of hits (524) and the titles of the first page of hits suggests that this is an area of study. This one in particular sounds like what you might be looking for: Comparison of eye fatigue among readings on conventional book and two typical electronic books equipped with electrophoretic display and LC display . This link to the paper is paywalled, unfortunately, but you might be able to ferret out an open copy of it somewhere.

Cheers,

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[Minwee]

"You will be looking at either a back-lit screen or a book--we won't tell you which until after the study--and then we will ask you questions and examine your eyes to determine the effects."

I take it you haven't actually seen a real e-book reader. They don't use back-lit screens, for all of the reasons given in this thread.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[similar_name]

In a study concerning eye strain you probably don't want to start messing with the lights. I think we would also want to know whether there is eyestrain under normal (normal being a combination of data from outside, inside, direct, fluorescent, etc) lighting as opposed to lighting that makes paper and LCD look similar. Then, if LCDs under normal lighting do increase eyestrain in some people, we could use that baseline to see if lighting tricks might reduce the effect.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[Zalbik]

How do you do a double-blind study on screens?

You could (sort of) do it by masking the true test.

We're doing a study on eye strain as related to age. Please read these instructions (either screen based or paper instructions), and complete the attached (paper) quiz.

The participant believes the quiz is designed to evoke the eye strain, whereas it's just masking the true test - the instructions.

There are probably better ways to do this, it's the first idea I thought of....

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[umafuckit]

which does lead to a certain amount of eyestrain and can cause circadian imbalance.

Any night-time illumination can potentially cause circadian imbalances. There's nothing special about back-lit LCD displays. Shift-work and outdoor light pollution have also been implicated in circadian disorders. Plenty of citations if you Google.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[GIL_Dude]

Well, my wife and I are getting older (late 40s) and our eyes are not the best anymore. It is much easier to read an ebook on a Nexus 7 or a Kindle because you can increase the font size and lower the eye strain. Unfortunately you can't increase the font size on a paper book.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[jythie]

I guess in theory you would do a double blind study by tricking the researchers into thinking they are studying something other then eye strain.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[nedlohs]

The reading light you need to read a book will have cause the same "circadian imbalance".

E-readers aren't backlit in the first place of course. Yes if you are reading an e-book on a backlit LCD then it will suck in bright sunlight and in darker conditions when your eyes haven't adjusted yet - I know I can't read the text on my laptop when I get woken up by an alert at 4am and need to ssh to a remote machine - in a few minutes it's fine of course so for reading purposes that really won't matter. But why would you do that? Those tablets aren't primarily for reading.

Though of course if it's pretty dark you'll get more eyestrain from trying to read a book in the low light (hence those reading lights) than from the backlit LCD.

Of course I stare at a backlit LCD for at least 10 hours a day (at work and playing games at home, and of course the TV is such screen) with no eyestrain to speak of so it can't be *that* bad. Heck I'm reading text much smaller than would be used in an e-book this very second...

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[sjames]

It's not at all possible unless your test subjects themselves are blind.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[dbIII]

I'm one - there's a few books that I've been loaned where or given I've almost immediately obtained the electronic copy just so that it's more convenient to read it outside of the house. It's a bit hard to carry a novel the size of a brick around in your pocket.
IMHO the LCD ebook readers are a waste of time and no better than reading the things on a mobile phone or a Nintendo DS. The eink ones work in any reasonable reading lighting right up to full tropical direct sunlight.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[dbIII]

How about triple blind? We can use mice.


I'm not sure about the eyestrain since that's one for the medical professionals but I do know that LCD sucks in direct sun while eink just ends up being better lit in direct sun. I would not recommend an LCD book reader for that purely practical reason.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[Applehu Akbar]

Although I'm vision-impaired, I find treading Kindle format on iPads and iPhones to be easier on my eyes because of the consistent, always-optimum illumination. The two drawbacks of some e-books for me are: high prices and lack of suitability for reference works.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[bemymonkey]

A good backlit screen, set to the proper brightness and contrast levels, should not be visibly "backlit"! If it is, your screen is too bright and you will strain your eyes.

This is the main issue right here with using backlit devices for reading - most people (including many here on Slashdot) have no idea how to use them properly.

In a normally lit room, my monitors and other LCDs look like a piece of printed paper (provided they're displaying black text on a white background, of course), because that's the way I like it. No eyestrain whatsoever :)

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[u38cg]

Ask the medics. There are plenty of situations in medical trials where full double blind is impossible for one reason or another.

