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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the book-reports dept.

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?

20 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. EBooks by DaMattster · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    1. Re:EBooks by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:EBooks by Daemonik · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:EBooks by Tobenisstinky · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?
    4. Re:EBooks by Jason1729 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:EBooks by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
    6. Re: EBooks by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:EBooks by Daemonik · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    8. Re:EBooks by doom · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:EBooks by arth1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. ebooks are friggin expensive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:ebooks are friggin expensive by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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).

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  3. Books are tangible. by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  4. Due to failing eyesight in old age by sheramil · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. Love kindle, but... by saberworks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Next month's headline by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 3, Funny

    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....

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  7. Sales of E-books are actually up (moderately) by Rashkae · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Ebook fad is wearing off by Osgeld · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  9. Re:meet the new addiction, same as the old addicti by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3

    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.

  10. We love eBooks and our Kindles by Argon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!