As Print Surges, Ebook Sales Plunge Nearly 20% (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children's books surged 16%. The same trend is on display in the U.S., where ebook sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%...

Sales of e-readers declined by more than 40% between 2011 and 2016, according to consumer research group Euromonitor International. "E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiraled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets," Euromonitor said in a research note.
The article includes an even more interesting statistic: that one-third of adults tried a "digital detox" in 2016, limiting their personal use of electronics. Are any Slashdot readers trying to limit their own screen time -- or reading fewer ebooks?

Comments

EBooks

[DaMattster]

I happen to like eBooks very much. I like being able to check them out of the library online.

Re:EBooks

[MightyMartian]

I like them for convenience. I've got an ereader on my tablet that syncs with the one on my phone. When I'm at home I'll read on the tablet, which has a much bigger display, but when I'm out, I can read the book on my phone. I find it convenient, and don't really read any fiction in real book form anymore.

Re:EBooks

[ShanghaiBill]

I happen to like eBooks very much.

So do I. But I rarely buy them anymore, because they often cost more than a used paper book. I think that what is killing ebooks is Amazon's "More Buying Choices" tab. Plus, if I buy a paper book, I can resell it when I am done, or at least donate it to Goodwill for someone else to read.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

I will never go back to dead tree books either. However, I do try to get away from my computer and phone as much as possible.

Re:EBooks

[Daemonik]

I agree with you on the pricing. You can tell that publishers are deliberately trying to keep ebooks less attractive than paper, especially when an ebook can be the same cost as a hardcover book, then when it finally drops it's still more expensive than the paperback.

I just tend to buy more self published and small publisher books now, the ones that keep their prices under $4., as a bonus they typically skip the DRM nonsense too. Rather than waiting 7 years between sequels they're more like 1 year or less or have multiple ongoing series that you can binge on.

Re:EBooks

[Tobenisstinky]

Convenience (size, online access) is, at least for me, beginning to be outweighed by the cost, availability of older works (10-20years) and as other's have stated, quality of new content. I can see a new release of a popular author in hardback costing $29, but an ebook? WTF? digital delivery should count for something.

Re:EBooks

[Lorens]

they often cost more than a used paper book

Hell, for me (using Kobo) they mostly cost more than a NEW paperback, delivered by Amazon!

I recently complained and was told that yeah, the price is aligned on the hardcover, and when the paperback comes out it takes them a lot of time to adjust the ebook price. If they say so... didn't buy the book.

Re:EBooks

[MightyMartian]

The way it was explained to me is that printing, particularly in an age of "just in time printing" is not the most significant cost in publishing. Whether you distribute a book in physical form or electronic, the process is much the same, in that you have to take a manuscript, edit it, and put it into a publishable form. Now while an epub file (which is just a glorified bunch of HTML, image and meta files zipped together) doesn't require the kind of typesetting that a print book does, it still has to work off of the final copy produced.

Now that doesn't explain all of an ebook's costs, and I do think there's some gouging going on, but it's not as high as we think.

Re:EBooks

[fluffernutter]

Was the person who explained this to you making money off of eBooks perchance? Because that's what it sounds like.

Re:EBooks

[Jason1729]

You have been lied to.

It is not just the cost in physical printing (which has a significant labor component as well). You need a truck driver to physically move the books from the print facility to the store (which also costs fuel and the use of the truck). You have to pay for the physical space of the book store. You need someone to stock the shelves, someone to physically check out the customer. You have loss due to stolen books, loss due to books damaged too much on the shelves to sell. Unsold copies. A distribution network. And everyone needs to make their profit. When you buy a physical book off the shelf at a store, how much of the money you paid do you think the publisher actually nets on it? If you think it's more than 10 cents on the dollar, you don't know anything about commerce. Even with an online seller like Amazon, someone has to pay for shipping costs and you still have many costs dealing with physical objects.

If anything, the cost to edit a manuscript into an epub file is a negligible part of the cost of the finished product.

And then...when you pay $30 for a hardcover (or $10 for a paperback), you own the physical object and can do what you want with it. Give it to a friend, donate it, sell it to a used book shop, etc. I do buy print books and I frequently trade with friends. At work, we have several avid readers and we have a small bookshelf where people drop off books they've finished and help themselves to what looks interesting. The average number of readers per copy for a physical book is much higher than for an ebook just because they're so easy to pass around and used books have such a low perceived value.

That makes print books a much better deal, usually for the price of a single book you get to read a few.

Look at the audible audiobook business model. They have a lot of the drawbacks associated with ebooks, but they cost about 20% as much as a CD version and are more convenient. Book publishers could similarly drop the price of ebooks 80% from even the paperback copy price and still not hurt their profitability compared to the actual print copies.

Re:EBooks

[Dayze!Confused]

For me it's the complete lack of ability to actually loan the book to someone else which should be pretty damn simple. But instead Amazon decided to make it overly complicated, and limited to a once in a lifetime nonsense, with 30 days to read. The lack of this feature, and resale, I believe, is why eBooks are overpriced.

Re:EBooks

[phayes]

New ebooks do indeed come with price premium often making them more expensive than hardcovers -- which is why I never but new books when they come out.

However, if you just wait a few years, the ebooks come down in price to paperback prices.

That's why I'm happy with my 4000 ebook calibre library acquired around the same time as Napster was a big thing. I still have a backlog big enough that waiting a few years is not an issue and that's without spending all my time delving into the project Gutemburg classics. Buying through Calibre also turns up the on-line shops with the cheapest ebooks and filters out everything DRM protected.

Re:EBooks

[VernonNemitz]

As far as I'm concerned, they don't make ebooks to be as user-friendly as regular books. I want a folding two-page ebook, that I can hold in both hands just like a regular book. The "next page" button would do the equivalent of flipping a regular-book-page, thus showing two new pages on the two-page ebook. Then the ebook can be advantageous by being thinner and lighter than the regular book (because many such books have quite-large numbers of pages). The ebook obviously needs a light-powered low-power display; I THINK that the "IMOD" display can be layered over the top of a solar-cell layer, and if so, the net result would be an ebook such that if you have enough light to see it, then you have enough light to use it (just like a regular book).

Re:EBooks

[Dutch Gun]

I think a more honest answer is that they're afraid of ebooks cutting into their traditional business market. It's the same reason digital games cost as much as physical media. They don't want to piss off the retailers (who can retaliate by not displaying their wares as prominently), and in truth, it's not in their best interest to undercut them either.

Digital is frightening to publishers, because they well understand that the cost of copying a digital copy is $0, and has no intrinsic value by itself. As such, many of them have been dragged into the digital age kicking, screaming, colluding, and price-fixing...

Re:EBooks

[chipschap]

Well, as a writer, I can tell you that the AUTHOR sure isn't getting much of the revenue ... and Amazon especially exploits indie authors.

Re: EBooks

[Miamicanes]

Exactly. We now have 240ppi+ displays, but it's still basically impossible to buy a tablet with 14-16" 3840x2580 3:2 that weighs less than a pound (more than a pound, and it just becomes too heavily to hold open for extended periods of time) AND is fast enough to complete a pageflip in 150ms or less, or flip to some arbitrary page-pair in 250ms or less.

Tech books NEED 2-up layout, because they frequently have a diagram on one page, with explanatory text on the facing page. Attempting to read a book like that one page at a time is a miserable use experience.

IMHO, the MINIMUM specs for a tolerable ebook reader for tech books is something like the Chuwi Hi12... and it's *barely* fast enough to be tolerable. Anything less is just plain unacceptable. And tech support for Chuwi is a bit... difficult... unless you're fluent in Mandarin. A Surface Pro w/largest display would be better... but they're too expensive to use for JUST ebook-reading, and not quite good enough to use as your "real, one & only" computer.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

The market is flooded with people who want to be authors. Many of them are very talented. This high labor supply naturally pulls the profit potential down.

Once you equalize for talent, what really distinguishes one author from another is their existing level of fame, and the gatekeepers of that fame are the publishers. So, naturally, the publishers claim the lion's share of the profit.

Humans are selfish, after all.

Re: EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

If tablet works for you, you are lucky. I find reading on any backlit device straining and tiresome.
So I have to live with the slow speed of ACTUAL ebook readers (using eInk and similar technologies).

Re:EBooks

[jeepies]

I'm ok with eBooks for borrowing them from a library, but I absolutely won't buy more to own. I've been burned enough times now over the years that I'd much rather have a paper copy. Two particular instances cement it for me:

In the early 2000s there was an eBook written about behind the scenes Star Trek. It included a lot of interesting info and photos. The only way to acquire it was through an old Microsoft reader and it was heavily DRMed. It was locked to that device and needless to say it won't work on newer machines and is effectively lost to me.

The most recent example is a book I bought on Amazon. I found that having books on my phone was convenient so bought maybe a dozen or so for their Kindle app. You're supposed to be able to lend them to a friend through Amazon. However, a lot of authors/publishers don't allow lending. I ended up buying a paperback copy and gave that to my friend. After that, I vowed never to purchase another eBook unless it's completely DRM free and in a standard format, which basically means I won't be buying many (any?) eBooks.

Re: EBooks

[edis]

I've got Nook Glowlight Plus with eInk screen, that is backlit - it is fantastic, reading in darkness is most practiced way to read before sleep, covered. Any other active color screen is no match, being tiresome.

Re:EBooks

[aaarrrgggh]

Those things are all true, but with ebooks, the opportunity should be in making it up in volume. At a better price point, you would expect a higher volume of sales. With almost no incremental cost per unit sold, cutting the price in half is justifiable.

The publishers don't because they want to maintain control of the market and offset risks with fixed costs being covered by the hardcover release.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you find them?

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

You ... but nobody else. You're just a byte-fuck byteboi and need to choke on that electro-literacy till you barf the ereader into a steam vat of javascript.

Paper books feel like a womans ass & poison beaver ... and other good things, while electrons are for QCD.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Inelastic cost structure for IP "property" ... like top-tit books or QM_lectures. I don't ask how much the next Anglo-Saxon Chronicle costs ... I just buy it. Whatever it costs to follow Utred ... it's payed.

Re:EBooks

[Junta]

I would *hope* so, but there's frankly a limit on how many people would purchase a work. I'm not so sure that a 50 shades series book would have much opportunity to sell to more people than they already did. I don't think I've heard many people say "oh, I would read that book, but I can't afford it".

Of the people I know roughly their buying habits, their time budget for reading limits them far more than their money budget.