Re:Anecdote, data, and all that, but...

[SB2020]

I take it you haven't seen a nook glow or a kindle paperwhite then? They are backlit e-ink devices.

depends on the purpose of the book

[KernelMuncher]

For light reading I prefer ebooks but anything professional, I'd want a real book so I can underline passages and take notes in the margins. That all can be done with ebooks but not nearly as well as far as I'm concerned.

Re:This is why Kindle Matchbook is a good idea

[mlts]

I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.

Of course, this means standardizing on a DRM process, rather than iBook/Kindle/Nook/Kobo/Google/etc. having their own systems... or even better, no DRM at all.

It's price.

[TheResilientFarter]

I don't buy the expensive ebooks. Just not at all. There are so many books to read, I move on. The model is changing, and once the authors have finished their contracts and can sell the ebooks directly and the new authors have moved up, the expensive ebooks will disappear.

Re:It's price.

[Lawrence_Bird]

You perpetuate the common myth that the cost of the printed book is what it is because of the physical media. It is not. A print on demand soft runs about $3 and a hard cover about $5-10 depending on a few options. The price you see on books is one which primarily goes to compensate authors, editors and (if not self published) the publisher. There is no inherent reason why any e-book should cost significantly less than the printed version especially when you factor in the cost of maintaining the computer systems and staff for sellers who provide online backup to the copy on your device.

Re:It's price.

[rhodium_mir]

Ebooks "should" be priced at whatever generates the most profit for the person selling it. I'm willing to pay more for ebooks over paper because of the fast delivery and portability that they offer. Why should I expect something to be sold for less than I'm willing to pay?

Re:It's price.

[TheResilientFarter]

Data centers are not exclusively there for the ebooks, the cost is spread out across tens of millions of customers. Comparing the cost of distributing a paper book with the cost of distributing an ebook is the same as comparing the cost of a paper book and the cost to distribute a web page The web page and ebook are about the same size, yet billions of pages are free, costing a small fraction of a penny to serve. The high prices of ebooks are caused by the middle man, the publisher: the anachronism.

Re:It's price.

[Lawrence_Bird]

1) So you are cutting out Amazons warehouse.. not a huge savings on a per copy basis.
2) Per copy cost is? 5 cents?
3) Stores order books. Publishers may make arrangements with large dealers for big titles. Not seeing this one.
4) Per copy cost is? 1 cent? $15/hour and how many books in a box per hour?
5) The printing process is for all intents automated.

A) Just one server admin? No vacations? Do you think Amazon only has one for their kindle books?
Let me add to your list
B) The owner of company hosting and providing server space
C) The person who takes the raw e-books and uploads them to the right location with correct branding/license if reqd.

I have a 300page book currently in print. The soft retails on amazon for $17.95 and hard $24.95. My cost to print, which includes the cost of the printer fulfilling sales to Amazon, B&N, etc is $4.72 and $9.82. Of course, a real publisher probably gets a better deal right?

So by your logic I should sell my book in an e-version for $13.23 as well that eliminates all those print and distribution charges. Somehow I really doubt that is a dollar figure that you consider to be "significantly less" than the print version.

This comes as a surprise to some people?

[not_surt]

Hipsters!

Rupert Giles said it best

[odysseus_complex]

I think Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer said it best when confronted about books vs. computers:

Jenny Calendar: Honestly, what is it about [computers] that bothers you so much?

Giles: The smell.

Jenny Calendar: Computers don't smell, Rupert.

Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.

Re:Rupert Giles said it best

[nospam007]

"Books smell musty and-and-and rich. "

That's normal. They smell that way because they contain mold, a threat to your health or life.
They are full of spores and fecal bacteria. Several sorts of fungus live in that paper, it's as cheap as they can get away with and you can't sterilize or sanitize a book.

They are disgusting, really.

Re:Rupert Giles said it best

[nospam007]

"That's normal. They smell that way because they contain mold, a threat to your health or life.
They are full of spores and fecal bacteria. "

Almost forgot: Do you lick your finger for flipping a page?

Re:This is why Kindle Matchbook is a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Some authors (like Brandon Sanderson) give you a DRM free electronic version of the book for free when you buy a physical copy. I REALLY like that model, to the point that I almost exclusively buy his books from his own store to encourage him. I usually get a physical version of the book signed by the author, a free ebook version AND support his work (that I love, BTW) for just a little more than the retailer price.

