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When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

bbc.co.uk

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Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#251

Post by scottlocklin »

andrewla wrote: post #186
wlll wrote: post #165

I don't buy ebooks, and this is just one reason. This is the complete list: 1. For some reason they cost a similar amount to print books Sometimes a bit less, sometimes the same, sometimes more. Distributing a physical book means you have to print, handle, store, transport, store again, handle again and transport again (using a simplified model of the journey a book takes to the end user). That costs money, and it co…

All your points are dead on. I'll throw in these cons as well: 5. visibility (as noted by angrygoat) and browseability is terrible. 6. Flipping through an ebook looking for something is impossible. 7. Illustrations or drawings are rendered terribly. The list of pros of ebooks: 1. It's just a better experience. Ebooks are lighter than their equivalent books, easy to use one-handed, fonts can be adjusted, you can carry…

I buy ebooks for two reasons:

1) To give some money to the authors (I'd rather bitcoin them)

2) Because it is a reasonable format for books I'll read once from start to finish.

Searchability is baloney in most cases (index is better), and it's definitely not a better experience, even on paperwhite type technology -the only way any sane person should read an ebook other than quick lookups. I de-drm everything, because it's mine, so that's not a consideration.

Textbooks, ebooks are basically useless unless you're remote and have no other options (and in this case; koreader on rooted hardware). It's for novels, philosophy, history books which are for fun; that sort of thing.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#252

Post by scruple »

john-radio wrote: post #199
andrewla wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All your points are dead on. I'll throw in these cons as well: 5. visibility (as noted by angrygoat) and browseability is terrible. 6. Flipping through an ebook looking for something is impossible. 7. Illustrations or drawings are rendered terribly. The list of pros of ebooks: 1. It's just a better experience. Ebooks are lighter than their equivalent books, easy to use one-handed, fonts can be adjusted, you can carry…

> visibility (as noted by angrygoat) and browseability is terrible Great point. I picked up The Linux Programming Interface from a Humble Bundle, knowing nothing about it, and my first impression was "This is a terrible book: very dry and not engaging." My manager mentioned it was excellent, though, so I actually picked up a hard copy, and then I saw what was going on: it's a Linux textbook, not the kind of programmi…

Technical books are the exception for me. My entire library of physical books today is almost entirely technical books. Fiction and nonfiction are all ebooks. I read about a (fiction/nonfiction) book a week and am almost always also working on a technical book in the background (I run a technical book club in my company's engineering department).

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#253

Post by celestialjeu »

wlll wrote: post #165

I don't buy ebooks, and this is just one reason. This is the complete list: 1. For some reason they cost a similar amount to print books Sometimes a bit less, sometimes the same, sometimes more. Distributing a physical book means you have to print, handle, store, transport, store again, handle again and transport again (using a simplified model of the journey a book takes to the end user). That costs money, and it co…

All of this is why my primary use case for ebooks is actually borrowing them from the library. It's super convenient because I don't have to worry about returning it on time -- it'll just disappear from the my device! But if I'm going to buy a book I almost always want a physical copy. (I've bought digital of a few of my favs that I often re-read on vacation but I do own physical copies of them too)

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#254

Post by johannes1234321 »

feanaro wrote: post #243
johannes1234321 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your watermarked version appears online it is an indication that you might have uploaded (or not properly protected) it. This might not be enough to prove this in a court, but enough for the publisher's lawyers to annoy you. But hardly any uploader would keep watermarks in, which makes them more of a way for faithful users to not give the book I.e. to friends since there is a visible reminder about being your pers…

An uploader can easily edit the watermark out of the book, if he is so inclined, and he probably is. It only annoys those who were not bent on uploading it in the first place. Also, I specifically would not abide to any kind of law saying I cannot give a book I bought to a friend.

Many readers can't (they could learn it though) enough however indeed can.

