How ebooks lost their shine
theguardian.com
How ebooks lost their shine
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#2I wish they gave more clarity to this stat
* Overall digital sales up 6% to £1.7bn despite a continuation of the drop in eBook sales down 3%
I personally doubt that ebooks have 'lost their shine', I think this is more a matter of a journalist not being able to read into the numbers.
I haven't bought the report, but what little I know about the book market, I know that in 2016, adult colouring books became a BIG thing, really big! Are you going to buy those for kindle? No, so more money is spent on physical books and less on e-books.
If you're an ebook reader, you may also have noticed that Amazon has significantly raised prices on e-books in 2016. 25-50% on average it seems to me, and I often now see ebooks that cost the same as physical books. Now, I'm not going to buy a physical book because my ebook price has increased, but I do buy slightly fewer ebooks now.
Physical books have their place, but I don't see ebooks in serious decline in the near future.
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#3> "Here are some things that you can’t do with a Kindle. You can’t turn down a corner, tuck a flap in a chapter, crack a spine (brutal, but sometimes pleasurable) or flick the pages to see how far you have come and how far you have to go. You can’t remember something potent and find it again with reference to where it appeared on a right- or left-hand page. You often can’t remember much at all."
I don't care about creating dog-ears or cracking spines. Really, who does?
On my kindle I'm able to highlight passages and/or make notes (which are saved to my amazon account) and I can look them up later. I can create multiple bookmarks. Some books have support for the "X-ray" feature, a reference tool, in which there might be entries on such things as characters, locations and so on.
I'm able to highlight words and look them up on wikipedia or the oxford dictionary. Very useful.
I'm able to "flick" pages back and forth and easily return to wherever I started out.
> "You can’t tell whether the end is really the end, or whether the end equals 93% followed by 7% of index and/or questions for book clubs."
I guess, not that it's a real issue for me.
And maybe best of all... I'm not dealing with mountains of books taking up space in my home anymore.
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#4> "You can’t tell whether the end is really the end, or whether the end equals 93% followed by 7% of index and/or questions for book clubs."
...um, you can't with a real book either? At least without looking, which is something you can also do on a Kindle?
That said, the Kindle Keyboard 3G was the peak. Knowing you need never run out of book; and also the ability, in a pinch, to get on the internet and check your email / look up a map, free, wherever you are in the world.
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#5I find ebooks useful if the book is meant to be read from start to finish. I have yet to find ebooks useful for technical books, where I need to flip through chunks of pages and go back and forth between sections of chapters
as well as where I need to search by figure or equations rather than by text.
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#6I find ebooks useful if the book is meant to be read from start to finish. I have yet to find ebooks useful for technical books, where I need to flip through chunks of pages and go back and forth between sections of chapters as well as where I need to search by figure or equations rather than by text.
I find pdf's of technical books workable on an old ipad2 i keep around for this sort of thing. Not as easy as flipping to the right page of a book but i can take more books with me so that kind of outweighs the negative for me.
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#7There is one general problem I have with ebooks that limits them for me when it comes to technical books, but is generally not a problem for things like novels.
There is also a problem specific to Amazon ebook readers that holds me back from many technical books I would otherwise buy in ebook format.
First, the general problem. Suppose I am reading a 200 page mathematics book. I'm on page 150, and to understand something I want to review some point that was covered much earlier. I can close my eyes and visualize when I read that earlier point, and I get an image of the page it was on, where it was on that page, and how far it was into the book. I can pretty quickly jump back and find it.
This is not some "photographic memory" type thing. I don't "see" the page word for word, and cannot read the page number to know where to go. But I will get that the page I'm looking for had a diagram on the bottom and was a left side page, and that what I wanted was near the middle...that kind of thing.
It is enough that when combined with the way the pages are laid out in a physical sequence to give a sense of "place" to each page and the information on it. It seems kind of like a weak form of a memory palace.
With an ebook I do not get that sense of place as I read, and so if I need to find something much earlier in the book I have to rely on the search function or the table of contents, and often have to do a lot of paging around (which is slow on eInk readers). It usually takes a lot longer than it would have taken in the paper book.
The second problem, specific to Amazon's ereaders, is very inconsistent handling of images. For example I have some chess books that make extensive use of images for chess diagrams.
On my eInk Kindles, the chess diagrams are about the size of a postage stamp.
On the Kindle application for OS X, they are about the size that they would be in the paper book (in other words, they are the right size).
On the Kindle application for Windows, they are postage stamp sized.
On the Kindle Cloud Reader, the are the right size.
On the Kindle app for iOS they are the right size.
Same problem for math books. They often use images for equations. If those get the postage stamp treatment it makes that book very hard to deal with.
For things where images aren't needed, and where I'm not going to have to do a lot of looking back, I've greatly enjoyed reading on Kindle. Harry Potter was fine, for instance, as was the complete Sherlock Holmes stories.
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#8The first paragraph is alread bullshit:
Ebooks have full-text search, of course you have bookmarks and a progress bar (not as "nice" but does the trick) and usually pages render always the same on one device. For literature I also doubt I remember less, why would I.
Where paper actually excells:
- good for advanced layouts
- you can find something you know was "somewhere arround XY" but don't have a clear keyword for (More important for literature, but even there full text search often wroks better. I once read a book in print and than wrot about it, I mainly used the epub for quotations and not just because of copy and paste).
- some books are only available in print
- a used print is cheaper than an epub...
- you don't look like a mid 50s housewife in the train
If given the choice I still always take the epub.
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#9The first paragraph is alread bullshit: Ebooks have full-text search, of course you have bookmarks and a progress bar (not as "nice" but does the trick) and usually pages render always the same on one device. For literature I also doubt I remember less, why would I. Where paper actually excells: - good for advanced layouts - you can find something you know was "somewhere arround XY" but don't have a clear keyword for…
>you don't look like a mid 50s housewife in the train
Stay classy.
I far prefer reading real books (on the train and off) myself - but am already having storage issues due to city living...
Re: How ebooks lost their shine
#10One of the reasons might be due to price, physical books are exempt from VAT in the UK, whereas ebooks are not, so ebooks tend to be either the same price as their paper counterparts, or more expensive.
I read mostly on my kindle out of convenience, it doesn't take that much room in my bag and is comfortable to read on my commute.