Is a win-win situation for everyone, in one hand the author shows respects for his or her audience by not trying gouging them for no reason, while as a reader we have don't see out rights curtailed by insane copyright laws. And by making his work easier to share, the author is increasing his or her fan base and with it his or her revenue stream. Virtually every friend I've lent a Sanderson book in the past ended buying the whole collection, simply because he is THAT good.

IMHO, only crappy authors are afraid of people lending their work to friends because they know that once you read that crap once you are never ever get another book from that person, ever.

I don't think these stats are going to last.

[Karmashock]

Anyone that knows how to use ebooks and has a decent reader is going to probably prefer them.

The people that I've seen that prefer regular books either are very anti technology... either by age or inclination... or have never tried a quality reader.

Re:I don't think these stats are going to last.

[assertation]

Agreed, but 16 - 24 year olds are usually the people who are least likely to be luddites, the most open to change and the most likely to be all over new technology.

Re:I don't think these stats are going to last.

[Karmashock]

they also read less and therefore are less likely to have tried a high quality reader or care about them.

An ereader costs more then a book. Since they don't like or care about books they want to spend as little as possible. Filter the statistics for people that read.

Re:I don't think these stats are going to last.

[rhazz]

Anyone that knows how to use ebooks and has a decent reader is going to probably prefer them.

Not true for both myself and my wife. We both love books, and we liked the idea of an e-reader for its portability. We picked an an e-reader which worked pretty well, I believe it was a Kobo model - built-in wifi, etc. We both liked the interface, the online store, etc. But after we read a book on it neither of us wanted to use it anymore. There were several reasons (most of which have been stated numerous times in this thread).

We were in our late 20's at the time, and we are both programmers by trade, gamers by hobby. I do not believe we are an exception.

Re:I don't think these stats are going to last.

[Karmashock]

Was it a backlit epaper reader?

If you don't like those then I don't know what to tell you. Those are amazing.

Greed

[DarthVain]

ebooks are too expensive by far. Excessive DRM is used to enforce. The reason is greed. Much of it influenced (forced) by the big players and publishing houses.

I know there was already an author (forget the name), who has already show that he could make more money by selling many more copies at a much reduced rate.

I will stick to my paper books thank you, and used when I can. Unless I go someplace where space is a premium and you can't easily find books. Like Space or possibly the Arctic/Antarctica, however baring that I can probably get by.

Though that is possibly the point. A protection racket so as to not compete with their paper based business. They don't want to offer a good product, as then they might supplant their paper business, and at which point is probably more susceptible to forced change from the cozy outdated business model they currently maintain.

I prefer digital Games, Movies and Music

[Java Pimp]

As opposed to the paper versions...

Re:I prefer digital Games, Movies and Music

[bluefoxlucid]

No kidding. My first thought here was that all games, movies, and music are digital versions. One comes by CD, one comes by Internet pipe. Baen ships eBooks on CD.

Re:"a perceived unfairly high cost for eBooks"

[sandytaru]

I've read some eBooks that were worth $20. I've read others that were a waste of the $2.99 sale price they cost me. Depends on the book and depends on the author.

They reversed the age numerals

[Roblimo]

I'm 61, not 16, and I prefer my eBook reader (my Android phone) for light fiction, especially when I'm trying to fall asleep or in a waiting room or eating a light meal in a coffee shop.

The price of Ebooks -- yes, way too high -- doesn't directly affect me, since my local library loans me eBooks. And then there's that huge public domain Gutenberg collection and others like it.

I'll pay for eBooks when they're half the price of mass-market paperbacks. Until then, I'll only read titles I can get for free.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[JanneM]

A fair price is probably slightly below the same-title trade paperback. The work to create an eBook is effectively the same as creating a new mass-market edition on paper. Printing and warehousing are so efficient today they only add a small bit to the final price even for the cheapest titles.

The reason I mostly don't buy ebooks is DRM. I want to buy my books, not long-term rent them. I want to know I can still pick it up and reread it in twenty years whether I'm still a customer of Amazon or not - or whether Amazon even still exists (not a given, with the average lifetime of a corproration).

I find I buy plenty of programming ebooks from O'Reilly, for instance, since I actually buy them. If there was a good source for general fiction I'd be all over it.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[Zaelath]

Printing and warehousing are so efficient today they only add a small bit to the final price even for the cheapest titles.

