Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
wha'? where am i?
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.
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...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
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.
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.