Re: EBooks

[Junta]

Actually it is front lit, and a very nice frontlit design at that. If you are in a bright room, the light can be off, as the display is working *with* the environment lighting rather than against it.

Re:EBooks

[Junta]

Same across the board for most 'digital' with physical counterparts. If I 'buy' a digital video, it'd be more expensive (and more limited) than a blu-ray copy. Steam is about the only venue I've seen the downloaded copies sell for cheaper than boxed copies.

Re:EBooks

[Drethon]

I happen to like eBooks very much.

So do I. But I rarely buy them anymore, because they often cost more than a used paper book. I think that what is killing ebooks is Amazon's "More Buying Choices" tab. Plus, if I buy a paper book, I can resell it when I am done, or at least donate it to Goodwill for someone else to read.

I don't buy paper books because I don't have any real place to store them when I'm done. I don't buy e books when they cost more than physical books. As a result I don't really buy as many books as I used to.

Re:EBooks

[chipschap]

You're right, of course. And the same situation holds for musicians and other artists. Unless you're a star, you get pennies on a sale.

When Amazon introduced Kindle Unlimited and pay-for-pages-read, that seemed like the ultimate in ensuring that indie authors got even less than ever.

But until you reach rock star status, there is no leverage.

Re:EBooks

[hey!]

I'm in my 50s and my house is literally full of physical books. Every room is lined with bookcases most of them stacked two deep, and I've literally had to put jackposts in my basement to keep the floors from sagging.

Buying new books as ebooks means I don't have to get rid of my old books. It's also nice being able to travel with a generous selection of reading material.

Overall I find the reading experience to be about a wash, but that's a highly personal thing. For pure reading a physical book is better except in low-light conditions, but the search and note taking functions on an ebook are a big plus.

The biggest drawback for ebooks for me is the terrible mathematics typesetting, which is obviously a niche concern; but it's beyond bad; it renders many math ebooks unusable. Often the equations are rendered as low-resolution bitmaps that are close to unreadable, or in other cases I've seen equation terms randomly spread hither-and-yon across the page. For scientific and technical books I would much prefer a larger, higher resolution device. It's too bad nothing really fits the bill because I hate throwing out cases of obsolete technical books every year.

If I had to choose just one format, I'd choose paper. But I find ebooks have their uses.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually think the Amazon Kindle Unlimited model was much more fair to authors, including indie authors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the authors were paid a fixed rate multiplied by the number of pages of their book that were read. I don't see how it can be more fair.. You get paid for how much of your work people read -- no more, no less.

Re: EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently found an ancient Amazon kindle in my garage while spring cleaning. For a laugh I decided to read a book with it so I could reminisce on the quaint "e-ink" fad (I hadn't touched the thing since I bought my first tablet). The joke was on me because within a few hours I realized that reading e-ink is a vastly more pleasant experience than reading my iPad

Re: EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Baen sells ebooks drm free in multiple formats. They are the only place I buy ebooks from regularly because it is hard to find then elsewhere without drm.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

I like ebooks and my Kindle e-readers, but I can see that vastly overpricing of ebooks when most people know (or could find out) that once proofread, edited, and formatted as an ebook, the cost per copy to the publisher is much much much much lower per copy (even counting the royalty paid to the author) than cost per copy for printed books.

In other words, ebooks should cost no more than $5-$6. EVER! Publishers are using high prices and DRM to try to prop up sales of printed books. Just how far that the publishers are willing to go was illustrated by some of the biggest colluding with (Cr)apple to fix prices!!

Re:EBooks

[Daemonik]

Bookbub.com is a good place, they send out an email every day with a selection of bargain books.

Re:EBooks

[chipschap]

In theory, you are right. In practice, the rate per page is microscopic. The idea, of course, is that more people will read the book. But I hear most authors report a drop in revenue. (I have no direct basis for comparison as my stuff was published after the new program started.

Re:EBooks

[Daemonik]

David Chilton; James Redfield; K.A. Tucker; Michael J. Sullivan; H.M. Ward; Barbara Freethy; Lisa Genova; Amanda Hocking; Hugh Howey; E.L. James.. all millionaires off Amazon self published ebooks. If you're an author and you aren't making money you're marketing yourself wrong or you're writing in a genre that isn't popular.

Not that everyone is guaranteed to be a millionaire, but it seems like the most successful books on Amazon are trashy romances, sci-fi and fantasy serials. Also superhero and recently literary-RPG seems popular.

Re:EBooks

[Daemonik]

Here's the thing that truly pisses me off about publishers.. say you want to get into a series, the latest book is #50.. first off good luck finding the other 49, but if you do they cost the same amount as #50. It makes it not worth your time even picking up #50 and getting yourself involved in a series that will cost a fortune and a lot of time to track down.

Amazon published e-books typically the first in the series is $2, then it gradually goes up to whatever the newest book costs. They understand selling the first few books cheap to get a reader hooked on a series will pay off down the line.

Re:EBooks

[RespekMyAthorati]

I can see a new release of a popular author in hardback costing $29, but an ebook? WTF? digital delivery should count for something.

Do you mean you have heard of someone actually paying for an ebook?
That would be like paying for music.

Re: EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

>...The biggest drawback for ebooks for me is the terrible mathematics typesetting, ...
That's because Math and other technical books tend to be f...ing pdf files that don't scale worth a damn. I'd love to see pdf files go away.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I've always felt that the eBook version should be a side-effect of the publishing process-- and if I buy a physical book (which I think is the best way to read a book), as far as I'm concerned, I should get a one-use QR code to download the matching eBook. While I have shelves upon shelves of books, the fact that I can put my entire library into a tablet and read at my convenience, or search through, or do web lookups through, makes eBooks a very, very convenient way to read books.

Re: EBooks

[hey!]

PDFs are inconvenient in e-readers because PDFs are page-oriented. That makes them inconvenient on smaller-screen devices. That said, PDFs represent that page with a high degree of fidelity, which is PDF's biggest strength.

The problem with math ebooks published in AZW format is that they either render equations incorrectly (making them useless), or render them as bitmaps (making them less useful than they should be, and sometimes illegible).

In most cases I'd take an EPUB or AZW over a PDF for reading on a small device, but for math I'd take the PDF, despite its inconveniences. Or better yet, a physical book.

Re:EBooks

[doom]

A few year back, I noticed that whenever I pointed out the obvious-- Amazon is an evil company that deserves to be boycotted for a half-dozen different reasons-- people like this started coming out of the woodwork, talking up the wonders of epublishing on Amazon and how some friend of theirs has made just gazillions doing it.

Re:EBooks

[arth1]

Those things are all true, but with ebooks, the opportunity should be in making it up in volume. At a better price point, you would expect a higher volume of sales.

The flip side of the coin is that the higher volume is mainly crap. The eBook vendors used to have mostly good quality books, that had been reviewed and accepted by publishers. But because the entry costs are so low, and anyone can self-publish, the ratio of rubbish to readable books has become truly bad. The volume is why I don't buy e-books anymore, except for by authors I already know. And even those suffer, with no proofreading or other quality control.

Re:EBooks

[Whorhay]

I've picked up a lot of ebooks from the humble bundles. I usually keep my e-reader in the car for reading on lunch breaks. Or rather I did until it forgot it somewhere on an out of state vacation, now I've got to put up with trying to read on a tablet. I think a new e-reader is definitely in my future.

Re:EBooks

[FirstNoel]

meh, as it was explained to me.

Publishers don't really care who sells their books... as long as they get sold.

When Borders closed down, the Industry didn't get any smaller. B&N and Amazon just took up the slack.

Electronic or Physical, it doesn't matter.

And as far as distribution, it's quite a bit different than what it was even 10 years ago. Pubs used to send out thousands of copies of the latest and greatest. Only to get thousands returned. Now they are more picky about placement and quantity. And their turn around when from a week or 2 shipping, to 2 days.

Re:EBooks

[tlhIngan]

Convenience (size, online access) is, at least for me, beginning to be outweighed by the cost, availability of older works (10-20years) and as other's have stated, quality of new content. I can see a new release of a popular author in hardback costing $29, but an ebook? WTF? digital delivery should count for something.

Not as much as you think - the supply chain and costs of moving deadtrees is very efficient and ends up only being around $1 or so of the retail price. That's the complete cost - printing, binding, boxing, warehousing, shipping, etc. Returns are almost never done - and if they are, the publisher only wants the book covers - the rest of the book is simply tossed. It's why there's a statement saying if you bought a book without its cover, it's not a book that is for sale - it was marked as returned and discarded.

The rest of the money, after taking out the profits goes into the work - the author's royalty, editor's pay, typesetter (this one has to be done twice - once for print, once for electronic), proofreader, etc.

Online retailers are able to futz with their profit side, which is why they can discount a book 40% or more and still make a little money (very little - they make more simply by float - when the retailer gets the money from the customer versus when they need to pay the publisher - remember the publisher is often NET30 or NET60 or so (and it only happens after a book's release date has passed), so if the retailer can drop their profit side, they can make it up in volume.

Re:EBooks

[Sasayaki]

Self-published author here, I'm on a first-name basis with Hugh Howey, and I know H.M. Ward indirectly through various Facebook groups and shared contacts. I've published about 20 novels so far (#21 coming soon).

I will disagree that "If you're an author and you aren't making money you're marketing yourself wrong or you're writing in a genre that isn't popular.", but I've noticed a lot of trends to success. Not everyone who does these things will do well, but most people who do, do.

The main thing is: you can't just do it with one book. Most people have a good book idea in them, some have two, some have a whole series. I've been publishing since 2012 and, as I said, I've put out 20 novels. That's about 3-5 a year. That's hard.

You hit the nail on the head in terms of genres. Sci-fi/fantasy is where I make my money, along with trashy romance under a pen name. I tick all the boxes you're talking about in terms of genre and I can basically all of this. That's where the money is. I'm not a millionaire, but I hit my first $10,000 month this year, which is nice. Learning a lot about taxes.

Publishing in this way has been my living for a few years now. It makes money. It's a hard job, doing what I do, but it's a good job. These days, Google Play is my largest retailer by *far*, but back in the day... I couldn't have done it without Amazon.

Even today they're a big chunk of my income, even if the GP train is where the money is for me.

Re:EBooks

[dgatwood]

It is not just the cost in physical printing (which has a significant labor component as well). You need a truck driver to physically move the books from the print facility to the store (which also costs fuel and the use of the truck). You have to pay for the physical space of the book store. You need someone to stock the shelves, someone to physically check out the customer. You have loss due to stolen books, loss due to books damaged too much on the shelves to sell. Unsold copies. A distribution network. And everyone needs to make their profit. When you buy a physical book off the shelf at a store, how much of the money you paid do you think the publisher actually nets on it? If you think it's more than 10 cents on the dollar, you don't know anything about commerce.