This is a publisher's fallacy. Even if you accept that a mass market paperback only costs $1 to print, and warehousing and shipping are zero (they're not) it still wouldn't explain how the mass market paperback of Game of Thrones: A Feast For Crows is $5.49 and the kindle version is $11.93. And from what I'm told, the earlier ebook versions of those books were just scanned/OCR and are full of horrible typos.

It's the same reason Microsoft (say) charge $99 for Windows in the US and £99 for the same software in the UK, even though that's $161US; the market will bear it.

Except clearly the market isn't bearing it, they're telling the publishers to get stuffed in droves.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[swillden]

It's not exactly "general" fiction, but if you like what they sell, all Baen titles (baen.com) have always been DRM-free. Tor went DRM-free last year. Also, you have to check the details but many books on Google Play and Amazon are DRM-free. And of course you can strip the DRM off of the others, though it's probably technically illegal.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[RobertinXinyang]

As another older Slashdot reader (47), it depends want I am reading. If I am reading a piece of fiction; or, something that is read in a linear fashion, e-books are ok (but not as good). However, for something that I want to flip back to a section or explanation several times they are just not as good. Further, the "notes" in eBooks are simply not easy to use.

However, the real deal-breaker for me is the price to DRM. I give a lot of my old books away; I give them to friends, family, and co-workers. DRM makes it impossible for me to do that. Further, I do not value an ebook as much as a physical book; therefore, I am not willing to pay as much (or more) for one. As such, I get most of my ebooks form bit-torrent. Yes, there are exceptions; when the price/drm/value is appropriate I will purchase. Otherwise I will just download them.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[steveg]

Are they?

Is that why Amazon sells more ebooks than paper books, and they sell more paper books than anyone else on the planet?

Personally, I don't buy ebooks from Amazon, although I do buy dead tree from them. I buy non-DRM epubs and then use Calibre to convert them for my Kindle.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[steveg]

How do you check the details?

Last time I looked, Google Play doesn't indicate whether a given book has DRM or not. You have to buy it, try to download it, and ask for a refund if it does have DRM.

They may have fixed that, but that's how it was last time I tried.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[Zaelath]

"Sells more ebooks" sounds like a volume metric. Would that include books they sell for $0.00?

How are the "3 times the price" of the paperback books selling?

Are your Amazon figures from Amazon?

I'd like to buy more ebooks, and I don't care about the DRM, but they need to work out loaning/gifting properly, and the average quality of the ebook publishing would need to get a lot higher. I often show people my Kindle and get incredibly lukewarm responses from people that I know read a lot.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[JanneM]

Even if you accept that a mass market paperback only costs $1 to print, and warehousing and shipping are zero (they're not) it still wouldn't explain how the mass market paperback of Game of Thrones: A Feast For Crows is $5.49 and the kindle version is $11.93.

That's a rip-off. I fully agree. I guess that what happens is that they release the ebook at the same time as the hardcover, and price it relative to that. Then they never drop the ebook price when the paperback comes out; they might have a system based on "editions" that don't change their price over time.

But the poster I replied to seems to, like many others, think that most of the cost is in the printing and shipping, so an ebook would cost a lot less than a paperback. My point is that you likely reasonably can't expect that to happen.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[JanneM]

As another poster says, there's no way to find the DRM-free titles. And general fiction publishers (to me, SF is most definitely "general") don't seem to sell directly to customers outside their own country - probably due to distribution rights deals with publishers elsewhere.

Rakuten Books here in Japan does sometimes mark things when they're DRM free. I got Charles Stross' new edition of his Traders series DRM-free from there. The problem with Rakuten is that the website is a confusing, aggravating mess and finding anything there is almost impossible. You can't search with DRM-free as a search criterion, for instance.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[steveg]

You're right, it is volumetric. I have no idea how the dollars compare.

The figures are from Amazon (via the press), and they're a couple of years old, so I don't know where they stand now. 105 ebooks sold for every 100 pbooks. I've no idea whether they are counting those sold gratis.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1754259/amazon-sells-more-e-books-paper-ones

Also, I don't know whether the expensive ebooks are selling well. I don't recall seeing those expensive ones back when I saw this article, and to be honest I haven't seen them since either because I haven't been looking. I ignore the kindle versions. I can tell you that Baen's ebook pricing has gone up but it's still less than paper.

