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

[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

[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

[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

[Daemonik]

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

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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[Junta]

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

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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....

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)

[_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.

Re:Beach reading.

[__aaclcg7560]

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

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.

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!
 

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

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

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

[_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.