That's why, from publisher's view, the second point is so important: Remind readers all the time that "it" (without going into details) is illegal so they continue buying.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#255

Post by jhbadger »

wlll wrote: post #207
andrewla wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All your points are dead on. I'll throw in these cons as well: 5. visibility (as noted by angrygoat) and browseability is terrible. 6. Flipping through an ebook looking for something is impossible. 7. Illustrations or drawings are rendered terribly. The list of pros of ebooks: 1. It's just a better experience. Ebooks are lighter than their equivalent books, easy to use one-handed, fonts can be adjusted, you can carry…

> It's just a better experience. That's rather subjective which is why I left most of this stuff out. Some people really like reading on a kindle or iPad, I don't particularly (the Kindle is "OK"). > Ebooks are lighter than their equivalent books It depends on the book TBH. A lot will be heavier, many won't. The book I'm currently reading ("Medium Raw" by Anthony Bourdain) is 49g heavier than a kindle (the cheapest i…

>> fonts can be adjusted >Never wanted to do this

You are probably young. Trust me -- when you are approaching 50, if not sooner, this is extremely helpful. And my father in his 80s has started reading again because he can make the fonts on his Kindle basically gigantic. There are of course a small number of printed books in large print editions, but ebooks allow this to be done on any book.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#256

Post by miki123211 »

jwr wrote: post #242
miki123211 wrote: post #92

That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, some visible, some hidden. Same for audiobooks. There's no DRM, there's some piracy, as always, but the system works and it works pretty damn well. I wish american ebook and audiobook stores were like this.

I think the reason why no-DRM approach took off in Poland is because Amazon has been slow to enter the market. None of the competitors were large enough to develop and maintain a DRM ecosystem (with reading apps, readers etc). I'm sure they would have liked to (corporate brainlessness knows no limits), but they were not able to pull it off. The result is indeed great: E-books are reasonably priced, they get auto-deli…

also some publishers let you upload your books directly to Dropbox.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#258

Post by kingaillas »

I like ebooks.

I like being able to resize fonts, I like looking up words immediately, I like carrying around dozens on a phone and/or kindle.

I like the sales. I follow reddit's fantasy and printsf subreddits, and there isn't a week that goes by without a book on sale for $1.99. Pricing could be more advantageous (lower for ebooks) but at the same time, I just bought a few of Greg Egan's books to fill out my collection (Diaspora and Quarantine) and they are right now on the US Store at least, $2.99 ebook versus $12.99 paperback. And, the ebook versions are loanable.

Yeah I could use my library more, and I use it plenty, but it turns out I LIKE AND WANT TO funnel cash towards authors I enjoy. That's how they make their living.

Physical books still offer better random access to content (flipping around from chapter to chapter) but ebooks won me over for technical books as well - simply because I can have them in multiple places (home, work, travel) without lugging them around. Yes I have a physical copies of certain key books but the convenience of having them all over wins out, for me.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#259

Post by miki123211 »

username223 wrote: post #193
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's trivial to turn one ebook into a billion pirated copies, not so much with a physical book. It's a huge difference in logistics.

It's actually not that easy for most books, because most books aren't popular enough to sustain a torrent. A PDF of a book is usually tens or hundreds of megabytes, which is too big to get through most mail servers. Mass-sharing an ebook takes just enough work that it won't happen for anything that's not a best-seller.

Mass sharing a scanned book, particularly one that was not OCRed, indeed usually takes too much work. EBooks, or rather most of them, are tiny epub files with little to no images, 5mb maximum. There are sources distributing ebooks at scale, libgen.io is a prime example, the ebooks channel on IRC highway and myanonamouse, a private ebook and audiobook torrent tracker that some people apparently use also exist. There are rumours of private collections spanning millions of titles that fit on a single, albeit large, hard drive.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#260

Post by cjg »

criddell wrote: post #211
wlll wrote: post #165

I don't buy ebooks, and this is just one reason. This is the complete list: 1. For some reason they cost a similar amount to print books Sometimes a bit less, sometimes the same, sometimes more. Distributing a physical book means you have to print, handle, store, transport, store again, handle again and transport again (using a simplified model of the journey a book takes to the end user). That costs money, and it co…

I never understood the argument that ebooks should cost less. The price of a good usually isn't determined by the cost to manufacture and sell. Why should books be different? For me, I'll pay more for an ebook than a paperback because it's a more valuable format for me. Aside from being more compact and searchable, I can select a larger font. If it's more valuable, why shouldn't it cost more? One thing we do agree on…

Actually the price of a good is almost always the cost to manufacture and sell. If it were not, someone else would manufacture and sell it at cost. Bear in mind that the profit inherent in captialism corresponds to the cost of the capital required to run the manufacturing and sales process.

Of course, goods fall on a commodity range. Some things are entirely fungible, others less so. The less fungible a good is, the more the cost can move away from the cost to produce.

Books sound like they aren't fungible - after all one title isn't an exact replacement for another. But, they are quite fungible in the sense that one murder mystery can in some sense substitute for another.

Very few things are not fungible at all.

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