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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."
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.
3A 4E 22 05 C1 83 0B 7A
It's random, but my posting it here is probably considered illegal to someone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
citation ?
I want to see a real study about this supposed eye stress people keep mentioning.
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.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
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.
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.
Ask them if it's OK to delete the last copy of an eBook and see what response you get.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
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.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
If ease of sharing is an issue, then perhaps they aren't so skilled at piracy. Same can be said of price.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
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?
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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...
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
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
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.
Plus some random exec can't revoke your ability to read your printed book at a moment's notice.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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...
Windows moves in mysterious ways, its crashes to perform
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.
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
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.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
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.
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.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
Tech is often driven by the youth market. If you lose the young, you lose.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
227-3517
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.