The just-in-time printing is mostly used for delivery of back-catalog titles, and mostly to Amazon and B&N, rather than to bookstores (because special orders are relatively rare). The small number of actual POD printers are typically located in the same city as major online booksellers' distribution centers, and they bulk deliver books to them by the truckload, so the transportation cost is so cheap that it gets lost in the noise. Unsold copies are usually limited to at most one or two copies by Amazon unless the book is already selling in bulk, so again, that gets lost in the noise, at least for moderately high-sales titles. And so on. As for how much the publisher nets, that 10% estimate is probably in the ballpark for POD books. For books printed in larger quantities, of course, the reduced printing cost increases the publisher share.

If anything, the cost to edit a manuscript into an epub file is a negligible part of the cost of the finished product.

If all you do is export it from InDesign, then yes, it's a negligible part of the cost, but the formatting is also likely to be mediocre. If done well, it's a decent chunk of change, though still not huge. :-)

Re:EBooks

[dgatwood]

On the other hand, self-published books are less likely to provide new readers with enough context to jump right into the story in later books, because they tend to get less developmental editing.

Re:EBooks

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you on the pricing. You can tell that publishers are deliberately trying to keep ebooks less attractive than paper, especially when an ebook can be the same cost as a hardcover book, then when it finally drops it's still more expensive than the paperback.

This.

Recently there was a book I was interested in buying. The ebook was more expensive than the paperback.

My solution ... I'll skip the book. (I have plenty of things to read & otherwise occupy my time.)

Re:EBooks

[Rande]

These days, absolutely.
Sure, when I got my first Sony eReader, I pirated a lot. Actually paying for books was a hassle and the range of books then was very limited.
But since I got a Kindle and Amazon introduced Unlimited and 10,000 self published authors came on, I'm happy to pay a small amount for a good story (even if they aren't edited well/at all.) The 10% preview is great to check if I like the writing style of an author I've not read before. I think I've only bought 3-4 duds where the rest of the book didn't live up to the first 10%.

Re: EBooks

[edis]

Thanks for confirming my afterthought, that technically light might be sliding on front-wise, even if this is not obvious. Yep, completely passive look is gorgeous, even though my personal abilities to read were hidden in described possibility.

eBooks for me

[Danie_ZA]

Nope I love my ebooks. Reading with a backlit Kindle causes me no more eye strain than a paper book. And I feel I'm not contributing to using paper (besides with 5 book shelves double stacked a few years back, its a good thing as I have no more space).

Re:eBooks for me

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nope I love my ebooks."

Nope, I love my Book Shelves. I have thousands of books, many of them rare First Editions... because there never was much interest in ever publishing a Second Edition. That's the problem with eBooks, and Digital Music and Films as well. There has to be enough popular interest in scanning and laying out a Digital version for anybody to, (Legally), even bother.
I also have many running feet overhead of LPs, with a lot of Classical and Jazz that have never been put on CD, much less in MP3 form. (Once, during a minor Earthquake...)
As far as contributing to using paper... I hardly ever buy new books.
I don't have much worry about running out of space, and in fact I'm looking for a couple more 7' Cases for the Hallway.
This might be inferred by some as being a little OC and more than a little Luddite. But my work these days is still mostly in Research, largely in Optics. I have an Optical Bench in the Living Room, and one Bedroom has largely been taken over by Photomicroscopy and low-temperature Sensor design. (This is SOTA stuff; I spent my Working Life in Imaging the oddest things.) So being able to grab copies of the Alvarez Patents, with his annotations, on the fly is convenient. (I spent a few years working under Luis Alvarez. Brilliant guy. He taught me a lot about Aberrations, which isn't nearly as dirty as it sounds. He and Bernie Harvey gave me quite a few books, with pencilled notes in the margins.)

This is not common. I know people who not only do not have any books, they don't read Fiction or anything other than Technical material, and haven't since High School. But hang around certain hills in Berkeley, and you'll find quite a few people, with a _lot_ of books on shelves. One shelf is usually dedicated to their own published work.

The funny thing here is... I'm writing an eBook on Basic Practical Optics. It's about 300 Pages so far. Profitable publishing prospects are slight, so I might as well just give the damn thing away to anybody interested.

Re:eBooks for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's too bad people can't use both ebooks and paper books.

Re:eBooks for me

[Anonymous Coward]

That was sort of my point. I prefer _reading_ paper books. (BTW, using Alvarez Spectacles. As I said, brilliant guy, a genuine 20th Century Ben Franklin.)
But I prefer _publishing_ in Electronic form. Collaboration and inserting references are so much easier, and the subject of this book, "Basic Practical Optical Principles", involves quite a few Experiments that can be carried out if wished. I can set up the Bench to show how Beamsplitting can be used as Attenuation if one wanted to take _one_ Image that shows the character of Moonlight on Moonlit Subjects, without totally blowing out the Moon, (Due to the some 15-18 Stops in Brightness difference.), take a few Shots, and have it in the meat of the Text in minutes, instead of waiting weeks for some Minimum Wage Copyeditor using Pagemaker to get the Captions wrong.
(I still use Boorum & Pease Logbooks to jot down notes, but each completed page gets Scanned.)

"Yeah, it's too bad people can't use both ebooks and paper books."
The problem here is the word "use". Both can be used in many different ways, and each has its advantages. But for the sheer pleasure of Reading, kicking back with a good book, in paper form in a comfy chair, beats reading some recent Bestseller Self-Help book on a Kindle, on Public Transit.

Re:eBooks for me

[Anonymous Coward]

And kicking back with a good book, in ebook form in a comfy chair, beats reading dead trees.

Re:eBooks for me

[Anonymous Coward]

At this, we should part. About the only thing that we both can agree on is...
Comfy Chairs.
And Good Reads.

.

ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's the surging price of ebooks. Ebooks are often close to the price of the hard cover, and generally more than the cost of the paperback... Add in the cost of a reader. And a smattering of DRM to lock you into one store or another.

The industry has done pretty much everything it can to make ebooks not worth using.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[MightyMartian]

I agree there's not really any cost savings, but I read ebooks largely for convenience. As to DRM, the only place it really fucks me up is graphic novels, which I have yet to figure out how to unlock, but for anything I buy off of Google Play, thus far a combination of Adobe Digital Editions 4 and ePUBee seems to do the trick. I appreciate that at some point that won't work any more, and then I may have to reconsider how I consume books (at the moment I buy a book, immediately rip out the DRM and then archive the epub).

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. I like ebooks but I buy fewer now. They used to be cheaper than paper books, now they cost the same or more. It is completely ridiculous that the version with almost zero manufacturing and distribution cost is more expensive.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition, no way to loan ebooks out or decide what happens to my e-library once I'm dead.
I've been wondering similar about my streaming music subscription. I worked hard to curate my online collection and don't want to see it disappear one day.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. I use the library a lot because there is no way I am going to spend 10 - 20 bucks on a book I will read once. If ebook prices were in the 2-5 dollar range, I would probably never bother walking to the library again.

Maybe someday the industry will figure it out.

Re: ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should focus your curation time on your NO1CURR.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[ravenshrike]

The entire article is TradPub trying to desperately maintain relevance. In reality, total e-book sales rose 6%. It's only the large established publishers who saw a 17% downturn. Which means self-published and indie e-book titles rose a whopping 23%.

Re: ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty much exactly why. The inflated pricing pushes some of their largest potential buyers to just buy used physical or source the material from "alternative download services".

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[phayes]

Only buy ebooks with no DRM or DRM that can be ripped out like Amazon's. My ebook collection will survive me.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[kqc7011]

From the Passive Voice, "PG didn’t see any reference to how many ebooks were sold by publishers and authors who don’t report their sales to the Publishers Association. He also didn’t see Amazon’s name on the list of members on the Publishers Association website." And a link, http://www.thepassivevoice.com...

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[chipschap]

If ebook prices were in the 2-5 dollar range, I would probably never bother walking to the library again.

Maybe someday the industry will figure it out.

They won't. They have never been able to figure out that a large number times zero is still zero, while a small number (price) times a large number (sales) comes out nicely, especially since the incremental cost to produce each ebook copy is about zero.

Re: ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Spend a few hundred dollars and buy yourself a nice automatic document scanner and a guillotine stack cutter. I cut the spines off books, feed them to the scanner and I get a zoomable, color pdf with OCR findability.

And kindling for winter.
Best part is you can read the paper copy first if you want and keep the digital instead of hoarding termite food.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who remember, or were affected by it, there's also the issue of making sure you own what you bought.

There was that time when people woke up to find their purchased ebook copies of 1984 were deleted by Amazon over some licensing issue.

Irony of the particular book affected not-withstanding, it showed that your purchases were not safe from external influences and if you wanted to make sure someone somewhere couldn't pull a switch and delete your library of purchased goods, you were smart to buy the paperback.

Sure, Amazon apologized for their actions and made a promise never to do it again (except for a list of exception cases) but in this day and age we're taught - mainly from the actions of companies - not to trust the words of companies.

Regardless, there were many people that learned their ebook purchases were not in any way shape or form more secure than a physical dead tree version.

Re: ebooks are friggin expensive

[MightyMartian]

PDFs are fine on larger tablets, but reflowable text is a must if you're reading on a small device like a phone.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[amiga3D]

The big negative of physical books is size. I have close to 1,000 books on my phone and it's a negligible portion of my 128GB sd card. I can read anything I want anywhere I want with the equivalent of a library. I often reread books several times and there are many older books online for free. I draw the limit with magazines. I've tried but all the digital mags I've got I end up printing out all the articles I want to read. A few years ago I took over 2000 books to the local friends of the library sale clearing up incredible storage space. I'll never go back as there are just too many advantages to digital. I can lay in total darkness and read without a light just by switching modes. I never lose my place. I love it.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Export your streaming music likes and playlists to text format. I figure if anything happens to the streaming service I am using, I'll have the list of songs to go back to.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[Junta]

Or else they learned that for their market, volumes didn't increase enough with price cuts to offset the per-unit revenue loss.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[chipschap]

Perhaps so, if they're managing to find the total profit maximizing price point. I suppose in some genres and some authors, fans will pay $9.99 - $12.99 for an ebook.