One reason that I insist on epub (and without DRM) is that I can load an epub up into Sigil and fix many formatting issues. Bad OCR is another matter, but I haven't run inot a lot of that.

Re:They reversed the age numerals

[Zaelath]

Interestingly the press release does exclude free books, but yeah, still doesn't mention prices other than (most of them) being under $9.99.

As to OCR, I was looking a one the other day and there was a thread about it being terrible and a comment 2 years later that the version they bought was all but flawless.

Anyway, it seems a fair old crapshoot. Though Amazon seems to have a decent returns policy on ebooks (albeit 7 days is a short window), where as others that I looked at didn't even have a policy on their website that I could find.

Better to have, not better to read

[chispito]

Yes I like the smell of paper, and the ability to thumb through a book, and the ability to write a personalized note inside when giving one as a gift... but if your primary motivation is getting through content, if the experience of reading books is more important than the experience of having books, ereaders win. They are smaller, and can contain most/all of your collection simultaneously. No more having to choose which book to take on your vacation. Take all of them.

I think it is about the feel

[X-Ray Artist]

Although I do not fit in this demographic and now do the majority of my reading on my Kindle, I, too, prefer printed books. There are plenty of good things about ebooks. I particularly like the portability and built in dictionary. In spite of the conveniences that ebooks offer, I still prefer the FEEL of a real printed book. As a result, I have a good collection on my Kindle and an overloaded bookshelf.

That's because of the DRM

[pouar]

I would use eBooks much more often if it wasn't for the damn DRM. My college is making me use some crappy textbooks, and the PDFs have DRM on them, so the first thing I do when I get one is remove the DRM. Then when the class is over I just delete the PDF because the info is pretty much useless to me since it's below my knowledge and intelligence level. I wouldn't be using these books at all if the college didn't require them. It's a good thing the state is paying for them because I sure wouldn't buy anything this crappy, especially when the internet gives you the exact same information for free.

Re:price breakdown

[davecb]

Yes: one of my customers is a major publisher, and the printing costs, warehousing and transport are indeed a huge part of the cost of a book, certainly on the order of 40%. Some of this can avoided by the publisher, by having a retailer warehouse the books, but the retailer still has to pay for the warehouse, and therefor adds that cost into the price.

There ain't no free lunch (;-))

--dave

It's true for older than 16-24 year olds

[PontifexMaximus]

Look, I'm in IT. I work with computing systems and stare at screens all day. I read a lot of stuff online. But, I also have over 5K books in my personal library. For me, it's not so much the feel of having a book in my hand as it is the smell of books. There's just something about that that you don't get staring at a display. I'm also one of those people who can't see paying $7 for something I can't hold. It's sort of like blowing cash on Candy Crush Saga. What are you really getting when you buy an ebook? Yes, the author's hard work, but it's the tangibility thing.

Not to mention, who's gonna spend millions on a first edition Ebook? :)

Why do people keep so many books?

[CohibaVancouver]

I don't really understand why people hang onto books. An atlas and other reference books? A Calvin and Hobbes anthology? Sure, I can accept those. ...but a Tom Clancy novel from 1994 next to Watership Down next to...? Why? I step into people's houses and see bookshelves lined with books that haven't moved in years. Are they really going to read all these books again? Why hang on to them. Send them on their way to someone else who will appreciate them.

Re:Why do people keep so many books?

[DogDude]

Books are important to a lot of people. I'd even say that the books that people read and internalize form a good bit of their personality, as well. The selection of books that a person has read says a lot about a particular person. It makes sense to me, at least, while people would want to keep their books.

Re:Why do people keep so many books?

[cbeaudry]

- For nostalgia
- As trophies
- To pass on to the next generation
- To re-read in 10 years (I have done that numerous times)
- To lend to family and friends
- For reference
- To show off

There are many reasons. Just maybe none that you associate with, but you have to remember, everyone is NOT like you.

Re:Why do people keep so many books?

[steveg]

I do re-read books. My current to-read queue is quite long right now, so I don't do it as often as I used to, but I'd say in the last month I probably picked up a couple of books off a shelf and just decided to put aside the current book-in-progress and revisit an old friend.

I also have used the shelves to make recommendations and/or loans to someone who was interested -- I've even bought paper copies of books I'd read in e-form just to be able to more easily lend them.

