What's the current law regarding resale of ebooks? Do I "own" them or am I merely licensing them?
You do not own them.
E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
141–150 of 190 posts
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turns out Amazon knew what they were doing when they were selling ebooks for cheaper. The publishers come in with agency pricing and boom, sales plummet.
This is what is really frustrating about the article. It spends the entire first half boosting print books like there is something magical about them that prevents them from being disrupted like movies and TV were. >E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and tel…
There is in fact something magical about printed books :-) Well, not magic, but books are not just the medium of data transfer, they are also integral part of the reading experience. This is unlike music, where it doesn't matter if you're playing the content from a CD or transferring it over the network. The feeling of reading a book will always be different from using a reading device, it doesn't matter how to great the device is. Once the novelty of e-readers wears off, you will start to see a steady-state of sales on paper and other media for books. It seems that it is already happening. I, for example, read books in printed as well as electronic forms. I use e-readers for the convenience, but there are some types of books that don't work in electronic format in my personal opinion - and I think there are lots of people like me.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#143 Big 5 publishers eBook sales have declined becuase of agency pricing. Overall eBook sales have not declined.Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just that they have no incentive to pass on the savings, they actively do not want ebooks to become popular -- they've stated this outright at various points in their battles with Amazon, that their goal with ebook pricing/policies is to preserve their print business as much as possible, as they believe that's totally key to their future success.
Yes, pretty much like Kodak, which invented the digital camera, trying to kill it off/keep it expensive so it didn't cut into film sales. How did that work out for them?
There was an interesting comment here about Kodak several months ago:
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#145There are three huge problems that e-books haven't solved, which has been holding them back.
First, consumer surplus. (Read this if you haven't: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...) Printed books use different editions and market availability to segment the market and bring in a significant amount of consumer surplus revenue. e-books have very weak mechanisms to capture consumer surplus, and that represents a huge potential loss of revenue. In theory it might be possible to make that up on the other end with higher volume (see, for example, steam sales and humble bundles) but so far e-book sales models have been too constrained to enable that to happen very often.
Second, commodity pricing. This is a big problem across the board in a lot of media (games, movies, music, etc.) but e-books have just doubled down on the same model. Books are not like dried beans, you don't just go to a store and buy books by the pound, but that's the model the industry has increasingly been rushing towards. With only popularity as the sole determinant of total revenue. This is a massively flawed model that hurts many talented writers and perverts the market in unhealthy ways.
Third, ownership. People with physical books can gift them to others, or sell them, or loan them. They can let their friends, their children, their other relatives, or their family's friends borrow them and read them. They are a profound asset of learning and shared culture. An e-book, however, is still by default a jealously guarded personal possession that cannot be easily loaned, sold, gifted, or inherited. Given the importance of books, this is a profound disadvantage of e-books.
Fourth, vendor lock-in. The average user experience with e-books represents a substantial dependency on a particular corporation (such as Amazon). If, say, Amazon went out of business it could be especially difficult to gain access to ones Amazon purchased e-books. Imagine, for example, some sort of world-wide disaster, and now there are no more new kindles, no more Amazon, etc. What happens when your one device storing all your books finally dies? This is similar to the ownership problem. Buying an e-book today is partly making a bet that the company that sold you that e-book will be around for as long as that book is relevant. Given the history of both corporations and of books, that's actually not a very smart bet.
e-books have a lot of short-term advantages but they have a lot of long-term disadvantages, at least as they exist today. That's not an intractable problem but it's one that so far the big powers in the e-book world have been deaf to hearing.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#146I've been really disappointed with the pricing of eBooks. A new book is available for pre-order, and here is the Amazon pricing: Kindle – $26.35 Hardcover – $19.23 Audible – $27.61 Audio CD – $30.00 All logic suggests the electronic version should be cheaper. Prices like this will likely drive me, and others, to piracy. Yes, the value of the book is what I am willing to pay for it, but I feel insulted by the pricing…
> Prices like this will likely drive me, and others, to piracy. Especially since ebooks are small enough that you can download them in seconds. I love getting juiced for out-of-print books, especially ones that are in that gray area where the author and his direct descendants are dead and buried, but copyright lives on.
Whats happening is that people are publishing large bundles of e-books in a single torrent. Or like music, every book from a particular author.
I think fiction published need to look at what is happening in Free to Play games and Kickstarter if they want the industry to survive.
Oh oh.. thats my Startup idea. Nobody steal it. Kickstarter for fiction. You go and read the first chapter and pay to get the rest of the book written. A good author should be able to raise 50-100k which should be enough to get a good story pumped out.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#147I don't know my own reasoning, but I am part of this trend. I have owned every Kindle model from the very first up until the paperwhite. There were about 3 or 4 years where I did not read paper books. But recently I have gone to paper-only, and my Kindle sits uncharged. I can think of a few things I like about paper books (although I still love the Kindle):
* Bookstores are awesome and getting a recommendation from an employee is much better than browsing Amazon.
* Used books are cheap! A used paperback is often cheaper than an eBook.
* With paper I have sense of progress as I feel the right half of the book shrink as I read.
* I can easily lend a friend a paper book, I have shared many books with people recently but with the Kindle they had to buy their own.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#148I actually prefer to read scanned paperbacks on my ereader rather than the ebook versions. With my Samsung tablet they are the same size as a paperback, and the display looks like a paperback page. I like the typography, layout, and general imperfections of a scanned page. The letters are all slightly different, and are imperfectly placed. Ebooks are a bit too perfect and sterile. I'd like to take it a step further a…
> I buy the paperbacks, scan them (takes 5-10 minutes), then throw the book into the recycle bin. Poe's law is pinging.
I just assumed he had a multi sheet scanner and cut off the binding.
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#149I actually prefer to read scanned paperbacks on my ereader rather than the ebook versions. With my Samsung tablet they are the same size as a paperback, and the display looks like a paperback page. I like the typography, layout, and general imperfections of a scanned page. The letters are all slightly different, and are imperfectly placed. Ebooks are a bit too perfect and sterile. I'd like to take it a step further a…
How can you scan a paperback book in 10 minutes?
Curious about the kind of hardware-software set up that allows to do that in 10 minutes
Re: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead
#150I 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'm price concious, so a cheaper paperback will put me off from buying the ebook. I don't care if books are expensive apart from that. Children's books currently are better in print than in ebook form. The Kate Greenaway award lists some really nice books that don't work in ebook form. http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/greenaway/ (I'm sure this is something my child will think is odd when xe reads to their child -…
There is also the Wink newsletter for books that work better in paper: http://winkbooks.net