What's funny is when indie authors try to follow suit and ask $9.99 for an ebook, despite no reputation at all, let alone star status.

I'm in the former category (no reputation indie author) but at $2.99 I do manage to make sales.

Re:ebooks are friggin expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's the surging price of ebooks. Ebooks are often close to the price of the hard cover, and generally more than the cost of the paperback... Add in the cost of a reader. And a smattering of DRM to lock you into one store or another.

The industry has done pretty much everything it can to make ebooks not worth using.

Quiet the opposite. I pirate eBooks all the time. I WANT them to take my money. I'd pay 1/3 of what is being asked right now and no DRM. No? Zero it is. Some decent books are not even known enough to be pirated. Too bad. No money and no exposure.

Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

When anyone can get a book 'printed' and subsequently review said book on amazon until it has a high rating, the old cost of production/distribution barrier to entry becomes the new filter of quality.

Re:Filters

[lucm]

Indeed. There is so much garbage on Kindle now, even with a specific search there's tons of useless "books" that are either a low-quality blog post or a sales pitch for some other service, it ruins the whole experience.

I like ebooks and I like Kindle features like being able to see all the highlights I made in a central web page. But lately I spend so much time "shopping" before buying a book that I'm starting to consider going back to the actual bookstore.

Re:Filters

[Daemonik]

The majority of the self-published book writers on Amazon sell their first book for $1 or $2. It's a cheap way to decide if they're a decent writer, and most of them have rather large series of books. I don't expect Shakespeare levels of literature when I'm buying a $4 sci-fi adventure novel, just fun and decent.

Re:Filters

[JaredOfEuropa]

I agree. I love the convenience of being able to buy book whereever I am, but the online bookstores are rather rubbish (it's not just Kindle, Kobo suffers from similar issues) and the tools to manage your library are terrible. There's a hell of a lot of room for improvement in the UX alone.

But the idea of e-readers itself is great... I use one with e-ink, the book reading part works great, and the screen is comfortable in any light. And it offers no distractions the way a tablet or laptop does, so I don't count using an e-reader as "screen time"

Re:Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us actually care about writing welll, doing our research thoroughly, and having our books professionally edited - and still choose to publish as indies, because it's nearly impossible to get trad publishers to so much as add our books to their slush pile. (Slush pile: in publishing parlance, unsolicited manuscripts, generally assigned to interns to evaluate for possible consideration.)

So we publish on Amazon or Smashwords - the Big Two of indie publishing - because that's the outlet available to us. It's not what we'd prefer. It's merely what's possible.

Here's a link to my book/

Re: Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

What about creimer, who feels the need to talk about his self published books, his government IT job and his two year lay off for being "too good".

Surely he needs to post in this thread a dozen times.

I don't miss paper at all, for books.

[MarcoPon]

As an avid reader, I like my front illuminated ebook reader very much, thank you. And I don't regret a bit having to bring with me the latest big book (often not very well printed, or with a too small or too largh font) on the train to/from work to read.
Manuals & tech info are an entirely different thing, of course, at least until I can get a big, flexible (as in bendable and unbreakable) speedy ereader.

Re:I don't miss paper at all, for books.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the issue is mostly a matter of prices and the fact that most ereaders aren't really ereaders so much as rebranded tablets. Those illuminated e-ink readers are great, the only reason I don't use mine very much is that it doesn't really handle foreign languages very well. And here's no real excuse for that, Android has supported most languages for a good long time now.

never liked ebook

[aepervius]

if I want to go through page of a tech book, I can have a few colored page marker and go very quickly from 1 page to the next, it is far more slower with ebook. And the feeling of paper in hand is.... I dunno , psychologically better ? OTOH I am now by 900 books at home and it starts to cover literally whole walls.... But one things I remarked : more and more people go to my local bookshop than it was 4 years ago...

Re:never liked ebook

[lucm]

How many of those 900 books are still relevant? You probably have classics worth re-reading, but I bet you also have things like "Writing Java Applets in 24h With Jbuilder 3.0".

A physical library that has obsolete books is basically hoarding. I have obsolete ebooks but I don't download them on my Kindle or tablet, I can access them if needed but in the meantime they're Amazon's problem and that works well for everyone involved.

Re:never liked ebook

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

if I want to go through page of a tech book, I can have a few colored page marker and go very quickly from 1 page to the next, it is far more slower with ebook. And the feeling of paper in hand is.... I dunno , psychologically better ? OTOH I am now by 900 books at home and it starts to cover literally whole walls.... But one things I remarked : more and more people go to my local bookshop than it was 4 years ago...

Bingo. Real books are nice. I have a couple of thousand lining the walls downstairs in the rec room, and that's after losing ~1000 to floods and damage and theft and whatnot over the years. Everything from technical references to sci fi to weird offbeat stuff, how-to books, eclectic stuff, etc etc.

EBooks are okay, but they're not my preferred media.

Re:never liked ebook

[__aaclcg7560]

If I buy a printed tech book these days, it's probably an older book that isn't available as an ebook or a previous edition of a current book that's too expensive. Why pay $100+ for a compiler book when you can buy an older compiler book for $5?

Re: never liked ebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, real book are way better to insulate your house

Re:never liked ebook

[ShanghaiBill]

I am now by 900 books at home and it starts to cover literally whole walls

That can be a good thing. If the people in the neighboring room are loud, a wall covered in bookshelves can block the noise very effectively.

Re:never liked ebook

[AthanasiusKircher]

How many of those 900 books are still relevant?

As someone who also owns over 1000 books, I'd say the vast majority of my collection is "still relevant," at least to me.

You probably have classics worth re-reading, but I bet you also have things like "Writing Java Applets in 24h With Jbuilder 3.0".

I don't tend to buy such books in the first place, if I can help it. I mostly buy physical books that I expect to last as reference works or whatever. If it's a short-term guidebook or something that will be obsolete in a couple years, I'll borrow it from a library or friend or buy a beat-up used copy and then get rid of it.

A physical library that has obsolete books is basically hoarding.

Agreed. But some people actually like reading beyond ephemeral manuals and the latest trade fiction title, and a personal library is useful for consulting standard sources on many topics. The basic knowledge in many fields doesn't change over a few years or even decades as much as programming. Admittedly, maybe 10-20% of my collection consists of books I probably will rarely if ever consult, and they aren't even obscure reference works, so I could prune them. But I will pull hundreds of my books off the shelf at some point every year.

Re:never liked ebook

[AthanasiusKircher]

if I want to go through page of a tech book, I can have a few colored page marker and go very quickly from 1 page to the next, it is far more slower with ebook. And the feeling of paper in hand is.... I dunno , psychologically better ?

One major thing is the reliability of layout, with its effects on navigability. A well-designed book is also helpful in all sorts of more subtle ways, but the biggest issue with reflowing ebooks is that they destroy the sense of "location" that physical books have.

I can pick up a book I haven't looked at in a few years, and I often can locate a passage very quickly just by remembering, "It was about 2/3 of the way through, and there was a diagram on the top of the left page... and some description about X." Doing a full-text search can sometimes get me there quickly too, but it depends on exactly what I'm looking for. Frequently, manually paging through is a lot faster.

Heck, it's not even just navigating books, but also navigating libraries. Years ago I had this experience returning to the small local public library I hadn't been to in a decade. A lot of the same books were still in some of the sections, and I remembered roughly where they were and what to expect. The same happens with my own home library on bookshelves, where I can rapidly locate a book and a passage within it. With a DRMed ebook, I don't have a guarantee I'll even be able to access it in a decade, let alone have it organized in a way that I can find it easily.

Don't get me wrong: the kind of search tools ebooks provide also are extremely helpful and you can do certain kinds of navigation that are much more cumbersome than physical books. But to me at least, the physical book experience is still superior especially for books I plan to go back and consult multiple times. (And for other books where I'm reading for pleasure, the physical book is generally more pleasant from a design perspective, though I admit that difference is more subtle and mostly has to do with my interest in typography and layout design.)

Re:never liked ebook

[Anonymous Coward]

My two cents? I agree about technical books and would also include art books, graphic novels, and manga. Although the last two, I'd actually just like to have a better e-reader (larger screen) designed to deal with such things. The art books, though, I agree there's something about paper that's definitely better.

Meanwhile, for basically everything else? Definitely e-reader. Sci-fi (and other) anthologies are awesome. Being able to choose the font size is awesome. Being able to do word look-ups is awesome. Really, my complaint is still the whole "screen too small" bit; and the lack of storage expansion for large manga.

PS - I (like many others) hacked my Kindle to shrink the margins, have wider font size choices, and have never actually used my Kindle on the Amazon store or internet (for fear of forced updates). So, that rather pushes me to pirate ebooks.

PPS - Having said that, I actually got my Kindle originally to read a lot of non-DRM ebooks I bought previously after realizing just how sucky computer monitors are for reading books. That's why I still enjoy it. That and the pirated Sci-Fi anthologies. It's all 1930s to 1960s stuff, so honestly it's really hard for me to feel guilty about it. Meanwhile, if there were a way to get pulp e-manga at a cheap price, I'd gladly pay for it...even without the e-reader for it.

Re:never liked ebook

[xystren]

And there is always the historical context that you get from printed books that is too often underrated and dismissed. While technology tend to be focused on the newest, latest, and greatest, but often forget how we got here.

And for other non-technology type topics, such as history, and at the risk of being chased out of slashdot, dare I say the social sciences... So much context is lost without the understanding of the historical evolution. Books written on religion for example, especially in North America will have a significantly different context (and bias) when compared pre/post 9/11. Not to mention the now all too common of political agendas being worked into such material - sometimes having a different context or perspective is always a good thing (even if you agree/disagree).

Studying (again a risk of getting chased off) clinical psychology, even within that domain, one could see the political influences, when I first started, everything focused on a multi-multiculturalism and when I was finished everything was evidenced based practice.. and that was just over the course of four years. For example edition 4 of one of my textbooks had absolutely no projective testing (or even any mention of it), while the 3rd edition had several sections describing the various different test that are have been used, both current and past...While the evidenced based nature of projective testing can be argued/debated (and that I won't get into), it doesn't mean they are valueless. Especially with children, some of the projective drawing tests are great for also establishing rapport - something that is often forgotten in the more evidenced based practice focused texts.

People often forget the historical value of book, and the context they provide, which otherwise is lost. Sometimes it nice to see where things have been to truly understand where things are and where they are going.

Re:never liked ebook

[Gilgaron]

You lost books to theft? That seems surprising... I'd figure they'd grab the TV and split... I'd be livid to lose a book... moreso than the TV that realistically gets more use...