Re:price and sharability

[davecb]

I buy e-books from companies who expect me to treat them like physical books. If I lend a colleague a copy, I tell him if he likes it he should buy one. General speaking, (s)he does. Sometimes electronic, sometimes paper.

One publisher puts a "bookplate" in that says "This electronic copy of <title> belongs to David Collier-Brown, davecb@spamcop.net", in the top half of a page that contains a simplified set of terms and conditions, which explicitly says "treat me like a hardcover book".

I could remove it easily enough, it's just epub, but I don't care to. I agree with the publisher, and I want borrowers to know who they borrowed the book from, so they'll tell me if they buy their own. I expect most of my friends could pirate the book as well, and that they don't care to.

The publishers know I can pirate the book, but that I bought it. They take a risk that I may lend a copy to someone who "won't give it back", in the sense that he will keep it and won't buy his own copy. That tends to make me reluctant to lend him either electronic or physical books, just like I would if he didn't return a hardcover he borrowed.

In short, they expect most people are honest, can pirate and will buy books they like. See any of my postings about O'Reilly's Using Samba for proof that people did exactly that.

--dave

Thanks goodness for that...

[hughbar]

As a 63 year old, life spent in IT, I fear e-books: DRM, can't share, they will be very selective about texts [blockbusters, crowd pleasers], 'book' can be removed remotely etc. etc. That's apart from the pleasure of having a house full of book, trashy science fiction from the 60s and 70s, crime novels and even a few serious books too.

Re:Thanks goodness for that...

[CrimsonAvenger]

As a 63 year old, life spent in IT, I fear e-books: DRM, can't share, they will be very selective about texts [blockbusters, crowd pleasers], 'book' can be removed remotely etc. etc.

I use an old Sony eReader & Calibre. No DRM (I remove it with Calibre if necessary), I can email the eBook to a friend as needed, there is NO way for the seller to "remover remotely" my eBooks.

Availability of texts is highly variable of course, but that's becoming much less of an issue as time passes.

Oh, and I'm 54, and an IT pro as well...

Re:Thanks goodness for that...

[steveg]

I'm splitting your difference. 58, and I use a Kindle which I use exclusively with non-DRMed epub->mobi conversions via Calibre. I haven't removed any DRM yet, since I've been able to find enough non-DRM epubs to fill the pipeline for several years yet.

I generally clean the epubs up with Sigil, since I don't care for justified text on a small screen. It works for paper, but less so on an ereader.

Oh, yeah, also IT.

Re:Thanks goodness for that...

[xSander]

'book' can be removed remotely

On that note -- that's why I refused to consider Amazon's Kindle e-readers after that debacle with the George Orwell e-books.

The Not-So-Green Generation

[Ngarrang]

I expected more from this age group. With all of the awareness of shrinking natural resources, why anyone would choose printed books and their inherent danger to the environment. But, who cares that trees are cut down, thus adding to global warming, as long as I can have the feel and smell in my hands.

I expected more of this new generation.

Re:price and sharability

[assertation]

I think the language you used are why the young people who were polled prefer print.

They can hand a printed book off to someone without the word "pirate" being potentially used.

Personal experience

[submain]

I spend at least 8 to 10 hours at work staring at a screen every day. Then, I come home to stare at another big screen for a couple of hours. The last thing I want to do is to stare at yet another screen to fall asleep.

E-readers are nice, up to a certain point. Contrast is still too low for my particular taste. I had a kindle for about an year, until I unconsciously would reach for printed books because it was just more pleasurable to read without having to fiddle with font sizes to compensate for the lack of contrast. Flashing page turns also broke my immersion.

But again, I am 26 - maybe I'm just too old to get into the e-book scene.

Re:Personal experience

[steveg]

Or too young.

You're right about the contrast, but that's a minor issue, unless you're reading in the dark. For me, I'm normally reading in normal indoor light up to full sun.

  If the flashing page breaks your immersion, you weren't really immersed. :)

The price of my ebooks is just right

[Agent0013]

I find the price of ebooks on bit-torrent sites to be perfect. You can't beat free!

On a more serious note, they should be much cheaper than the printed version to be worth it. The hassle of DRM and not being able to loan it to a friend. The worry of losing your ability to read it someday with incompatible readers or simple drive failure. At least half the price of a physical book if not less, any more and piracy is my alternative.

