When I'm 85 I'll still be able to open a book I bought in 2012 and read it. Text on paper ain't never changing file format.
EPUB is HTML, and that's not going anywhere, either.
E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
131–140 of 190 posts
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#132When I'm 85 I'll still be able to open a book I bought in 2012 and read it. Text on paper ain't never changing file format.
EPUB is HTML, and that's not going anywhere, either.
Op is talking about time-spans longer than we've had the internet. Don't flatter yourself by thinking you can predict the future.
( Ironically, neither Firefox nor Opera opened a .epub file out-of-the-box. So much for compatibility. )
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#133I hope this isn't the trend going forward. I don't get the traditionalist love of paperback books most of the time. Like the sort of people who go on and on about exploring book stores or the smell of new paper. I love my Kindle and I really hope to be able to use it as my primary reading source, its just so convenient, light, portable and unobtrusive (especially with that newer back-light option). But the price of n…
I think Douglas had a point here.
“Douglas said…Books are sharks,” Gaiman told a packed audience at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
“I must have looked baffled because he he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.”
Adams told Gaiman: “‘Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books and no matter what happens books will survive.’ And he was right,” said Gaiman.
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/03/06/neil-gaiman-sa...
Though funnily enough, the one thing that has got me wanting to buy an e-ink display is for technical reference.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also an issue of Ebook lock-ins. Some people are tired to have their collection of purchased books in various incompatible formats available to read through different subsets of devices / apps.
I agree that it is frustrating. I sell a lot of PDFs through Gumroad, and I think many of the buyers want that cross-platform compatibility (and the ability to print out specific pages). However, when I make ebook bundles available with .mobi, epub and PDF versions of a particular titles, relatively few people buy them.
Do you charge more for the bundle?
If so, sincere question: why, if it's the same content?
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#135While lots of people are pointing to pricing as the reason for this decline, and that's obviously a big factor, I think you also have to look at the decline of the tablet here. Phones just don't produce a really great reading experience. Actual computers are obviously never going to be a big market. Dedicated e-readers probably don't make sense to people who aren't voracious readers. And tablets are increasingly bein…
>> Phones just don't produce a really great reading experience. If i'm not mistaken, the kindle is 6".Many phone are 5.5" or 5" which isn't that different - especially with the fact you can control the zoom.
If I'm reading a book, I don't want to be zooming in and out. It's a pain to hold a phone one handed in a way that also promotes easy page turning without accidental page turning. Reading in bed while my partner sleeps is also a lot less intrusive on my Kindle than my phone (which annoys me too, as unless overridden, the brightness will be far too much in a dark room).
I love my iPhone/iPad. But they don't compare to the Kindle for reading experience, at least for me. I just wish color eInk would get here already.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years l…
The ebooks I buy are immediately stripped of drm and dumped into calibre. It's not the prettiest software in the world, but it works and the ebooks are mine forever no matter what happens to amazon, google, apple, or kobo, and they're trivially transferable. I will not buy ebooks from a store that uses DRM that's not immediately removable.
We are developing a platform that can be used as a Calibre alternative to organize, read, make highlights, bookmarks and notes and have them synced across all devices.
Check us out at https://bookfusion.com/ . We will be releasing an updated Android app and our IOS app soon. Feel free to send us some feedback at dc@bookfusion.com
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#137This article just feels irrelevant and completely out of touch. As many people have pointed out here, e-books are insanely popular, just not necessarily through the traditional distributors. Personally, I also believe that there's only one reason why the paper book isn't far less popular than it is, and it's entirely temporary. Get out of the tech-minded echo chamber and ask a person why they would still buy a paper…
>1. Make an e-reader with a beautiful e-paper screen capable of displaying full color. Color drains battery life. Let this be a 2nd/3rd gen thing. Few books will take advantage of full illustrations. This, however, can be huge for children's books . >2. Make the screen refresh very quickly From my hardly-ever-use of a few e-readers. Is this really a problem? >3. Give it sensible touch gestures that you never accident…
"Color drains battery life. Let this be a 2nd/3rd gen thing. Few books will take advantage of full illustrations. This, however, can be huge for children's books."
1 - aren't we past generation 1 of eBook readers? Color might drain battery life more, but my Voyage gets well over 100 hours with Wifi off, even using the adaptive backlight. How much more is needed?
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon also supplies KindleGen( http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211 ) to convert epub to mobi
Neat, but weird that they don't offer it as a service through their site... or do they?
You can email documents to a specific email address tied to your kindle account and they will be converted.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ebooks I buy are immediately stripped of drm and dumped into calibre. It's not the prettiest software in the world, but it works and the ebooks are mine forever no matter what happens to amazon, google, apple, or kobo, and they're trivially transferable. I will not buy ebooks from a store that uses DRM that's not immediately removable.
We are developing a platform that can be used as a Calibre alternative to organize, read, make highlights, bookmarks and notes and have them synced across all devices. Check us out at https://bookfusion.com/ . We will be releasing an updated Android app and our IOS app soon. Feel free to send us some feedback at dc@bookfusion.com
Does it read all the formats that Calibre supports and convert between them? That's the use case for Calibre - and where most alternatives fall down.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#140I hope this isn't the trend going forward. I don't get the traditionalist love of paperback books most of the time. Like the sort of people who go on and on about exploring book stores or the smell of new paper. I love my Kindle and I really hope to be able to use it as my primary reading source, its just so convenient, light, portable and unobtrusive (especially with that newer back-light option). But the price of n…
There needs to be a new document format for technical docs. Mobi, epub and pdf just aren't working. I would love to be able to go all digital and read technical docs on my kindle, but right now it's frustrating. Even on a tablet, it's not great.
What's wrong with epub for technical docs? I don't really have a reader that is suitable for technical books (I'm not sure anyone has, passive, high-contrast, 300+dpi and a screen size at minimum the size of an A4 page) -- but if I did, I'm not sure I'd have any problems with docs being in epub. Or just html (not a big difference there, really).
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not sure I understand what you think needs improvement wrt epub? (Now, how those epubs are made, that might be a different matter all together, like a lot of html renderings technical manuals leaves a lot to be desired -- old-school javadoc comes to mind).