Re:never liked ebook

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You lost books to theft? That seems surprising...

Shitty room mates will steal anything that's not nailed down, and if it's nailed down they'll pry it up.

meet the new addiction, same as the old addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

"...one-third of adults tried a 'digital detox' in 2016, limiting their personal use of electronics."

As a medical professional, I feel obliged to point out that the most sensitive (i.e., least false negatives) single question you can ask to diagnose alcoholism is "have you ever tried to cut down on your drinking."

The most specific is probably "do you hide alcohol around your house," so if you have smartphones taped to the underside of the toilet it's probably time to detox.

Books are tangible.

[Qbertino]

I still get hardcovers if the topic seems interesting enough and appears to have a long term value.

I don't get DRM ebooks, they are a pain and a burden. I tried one amazon ebook "reamde" for kicks and one google playstore book, a thick WP devguide. DRM turned me off quickly in both cases. Reamde I'll get as paperback some day if I want to read it again and got the WP book as a zero-fuss PDF.

I do have my fat Oreillys as PDF too - way easyer to lug around on my tablet. But getting them through official chanels is prohibitively expensive.

Bottom line: I'm a tablet guy ( 10" Yoga 2 with Android) and even I distrust regular ebooks to an extent. So I'm not really surprised about about this news.

Re:Books are tangible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy DRM-free ebooks. There are publishers and authors that do not require DRM. It does limit your selection but there are a lot of books that you can buy without DRM attached. My entire library, about 800 ebooks, is DRM free.

Re:Books are tangible.

[lucm]

Bottom line: I'm a tablet guy ( 10" Yoga 2 with Android) and even I distrust regular ebooks to an extent. So I'm not really surprised about about this news.

I'm also a tablet guy (although I'd rather chew glass than buy Lenovo ones again) and the Kindle app is the first thing I install when I get a new tablet. It's as good as reading ebooks get; even the online version (read.amazon.com) is better than dealing with Pdf.

I read on average two books a week. Done that for years. It has come to a point where I sometimes look at a book that seems interesting on amazon.com and when I try to buy it I see the message saying that I already own it... When that happens I quickly look at the highlights I've made in that book, without even having to open the book, and it refreshes my memory. Then I can move on and buy something more advanced in that same topic or disregard it completely.

That's also how I brush up my Spanish. I buy Spanish books and use the built-in dictionary to look up new words. I've tried that with paper books and paper dictionaries in the past and it's just not the same. All I have to do in Kindle is tap a word and I see the definition inline; since I often need the dictionary 2-3 times per page in Spanish books it's a wonderful thing.

Re: Books are tangible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain read.amazon.com some more. I have a ton of books in pdf format that are super annoying to read on my kindle. You have a solution that makes it easier?

Re: Books are tangible.

[lucm]

I don't know where you got that ton of books in pdf format. Did you scan yourself books that you bought at the bookstore?

All the ebooks I have come from Amazon so they work natively with all the Amazon apps. It doesn't bother me because what I value is the ecosystem as a whole; the convenience of search and highlights, the easy inventory management, the built-in dictionaries. If Kindle was nothing more than pdf reader I would probably buy paper books because I really find reading pdf tedious, unless it's a very short document.

Re:Books are tangible.

[Aighearach]

The difference is, as a random slashdot reader I know that Reamde is a book worth reading. I also have an unfinished copy on a tablet. The only book by that author I didn't rapidly consume! And entirely because of the format.

I have non-DRM titles, too, and nobody would have heard of them if I got them through official channels. Almost all the non-DRM stuff that I paid for is on paper!

And I can get a paper copy of Reamde used for under $5.

Just a Fad

[frovingslosh]

I'm sure the industry has nothing to worry about. The public just can't be getting smarter and wise to the evils of DRM and the limitations that the supposed ownership of digital media such as ebooks that it puts on them.

Due to failing eyesight in old age

[sheramil]

I like being able to enlarge the text without having to buy a large-print edition, if it exists. Moving my nose closer to the page just makes it harder to focus, before anyone suggests what Lister suggested to Kryten.

Love kindle, but...

[saberworks]

I love my kindle but ever since the various publishers and amazon settled and they started setting their own prices, the ebook prices are way too expensive. In a lot of cases they are more expensive than the print copies and they have way more restrictions. I can't lend or give them to my brother (some pubs allow lending but only N times and only for 2 weeks at a time, which is absolutely ridiculous). I can't donate the book to a library if I don't plan to read it again. I would be ok with these restrictions if the ebooks were cheaper.

The other thing that sucks on amazon/kindle is trying to find decent books. I have to go visit B&N to find new sci-fi/fantasy novels because the search/discovery on amazon is terrible. For every 1 fantasy novel by a major publisher and a well-regarded author, there are about 500 indie "books" that are just terrible. (Yes, there are some gems in there, but it's really difficult to find them.) It seems like amazon is just concerned with the volume of books on their store, not the quality of them. If I could filter out the "kindle unlimited" books from all of the lists it would make things a lot better.

Re:Love kindle, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

While price is part of the issue, the bigger issue is that tablets like the iPad, with their bright glossy screens, are poor for sitting down and reading a book.

When tablets like the iPad killed off e-ink, then reading books became less comfortable, and most people aren't willing to have both a tablet and an e-reader.

Re:Love kindle, but...

[__aaclcg7560]

In a lot of cases they are more expensive than the print copies and they have way more restrictions.

That's because traditional print publishers are trying to protect their print business. Given a choice between an overpriced ebook and slightly less expensive print book at Amazon, most consumers will buy the print book.

Re:Love kindle, but...

[Hognoxious]

That's like neglecting digital photography to protect your film business.

Worked sooooooo well for Kodak.

Re:Love kindle, but...

[__aaclcg7560]

That's like neglecting digital photography to protect your film business.

The problem with film was that you needed to develop the film before you could have pictures. Digital photography took out that extra step. Print and ebooks are just different formats of the same content.

Worked sooooooo well for Kodak.

The verdict is still out on traditional publishers.

Re:Love kindle, but...

[Hognoxious]

It's a strategic error to be frightened of cannibalising your own sales. Your competitors aren't.

You rather missed the point there...

Re:Love kindle, but...

[__aaclcg7560]

It's a strategic error to be frightened of cannibalising your own sales. Your competitors aren't.

True.

You rather missed the point there...

I'm not yet convinced that print is on the way out as film. Not everyone has a computer or access to digital devices. I'm reading a book about Facebook advertising ("Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez). There are 7.5B people in the world who could use Facebook, but the actual number of users who can use Facebook is 1.5B — and Facebook is running out of users to sustain its growth. I think print may stick around longer than film.

Re:meet the new addiction, same as the old addicti

[sheramil]

... so if you have smartphones taped to the underside of the toilet it's probably time to detox.

I haven't tried, but I expect that taping them to the underside of the toilet would make them awfully hard to read.

Ebook fad is wearing off

[DogDude]

It might be time for the e-book fad to slow down. They'll always be around, but I think that most regular readers have tried them at this point, and found something lacking.

Everybody has an anecdote. Mine is that I don't know anybody who reads books on a gadget.

Re:Ebook fad is wearing off

[Osgeld]

I think the opposite, the short term up in physical sales is a fad, like records and cassette tapes and other "remember when" items

paper books infest the earth to the point that some places are charging you if you want to give them away

Re:Ebook fad is wearing off

[DogDude]

infest the earth

Paper rots quite nicely, and can be grown again into more paper. Those electronic gadgets that will be around for thousands of years are certainly "infesting the earth".

Re:Ebook fad is wearing off

[Anonymous Coward]

And to contrast I don't know anyone who hasn't adopted e-readers. A couple friends and I will still buy print tomes that can't be found in electronic format, or books which translate better in a physical copy (due to map, art content, etc.) but for paperback reading tablets have been great. I've actually imagined that a major issue with any reader/biblioholic over time is that your ebook collection will just grow---and grow---and grow. Eventually, one day you realize you're out of memory on your SSD card and you have been buying 20 books for every 5 you read. At this point it's time to cool the jets. I also suspect some people (including myself) spent a lot of time migrating to an electronic library....I collected several hundred books I wanted in ebook format for posterity, and once I had that I was more or less good to go. I'll never go without my tablet, though....the only environment in which reading a book on a tablet is not a better experience than in print is on a bright, sunny day. Given I still have shelves and shelves full of actual books, I think I'm covered in all directions.

Beach reading.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't feel comfortable taking my Kindle to the beach.

Re: Beach reading.

[Anonymous Coward]

take a human partner instead?

Re:Beach reading.

[__aaclcg7560]

Do you take your cellphone to the beach? You can read your Kindle books on your cellphone.

Re:Beach reading.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a Kobo instead. They're waterproof.

Re:Beach reading.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Do you take your cellphone to the beach?

Hell no.

Re:Beach reading.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you install a proprietary app. I don't do that.

Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed several times that ebooks are not only as expensive as regular books, but sometimes even more. Paper books sometimes get discounts that make them cheaper than ebooks. Why would anyone pay more for bits?

Re: Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Here in the U.K. There is VAT of 20% on eBooks, but not on the dead tree varitity.

Re:Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't say for the rest of the world, but in the UK physical books are exempt from VAT (currently at 20%) while ebooks are not and attract it as "luxury goods". The argument for physical books being their educational use. I'd guess the law on VAT hasn't caught up to the digital age yet - though the cynic in me might argue artificially elevating the prices of ebooks over dead tree books suits the traditional publishing market.

Next month's headline

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Next month's headline:

"As EBooks Surge, Paper Book Sales Plunge Nearly 20%"

It's almost as if things went in cycles or had ebbs and flows....

Re:Next month's headline

[Anonymous Coward]

That they do, but there might well be more to it. Honestly, paper books are a fine and valid choice, just as ebooks are. So people choose. Maybe taking a bunch of pulp novels with you on vacation is on balance better done with an ebook reader. Maybe trying to learn a new trick goes better from a paper textbook. Use what works for you. Quite possible many people tried the ebook thing and decided that they like paper books better.

Me, as a perennial cheapskate (since no disposable income whatsoever) I make do with whichever I can get free (typically PDF off the 'net) or cheap (paper books from the local thrift store). I can tell you that I much sooner idly grab a book from the shelf than dig up the file from the archive and feed it to a reader like xpdf. Of course, if I'm looking for something specific then the searching functions in the reader programs start to look appealing. Though usually on the desktop, as the ereaders I have are simply too slow, at every step of the way. Turning on, book selection, search term input, execution, and so on. A paper book with a decent index easily beats all that.