What ebooks are missing

[Mister J]

Here are the missing things that are currently stopping me from defecting from the land of dead-tree books:

1) The reader that's as pleasant and easy to read as book, anywhere I might want to read (like in the bath, or our in the sun on a hot day), and that doesn't leave me twenty times as much out of pocket if it gets lost, stolen or damaged.

2) Cost of acquisition on a par with books. Currently, it's not uncommon for Amazon to be selling a paper book for less than they charge for the kindle version. Factor in the second-hand market, and you can pretty much always pick up a book for significantly less than an ebook.

3) The ability to sell/loan/give away ebooks. And be 100% sure that I'll always be able to read them. The value of books is significantly diminished if I can't lend them to friends and family (and borrow theirs), and if I no longer want them to sell them off or donate them to a charity shop. Or if in ten year's time the vendor went out of business and took their DRM system with them and I can no longer read my ebooks.

4) A way of converting all my paper books into (legal) ebooks. The biggest advantage of ebooks (hundreds of books in your pocket!) is completely if for any given book I wan to read there's a 95% chance that I'm going to have to go and get it off the bookshelf anyway (not that it wouldn't be nice not to be forever running out of bookshelf space)

That last one is, for me, the real killer. Ripping all my CDs into iTunes took a while, but now I have all my music wherever I go and my CDs are in boxes in the attic. I can't do that with books. Sure, I could try and track down pirated ebooks for every paper book I own, but that would take a very long time, and I'm betting there are plenty I wouldn't be able to find. Plus I'd still need to hang onto the originals to make the slightest claim on legality...

I'm 34 and I prefer eBooks... sort of

[morgauxo]

I find paper books to be easier to read. I use either an iPad and an Android phone (with lapdock). Unfortunately I don't have any eInk displays yet, that might make a difference. I also am concerned about paying for eBooks with DRM. Will I have access to them forever?

But....

Space is valuable. I have too much junk, and too many books. I almost always choose the eBook now because they take no space!

Also, I like having my books on my phone. When I find myself away from home and bored (for example: shopping trip with the wife) I can use that time to read. My paper books are all stuck at home, useless.

Re:90% of students...

[plover]

The e-textbooks of the subjects I teach are locked by DRM in a proprietary iPad app, and my license (and my students' licenses) to read them will expire in three years. There is no resale of the used books. I consider these bad things.

On the plus side, the e-books purchase price is less than half the dead tree purchase price. And not all technology-specific books have a lifespan of over 6 years - how long will my copy of "Pro WPF in C# 2010" really be of much value to me? For another DRM-is-not-much-of-an-issue point, the "Database Systems" dead-tree textbook I picked up new for last term (freshly revised, it's in its 14th printing) is still peppered with anachronisms and ancient anti-Agile voodoo practices that stopped being good advice in about 2005. If that book were to delete itself from my bookshelf in three years, I probably wouldn't even notice.

However, the DRM is not selective, and it won't just delete the bad books. If I had a DRM version of the GoF book, I'd be pretty darn put-out to lose that.

So I'm going to pick my battles. If it's a book worth having, it's a book worth having in the physical world. If not, I'm not going to sweat the e-book thing too much.

Re:Ebooks are a ripoff.

[0123456]

Actually, many trade-published e-books cost more than the paper book, not less.

Re:This is why Kindle Matchbook is a good idea

[zeugma-amp]

I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.

Baen Publishing does essentially with some of their books. A couple of years ago, I bought the hardback of a book from their '1632' series, and it came with a CD that contained every other book from the series, plus some others. All with no DRM. It's one of the things that makes me a loyal customer. I reward companies that don't treat me like a potential thief.

Re:This is why Kindle Matchbook is a good idea

[0123456]

Amazon support this if the publisher lets them: buy a paper book from them and you can get the e-book free, or for a discounted price (I think it has to be discounted to $2.99 or less).

text via many Channels

[globaljustin]

No, it's not only about price. It's about the fact that the book can be read anywhere, without needing a battery charge or anything. Even many kids think about that

That's right...

because it is all just ***text on a page***

that page can be ink on paper, sprites on LCD screen, or pixels on a kindle

people want news more than ever, people want to be entertained more than ever, people want mental stimulation more than ever, & most importantly people **expect** to get this whenever they want

the text is the Message...the book or ereader is the Channel

Claude Shannon's SMCR Model always provides clarity ;)

Re:This is why Kindle Matchbook is a good idea

[mlts]

I also have to give props to Baen Publishing for that. they had some of their older classics offered for download as eBooks for no charge.