Sales of E-books are actually up (moderately)

[Rashkae]

Here's a more thorough analysis of the trends, (in pretty, easy to understand graphs)

http://authorearnings.com/repo...

In short, Market share of the publishers reporting their sales is *way* down.

Re:Sales of E-books are actually up (moderately)

[ET3D]

Thanks! Fascinating.

Re:Sales of E-books are actually up (moderately)

[_Sharp'r_]

Yeah, the original article is way off reality. They're reporting on mainstream publishing house ebook sales only..

The real story is that ebook sales are growing and Indie publishers and writers (not included in the cited stats) are taking over more and more of the market. So it's shrinking for traditional publishers, but growing overall.

I do both

[Scholasticus]

Though I enjoy reading books on my tablet very much, I've been buying fewer ebooks recently. This is mainly because many of the things I want to read are not available in any ebook format. So I've already bought many books as epubs (even things I already have in print version), but as I look for more obscure things, I'm not having as much luck. I can understand why a publisher wouldn't want to go to all the trouble of converting the complete short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, for example, to electronic format at high risk (few likely buyers). So I get the print version. Profits can be pretty slim in the publishing business, so I think electronic and print will coexist for some time. I have no desire for "digital detox" though.

No

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"The article includes an even more interesting statistic: that one-third of adults tried a "digital detox" in 2016, limiting their personal use of electronics. Are any Slashdot readers trying to limit their own screen time -- or reading fewer ebooks?"

No, I've always been able to manage my horrific, debilitating "digital addiction" without it spinning out of control. There's thing thing, it's called the "OFF" button...you should try it sometime.

"I can quit any time I want, I just don't want any of those times." - attributed to W.C. Fields

Re:Trendy

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Whatever, I need a smoothy cleanse.

Pro Tip: I usually crush up a couple of Xanax to blend into mine.

Ebooks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me crazy but I still prefer an actual book that to an ebook.

Too much content...

[__aaclcg7560]

I stated publishing ebooks at Amazon and Smashwords in 2010, selling short stories that I had reprint rights for at a buck each. I made more money from ebook sales than I did from first serial right sales. Sales tapered off as I took a two-year break (2015-2016) from writing and publishing to focus on my tech job that pays the bills. Short content for a buck is dead as a business model. I'm consolidating my 50+ titles into fewer titles, ordered new cover artwork, and raising the price to $1.99 for each. I should have that finished by the end of the year.

Re: Too much content...

[Anonymous Coward]

No one cares what you self publish. Your comments are boring enough on a free site, you wannabe.

Re: Too much content...

[__aaclcg7560]

No one cares what you self publish.

Let me check my sales revenue data... KA-ching!

Your comments are boring enough on a free site, you wannabe.

Let me check my ad revenue data... KA-ching!

Re: Too much content...

[Tablizer]

I have to disagree. It was interesting hearing from an actual DIY-ish publisher. Don't generalize your criticism into everybody, please.

I love my Kindle!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a Kindle for a few years now, and it's the best electronic reader I've ever used, but it still has limitations. Primarily, I can't write on it. When I'm reading papers or dense nonfiction, I take notes. So I use my Kindle for light reading, which means the only ebooks I buy are paperback fiction.

ebook readers with e-ink are too small

[Anonymous Coward]

If ebook readers (especially Kindle) were larger, then I'd buy more ebooks instead of printed books. I'll probably end up buying at least $400-$500 in printed books for the remainder of this year because the small screen size of Kindle's suck for textbooks and technical books that contain pictures.

For me, reading books on regular tablets without e-ink would just add to the eye-strain because of long hours spent daily on desktops/laptops for work.

Re:ebook readers with e-ink are too small

[dk20]

I also love my kindle but wish it has a larger screen.. they are priced weird, either they have the small screen and are almost disposable ($60ish) or a larger 10" and are rediculously expensive (~400)???

why cant they do a 10" at say ~$150?

Re:ebook readers with e-ink are too small

[Anonymous Coward]

All Kindles have 6 inch screens (there's the classic Kindle, the Paperwhite, the Voyage and the Oasis). The 10 inch "Kindle" Fire isn't really a Kindle, it's a tablet with a terrible IPS LCD display that sucks for reading and horrendously bad software.

Re:ebook readers with e-ink are too small

[Rande]

I've pretty much completely switched to the Kindle Fire 10". Wasn't that expensive (apart from the cover. I'm sure they're subsidising the device with the price of the covers).
Took a while to get used to in comparison to the eInk though.

Sure, not all the DRMed shit

[Anonymous Coward]

They sell the ebooks at higher price than the paper version, and DRMed well past the inconvenience limit of legit customers which also need to pony up for the reader.

And, oh! you don't own the ebook like the paper version and all your ebooks can disappear in a split second without notice.

What would be surprising if were the any other way, the industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot since Napster and refuse to learn. Good luck.

Wonder what changed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it has nothing to do with publishers forcing Amazon to abandon the "max price $9.99" model. I have bought a couple of new books that were cheaper than the Kindle version recently. And if I see that Hachette is the publisher I will only buy if I can find a used copy.

I avoid eBooks

[rickb928]

0. They are not as easy to navigate as paper books.
1. They are dependent on electricity.
2. They are hard to share...

Re:I avoid eBooks

[iggymanz]

eh? they are easy to share, I've borrowed some e-books from my friend via Amazon.

Re: Trendy

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro Plus Tip: Rail a line of coke off of a hookers tits before you drink it.

Re:meet the new addiction, same as the old addicti

[ShanghaiBill]

I haven't tried, but I expect that taping them to the underside of the toilet would make them awfully hard to read.

A handheld mirror helps. After a few hours practice, you can read backwards with ease.

Re: Trendy

[Hognoxious]

In fact, forget the drink.

Re: Trendy

[Anonymous Coward]

Charlie?

Ebooks are not competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Look on amazon, and one can find engineering books in hard cover/paperback for $50-$100, while the ebook versions are $150+.

If i buy a print book, I can resell it or donate it, and it is inexpensive. It also cannot be taken away. If I "buy" an ebook, I have nebulous rights to read it in a walled garden, and those rights are one digital screw up away from being lost. The cost and risk make ebooks completely non-competitive for me.

Audiobooks, Overdrive and Amazon

[tannhaus]

There are reasons I buy fewer ebooks. One is that I'm able to get audiobooks from my local library either physically or through Overdrive to read in the car during work drives. Two is that I'm able to check out ebooks through Overdrive from my local library. Three is that I'm able to read many books for free through Amazon Prime reading. I could also get the Kindle Unlimited for $10 a month. Through those options, I can get just about any book I want. So, there are few I HAVE to buy.

Before, I bought a lot more simply because they were not available to me unless I bought them. Things have changed.

Simple Econmics

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, the choice has been nothing more complex than "voting with my wallet": why should I bother buying an eBook version of a title for $9.99 or more when I can by the print copy for the same (or often even less) price? The print version I can lend to a friend, highlight and make notations, donate to my local library, or even resell if I no longer wish to keep it around. That being said, for some titles (reference mostly) I will gladly pair the same or near (-/+ 10%) the the print cost simply for the search capability.

The win-win for me is when Amazon offers a print version for $XXX and then gives me the option to buy the eBook copy at a seriously discounted rate (99cents or sometimes even free). But this is far and few between, sadly.

Re:meet the new addiction, same as the old addicti

[thinkwaitfast]

I read Empire Strikes Back upside down in grade school to see if I could do it. Surprisingly I finished it in a day.

We love eBooks and our Kindles

[Argon]

All three in our family love ebooks on our Kindles, mainly for reading fiction. We also love our "real books" especially when the smaller format of the Kindle doesn't work or when the book has a lot of pictures. We gave our daughter her Kindle first when she was 7 and her reading habit has really taken off. She's now nearly 10 and still considers her Kindle one of the best gifts she ever had.

The convenience of taking a whole library with you wherever you go and the front lit option for reading in your bed make a huge difference for all of us. Some how book lights never worked very well for me.

ebook pricing is definitely a disaster, in India I often find physical books cheaper than ebooks, so I end up buying whatever version is cheaper. So I can understand why ebook sales can drop but that doesn't necessarily mean ebook reading is dropping. We subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and plenty of free (and legal) or cheap ebooks are available if you know where to look (Bookbub for example).

As to digital detox, what do you the idiot box is? If the Kindle keeps my daughter away from the TV (and it did), I'm all for it!
 

Print For Me

[acvh]

I read on average 3 or 4 books a week; a mix of fiction and non. I have a Kindle Paperwhite, but my preference by far is print. The Kindle is too small, has too many page turns, and is uncomfortable to hold.

Limit?

[OYAHHH]

> one-third of adults tried a "digital detox" in 2016........ Are any Slashdot readers trying to limit their own screen time -- or reading fewer ebooks?

Why the hell would I want to do that?

I'm marinating my IPad in chocolate sauce as we speak and plan on frying it in bacon grease tomorrow so that I can devour as many juicy photons being emitted as possible.

I never left real books

[GerryGilmore]

Fundamentally, an ebook reader is just a specialized tablet and if I wanted to "read" on a tablet, I would. But I don't. There is no way that any tablet, etc. that I've seen that can match the overall experience of dead trees. Never any: dead batteries; "please turn off all electronic devices while we're on the tarmac"; "you're access to this book has been denied"; etc. Really - who needs them?

Re:I never left real books

[Whorhay]

I still buy dead tree books but most of my book reading is done on an e-reader now. I like to keep it in my car so I can read through my lunch break. I have to take it into the house once every few months to charge. Even when the battery gets low enough that it issues a warning you've got a couple hours of reading time left in my experience so it's not like it just instantly craps out when the battery gets low. That is of course more charging than any dead tree book will ever require but it is rare enough that I've never bemoaned it.

I do actually find the e-reader more comfortable to read from. I don't have to hold the e-reader open, I can just prop it on or against something and tap the screen to turn pages when necessary which is very useful when eating lunch in particular. The huge capacity to carry a library worth of books is great as I can read whatever suites my fancy at the time and when I finish a book I can just start another without having to exercise the forethought to have a second book at hand. The only thing that has ever actually given me any concern is the fragility inherent with a thin electronic device that is mostly screen.

I can see how an e-reader may not be an ideal fit for everyone, but you might be surprised at just how easily it might find a niche in your life.

Re:I never left real books

[david_thornley]

My reader uses e-ink. That's at least close to reading paper books, and is better than reading them on a tablet.

Re: Trendy

[Anonymous Coward]

Then 2 hours later pass out for 7 hours, wake up not remember falling asleep with a plate of food spilled on my clothes.

Housing gets cheaper

[paai]

I have always been an avid reader - but for some reason only books that I owned. Libraries didn't work for me. And I never threw away a book. So in my houses always a seizable room was reserved as a private library and book storage.
Five years ago I weaned myself away from the paper book. Then I sought (and found) om internet the ebook equivalents and gave away the paper copies. So within a few years I had an empty room here my library once existed. When I moved into a new house, it could be smaller - and cheaper - than earlier houses. I can read in bed without my wife complaining about the light staying on.

Yes, as far as I am concerned, the ereader is the best thing since sliced bread. BTW: I am 69 and it is nice to be able to adjust stuff like fonts and fontsize.

Paai

It's easy to own/control PRINT houses

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: NOT so easy to control online electronic information (not a single easily controlled outlet) - you all THINK about that & think hard. You control the message/data folks get from a FINITE number of outlets, you control the people (win wars for your mind without firing a single shot - good herdable sheep).

* When you control the presses & what's said (including the language framing it) you control the minds of those taking info in, shaping their views (largely w/ omissions of FULL facts & 1/2 truth misinformation (just as powerful as real information)).

(The worst part is, since we've all been victim to what William Blake called "the mind forg'd manacles" foisted on us by the above, you'll probably REBEL @ it at first... I did, shook my "beliefs" programmed into me (yes, programmed, & it happens to YOU TOO) - lol, put it this way: "Most people are so hopelessly inured to the system they will fight to defend it" - Morpheus - "Welcome to the REAL WORLD, Neo"... I'll add to that & say you MAY not like what you see).

Nobody I know LIKES getting played but guess what? We've ALL been played. That's what upsets you the most I think when you "abres los ojos" finally. The rabbit hole goes SO deep & has our ostrich heads stuck so far in the sand, ignorant of the REAL deal, it's not even funny.

APK

P.S.=> That's a BIG part of "the control grid" game afoot here folks - I suggest, IF you can find it, read a book (online if possible in say, .pdf form or otherwise) called HIGHER CIRCLES (from the 60's iirc, but it's SPOT ON even today largely)... apk

My pockets are too small for textbooks

[raymorris]

> Paper books sometimes get discounts that make them cheaper than ebooks. Why would anyone pay more for bits?

I do a lot of studying 5-15 minutes at a time. I study a few pages in the bathroom, a few pages while waiting in line, etc. Dead tree books are rather inconvenient to keep in my pocket, so I prefer digital for studying.

For reference books paper can be good because it doesn't dissapear easily, but even for reference digital is searchable.

I am a big reader and buy both.

[gurps_npc]

Basically, print books are far superior to ebooks.

Paperbacks are cheap and you can mistreat them / throw them away / easily give them away / sell them / donate them.

Hard cover are nice and large and easy to read. They feel good and are a much better experience.

The real problem for me are the graphics. Which is a shame because obviously the ebooks COULD be far superior. But they aren't. They totally suck when it comes to any graphics. They don't move, they don't enlarge. They aren't in color. Worst of all, they somehow manage to shrink them down so even though the ereader is BIGGER than the paperback, the drawing is SMALLER on the ebook. Not to mention the fact that while the resolution is good enough for letters, it is too low for good graphical display.

When I buy a book that has a map (like many sci-fi/fantasy books), I enjoy the map. I ignore it in an ebook. While I feel cheated.

Basically the only time I ever want to get an ebook is when space is at a premium. Airline trips for example.

Re:I am a big reader and buy both.

[iggymanz]

wait till you get old, you'll find e-books superior. I can't focus on the tiny print in paper books for long. And the prices for the books I like are much cheaper for electronic version

Re:I am a big reader and buy both.

[gurps_npc]

I currently need reading glasses for most paperbacks. I would still rather read them then an ebook, in part because I find the large print settings on ebooks to be poorly done. Particularly on smaller ereaders, it isn't worth the effort.

Re:I am a big reader and buy both.

[iggymanz]

I need my reading glasses just to see the larger fonts on my e-reader. In other words, for most paper books there will come a time when no reading glasses will be sufficient.

A good e-reader is superior to most books for readability.

Ebooks can be hard to create

[blackest_k]

The reader software blows in theory you can do a fluid layout but it is so incompatible across readers. About the best seems to be google playbooks but a lot use Adobe digital editions it's really hard to position pictures. For example you can not be sure if a caption will be under a picture or on the next page. ADE's quirks are different to ibooks quirks Straight text is ok but anything else is a nightmare. You can't even be sure that a photo will appear on 1 screen or split across 2

Fixed layout epub is also a real bitch depending on device you may find the font too small to be readable. PDF's are usually bad too the screens are often too small to hold the information and designed around a portrait A4 page. on a computer your screen is landscape so why are we getting portrait orientated pdf files! The other dumb thing is margins most screens have a bezel they do not need an inch wide border around the page and trying to fit the page on screen the content becomes too small.

It's a clusterfuck that isn't getting better anytime soon, at least with a paperbook the layout works. There is even 3 standards for epub 2 3 3.1 even the kindle has problems some kindles only support older formats so the improved formats are not going out because the older readers can't handle them.

It's a lot easier to design a paper book and get it done in a reasonable time frame if your doing ebooks there can be a couple of months editing with different releases for different platforms. when you have to cover the production costs the price has to be high to actually cover the production costs of the ebook version.

So much worse than the old browser wars, and of course nobody wants to fix this because they want to hook you into their eco-system.

Re:Ebooks can be hard to create

[djinn6]

So... there's this thing called HTML that they created back in 1993 specifically for displaying digital text and images. It supports flexible layouts, fixed layouts, adjustable fonts, charts, links, sounds, videos, even real-time 3D renderings! And on top of all that, it's also supported by billions of consumer electronic devices worldwide and there is a huge variety of free tools you can use to create it.

Seriously though, publishers seems to be stuck in the 80's, and that's not limited to book publishers either.

Re:Ebooks can be hard to create

[blackest_k]

epub is basically html or xhtml with css

But there is very little consistency on how that will be rendered. 2 columns of text very hard to get anything consistent e.g you might want fill left column then fill right or perhaps right column is a translation of the left column so you want the two columns in step.

how about centering an image or text on a page. can't do that consistently. Often even the font specified is ignored which is fine if the user wants the maintext in a different font but headings and links often the reader over rides and neither the reader or the author gets what they wanted. One problem is screen size there are a bunch some readers will give a view port size others don't. trying to keep proportions for an image another painful experience. Captions often display randomly even within the same reader with the same image size. No reader software even defines what the behaviour will be and even when you look at the standard that can be really vague. In the spine you can define 1 or more languages for the book.

Now most languages are left to right but some are right to left like arabic. if you have more than one language declared in the spine ADE will use the first one. IBooks will use the last.
This can result in the pages being loaded the wrong way in one or the other.

Personally I think IBooks is probably right the general principle of css is whichever is closer to the text wins. The standard doesn't have a why in it either just says you may do this.
really the solution is just use 1 language definition in the spine so first and last are the same thing.

Anyway anything beyond basic text is very hard to style and will likely default to no style.
With paper books it is always as you wanted it to be. Ebook readers do not want to play nice. If you stick to one reader type you might get it displayed as you want but on another system? It's crazy and unlike the browser wars where ie would do one thing and everybody else do another. There isn't enough of a consistency to say right this will work in everything but IE and IE was forced to move towards a standard. In Epubs there is no generally right way that will cover 90% of readers... Just a bunch of flakey actors.

Re:Ebooks can be hard to create

[djinn6]

I understand that the readers are a mess of incompatibilities, and I don't think there's a way to fix it. That's why we should drop the whole epub idea entirely and serve those books as webpages and display them in the browser.

epub is basically html or xhtml with css

That's not the same. HTML has a standard, which all major browsers complies with. This is what you need if you want a consistent format to work across devices.

how about centering an image or text on a page. can't do that consistently

You can do that just fine in HTML. Any standards-compliant browser will render it correctly. They also don't ignore your font choices and they always report viewport size. And RTL support is built-in.

Just look at Wikipedia. Those pages looks great on every screen size. And the best part is that most EReaders already have a browser. If publishers would just start selling ebooks in HTML, all of those problems would go away.

Spending less screen time

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely spending less time in front of a screen, it didn't improve my life to do that, in fact made me more tense and annoyed.

It's the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares?

The problem with ebooks

[OneHundredAndTen]

1) DRM - getting DRM'd ebooks is a pain in the neck, unless you happen to have the exact device specifically approved by the content's owner. Even in that case, it can be a pain the neck.

2) Lack of control - the content's owner lets you access such content. That is all. The owner can override that permission at will.

3) Price - ebooks are insanely expensive, bearing in mind that the format removes lots of costs, when compared with traditional books.

As long as the three issues above stay, ebooks will be niche products - and ebook piracy will remain rampant.

Re:The problem with ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only do ebooks remove a very significant amount of costs for the publisher, they ALSO remove a significant amount of value for the consumer (i.e you can't resell, etc). That makes the current pricing _even more_ insane than it at first seems. You're essentially getting less than half the value for what is often the same or higher price. A customer would have to be a complete moron to think that's reasonable, but there are still some folks with more money than time/shelf space who are willing to let themselves get ripped off, just for the extra convenience.

I don't think it's that the publishers are necessarily trying to "protect their print business" as such though, they are simply trying to prevent customers from realizing just how little value they get from ebooks, by charging the same (or often even more) than the print book cost. If the ebook price was only 25% of the print price, you can bet a lot more ebooks would sell, but people would then get used to paying a lot less for books in general, and publishers don't want that. Amazon tried to push it anyway, and it actually worked and consumers loved it, for a while, but the publishers struck back and eventually got their way, and now consumers are screwed once again, and buy fewer ebooks.

Further, as noted in another post, often sales are most closely tracked by and reported for the "major" publishers. Lots of authors, and ebook consumers are turning away from those greedy dirt bags and towards publishers willing to sell ebooks for a price that's actually reasonable (but who might not track/report their sales the same way), or using things like Kindle Unlimited, which I doubt count as "ebook sales" at all and yet customers are still paying money to read ebooks in that case.

With the combination of these effects I'm actually surprised reported sales are even as high as they are now...