O'Reilly also does this, which is nice, as one can have the dead tree manual on the shelf at the office, while one can check the eBook and fix things when down in the data center.

Re: "a perceived unfairly high cost for eBooks"

[plopez]

Perception is reality in regards to money.

This does not bode well for ebooks

[plopez]

Tech is often driven by the youth market. If you lose the young, you lose.

Re:price and sharability

[packrat0x]

I think the language you used are why the young people who were polled prefer print.

They can hand a printed book off to someone without the word "pirate" being potentially used.

Yes. It's nice to be able to share without worrying about Digital Rights Management.

Reading on phones is crap

[BlackHawk-666]

Teens probably think ebooks suck because they read them on their stupid little phones instead of using a decent e-Ink reader, a Nexus 7 or similar.

Thank #DEITY

[Lord Kano]

This renews my faith in our youth. I am much older. In fact, I'm technically old enough to be the parent of most of the people in that demographic.

LK

ebooks crap

[l3v1]

My opinion is that every new printed book should have a free ebook 'companion' version available right on release, obtainable with some code/qr from the printed book, with let's say a 6 months expiration date. Then, the ones who have the printed version could purchase the electronic version for let's say 5% of the printed price, and for 20% if you don't have the printed version.

I'm sure I wasn't the first to think of such a scheme, but it seems they just don't want the ebook market to grow 100x faster than it is now, so they don't implement such a structure.

And that's exactly why I never bought any electronic book. The only electronic reading material I ever bought are scientific articles, and even that is very rare, since I find most of them for free somewhere, or get it directly from the authors.

Maybe because younger people have better sight.

[Ateocinico]

I had to buy a kindle because small fonts gave me headaches and eye pain.

Re:price and sharability

[davecb]

Similie.

Cost and preferences

[YttriumOxide]

I agree completely that most eBooks are horribly overpriced.

I'm an independent author (see sig). I've priced my eBook version and paperback version at a level where I receive the roughly the same profit from both. Since paperbacks cost money to print, the paperback costs more than eBook (as you'd expect).

Nevertheless, when I look at offerings from other independent authors (using the same publishing platform as I did), the eBook is generally priced almost exactly the same as the paperback! I can tell you now - if you see an eBook priced the same as the paperback and it was published by "CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform", the author is making a much larger profit on the eBook than they are on the paperback.

Also, despite my eBook being significantly cheaper, it also gets significantly less sales. The ratio at the moment in my sales is around 8:1 in favour of the paperback.

I prefer e-books, but...

[N3tRunner]

I prefer e-books to print books in most cases, however their cost is the main issue for me. I can usually find a used copy of a book of a book that I want to read for $4 or less, but the electronic version is almost universally $10 and up. If all I'm concerned about is the content of the book (which is all that you get when you buy an e-book) then why should I care if a book has been used or not? It's frustrating, because I'd really prefer to consume the content through my Kindle.

Text book industry propaganda?

[davesque]

As far as college text books are concerned, it's a weird situation and I don't blame anyone who says they simply prefer a paper text book. Here's why. Have you ever tried to use the officially-sanctioned eBook solutions that are available on the market today? They're pathetic. Completely locked down with DRM and mired by bad interface design and usability. I bought an eBook for one of my classes at the beginning of the semester. I had thought to myself, "Hey, this could be great if it's like I imagine -- like downloading an eBook to my Kindle app on my iPad." Boy, was I mistaken. I had to download a half-backed piece of proprietary crap-ware in order to "read" my book. The user interface in this "app" (rhymes with "crap"?) was appalling. The interface was clunky and looked like it was thrown together in a single week. The pages were pixelated, not crisp like a PDF.

In the end, I resorted to _illegally_ downloading the books (as PDFs) I had just purchased legitimately on account of the inadequacies in the kosher versions. Ironically, now that I've gone through one semester being able to carry around my iPad (< two pounds) instead of paper text books (~ twenty pounds?), I would never -- not in a million years -- go back to paper text books. It's unfortunate that all these media corporations have been allowed to drag their feet so slowly in embracing new technologies and formats for delivering their content.

Papers FTW!

[antdude]

http://aqfl.net/node/8443 for my old web site's poll and comments. ;)