Re:The problem with ebooks

[_Sharp'r_]

Yeah, the major publishers are still trying to push readers away from ebooks towards paper and they price accordingly. As a result, small/Indie publishers and writers (not captured in this article's stats) are eating their lunch in ebooks, taking more and more of the growing (+4% last Q at Amazon) market.

Ebooks all the way

[neoRUR]

Ebooks and pdf's all the way, so tired of hauling around boxes of books, and I still have them all, but I can put hundreds on my iPad and switch around and I will always have them all with me when ever I want to read something else, or look up references.
I find the EPub format is better with the off color background.
I love books and old books and the paperback novel format and going into real bookstores and browsing, but I now I just get the ebooks.

Price: DRM-free ebook vs paperback

[Anonymous Coward]

I only buy DRM-free ebooks. When I first bought an e-reader, the vast majority of by overall book purchases were ebooks from Baen (which was the only major science fiction/fantasy/space opera publisher to sell DRM-free ebooks at the time); Baen's ebook prices are still pretty decent, but I'm running low on stuff from them that's high on my list to read.

Since then Tor went DRM-free too. Tor has a lot of great stuff that I still haven't read and initially I did buy a bunch of overpriced ebooks from them to do my small part to reward them for the decision to go DRM-free. Now though, while I'm willing to pay a dollar or two more for an ebook than a paperback (new or, more often, "very good" used), Tor's ebook prices are usually so high that I just end up buying the paperback.

Print book $12, ebook $12. Tell me why?

[Maxo-Texas]

I'm sorry- I feel ripped off buying ebooks for the same price as print books.

I'm not going to buy an ebook for over 50% of the price of a print book.

Cost is what is killing ebooks

[Anonymous Coward]

If i have to pay the same ( or more?!?! ) than paper, then many will choose something you can keep and put on the shelf.

Agree

[Anonymous Coward]

Was my first thought as well. People can understand the extra cost of print books due to them being an actual product that costs money to make and likely find it hard to justify paying the same for a digital only version of the same.

Ebooks for digital detox

[DeBaas]

I love ebooks. I tend to read mostly on holidays. And ebooks have many advantages for me: a lot less luggage, and I can decide during the holiday what to read. I just buy a book I want to read at Amazon, transfer it to my old Sony E-reader and then read it. With paper I could never do that. Amazon has nearly everything I could want and just a click away.

  The old reader has no internet to speak of so it prevents me from keeping an eye out for email and browsing. Just don't read on a device that can do much more than serve as an e-reader

Kindle Oasis is the perfect reading device

[Pulzar]

Kindle Oasis is definitely pricey, but I've been reading so much more since I got it. It's the perfect reading device... light, easy to hold with one hand, sharp illuminated screen that works both inside and outside as well as paper... and when I'm done with a book, I can browse for, buy, start reading the next one immediately.

I have very little reason to go back to paper, at least for fiction.

Only a symptom of the decline of tablets

[seoras]

Tablets, from my family and my own perspective as well as what I'm reading in the media, seem to have peaked and are now in decline.
Yes? No?
I've bought ebooks and I like that I can get any book instantly. That's it though, that's the only benefit it has.
I still prefer printed hard copy, which you can share, donate, re-sell and throw at anything displeasing.
Perhaps so much of our life and possessions has become intangibly digital that many of us still want some things we can physically own and touch.

Re:Only a symptom of the decline of tablets

[jjw3579]

I keep hearing Tablets are in decline, laptops are in decline, desktops are in decline, cell phone sales are in decline... What is everyone using if not one of the above? I can understand that sales may drop because people keep the devices longer, but they still have to be using them unless people are moving away from digitally delivered content somehow.

Ebooks FTW

[ayesnymous]

Try searching for every occurrence of a word in a print book, without flipping through every single page. You can't.

Try searching for every single thing you highlighted in a print book, without flipping through every single page. You can't.

You can easily do those things with an ebook.

The problem with e-books

[janfany]

I'm surprised. Old geezers like me are dying out and I'd have thought we were the ones hanging on to print. I have about 5000 e-books that I haven't read and I wonder when I'll ever read most of them. My house contains, at a guess, about 10,000 print books and I've read them all, some many times over. Sitting up in bed or lolling in a chair - even reading whilst eating - just seems more comfortable and enjoyable with the heft of a book in your hand. And I'm a techo; I started in the computer business as a support engineer in 1965 and continued in several roles until 2003. I do have an e-reader; I read from my PC; and I read from my smart phone. It just ain't the same. And it seems that younger people are finding that too.

Re:The problem with e-books

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you manage to eat and hold a book open at the same time? I love my kindle specifically for the times I'm trying to read while sitting at the table. For me, a smart phone screen is too small and the PC is too bulky for bed or the comfy chair.
I'm still acquiring plenty of regular books. I definitely want the hardcover for anything with charts, diagrams or pictures and I'm buying used books when Amazon demands new book prices for e-books.

Well of course

[jjw3579]

eBooks were great when they were 50% of the price of the paper version and arrived in a small fraction of the time. Now I can get a used copy of the paper version in a day for 10% of the eBook cost.

I like ebooks

[Cro Magnon]

Ebooks have one big advantage: size. My bookshelves are crammed. If I buy a dead-tree book, I'd have trouble finding room for it. I have plenty of room on my Kindle. Also, the last time I went on vacation, I barely had room for 3 books, and I was almost finished with the last one by the time I got home. I could read 3,000 books on my Kindle or iPhone. No danger of running out, and if I did, I could buy on the road.

eInk vs Paper

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoy both. I buy a print book, preferably hard bound, of any book I plan to keep forever. I have a small collection of books dating around the turn of the century 1800-1900s. Digital is for books I do not plan on keeping except via backups. An ebook in flight is a wonderful space saving thingie.

My back Loves Ebooks

[chriswininger]

Being someone who likes to read multiple books at once my back thanks the e-reader revolution. I am pretty sure I buy a lot more books than I used to, because being able to hear about a book and instantly buy and start reading..., well it's instant gratification and you don't go about your day and forget. Also I find e-readers much better for bedtime reading because I can keep reading while my girlfriend can turn out the lights and sleep (sure there are booklights, but eh) The thing about e-readers though is I don't expect much from them other than a quality screen and long battery life. I purposely don't browse the web on them because I want to restrict myself to long form media, plus battery life is so much better with wifi off. This means there is no point in buying a new one very often. I bought a nook several years ago and that's all I really need until it dies. The only thing that bothers me about e-books is the DRM, when it became clear Nook is not going to be around forever, I almost stopped buying from them for fear I would lose access to my collection, but then I found a good process for breaking the DRM; so, now I just make sure to immediately back up each title as I buy (not that I often read the same book twice). I also of course patronize DRM free stores whenever I can, but the DRM free selection is often much more limited than B&N.

New authors

[tepples]

The volume is why I don't buy e-books anymore, except for by authors I already know.

That can work depending on how you discover new authors. How do you do so?

Re:New authors

[arth1]

That can work depending on how you discover new authors. How do you do so?

Mainly recommendations in non-open fora[*], and reviews by professional whose reviews of books I have read seem appropriate. That books also exist in true hardcover is also a plus; then they presumably have gone through at least some sort of review without being refused.
And, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit, the gender of the author has lately become a factor too. These days, most books are written by female authors, and the lower the quality of the book, the higher the gender ratio of women to men seems to be. I know this is not because women can't write; half of my favorite authors are women. I think it has more to do with "formula writing" having been marketed towards women, including the whole harlequin movement who brought us thousands upon thousands write-by-number books that essentially are the same two plots[**] and same characters, in different settings.
if I pick ten new books at random, nine of them are likely going to be by written by women, and eight of those will likely be crap. So I improve my odds by weighing the gender when picking books.

I also score down any book that says "New York Times Bestseller" on the cover. New York Times readers are the McDonald's eaters of literature.

[*] In open fora, good reviews tend to be drowned by the volume of crap reviews, just like for e-books themselves.

[**]: Either "supergirl" or "girl captures heart (and cock) of rich/powerful man". Setting either in space doesn't make it science fiction, and throwing in a timed bomb doesn't make it a thriller.

Bucking the trend

[vanyel]

I haven't done paper in years, and have no interest in going back when my entire library fits on an sd card instead of filling up a room or two, not to mention that as my eyesight deteriorates, paper is increasingly hard to read. I've been doing more reading that tv watching lately, so I'm doing my part to make their stats out of date ;-)

Re:meet the new addiction, same as the old addicti

[Anonymous Coward]

I read Empire Strikes Back upside down in grade school to see if I could do it. Surprisingly I finished it in a day.

Well, it's only 3 words. I'm surprised you didn't finish sooner.

Gutenberg.org is your friend

[CmdrTamale]

Gutenberg.org gathers, scans, proof-reads, and publishes books that they believe to be out of copyright or otherwise in the public domain. They currently list 26 titles by W. Somerset Maugham of the 54,000 titles they offer -

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/126?sort_order=release_date
--
It is better to stand and fight. If you run, youâ(TM)ll only die tired. â" Viking saying

I'm six weeks phober

[holophrastic]

It's been six weeks since the battery died. I used call-forwarding to forward my cell number to my ancient land-line. I pulled the old "cordless-not-to-be-confused-with-mobile" phones out of the garage. I haven't looked back.

An actual answering machine. Cool. No caller ID. $9.95/month.

I don't lose my phone around the house. I don't keep it in my pocket always. I don't see who's calling and wonder why before answering.

Do you know what happens when I leave the house? I'm actually alone! If I'm driving an hour away, I'm guaranteed to be alone for the entire hour!

In reality, I'll wind up with a cellphone for emergencies -- need to be able to survive car trouble. But I'm thinking I'll leave the cellphone with the car keys.

Over the long term though....

[supermachoman]

I have to wonder if this will just go down as a temporary fad. Why people are unable to see the value in having an entire library's collection in the palm of their hand, with near instant access to any other book if desired, is beyond my comprehension. The only explanation I can come up with is it's a trend like organic food and vinyl.

Maybe e-readers are down even more than digital books in general because those who still do digital books prefer to just read on their existing phone or tablet. Personally I hope they don't stop making e-readers so this is sad news to me. To me, there's great value in electronic ink. I love taking my nook on long plane flights. I can read more books than anyone could pack, and I have a month of battery life. Then there's the direct sunlight thing....

On the other hand.... maybe it's just people like to be pretentious with their books. This could solve that problem

Check

[jf_moreira]

eBook? WTF, reading paper books is way better and nothing to recharge or to worry. Never had an urge of having one, played with some of them from friends but really did not feel like buying such a thing.