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No one buys books

elysian.press

61–70 of 752 posts

Re: No one buys books

#61
On the flipside, it’s nice that there’s a thriving small and fine press community out there with lots of news press’ appearing over the last few years and some really beautiful books being published.

Re: No one buys books

#63
post #54

I've published a few self-published books on Amazon about my global adventures. While sales are not making me rich, they certainly do sell month after month.

Self-publishing avoids the biggest single cost, the advance!

It can actually be moderately successful for the right type of author.

I’ve always thought the “book collection of webcomics/blogs” has to be moderately predictable as to sales.

Re: No one buys books

#65
post #17

No one buys books, cd's, dvd's, blurays, magazines, comics, games, and many other things that were bought a lot 10-30 years ago. These days everything is online and (usually) subscription based. Looking at myself, the only things I buy regularly, is food ;)

Surely CDs have become Spotify, tidal. Blu rays have become Netflix, Disney, etc. magazines have become websites, etc. The content is still there just the medium has changed. Has the same been true for books though? eBooks do exist of course, but did they replace the publishing industry that existed 50 or a hundred years ago?

Ebooks and audiobooks.

Re: No one buys books

#66
post #51

I recently started buying paper books. Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me. It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc.…

These sound like common traits for ADHDers.

Re: No one buys books

#68
post #51

I recently started buying paper books. Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me. It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc.…

Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections.

I can skim through a shelf full of books in a way that I’m just not able to with ebooks, even with stuff like full text search available in Calibre.

Re: No one buys books

#69
>> Obviously, given the number of people searching on Amazon for products, that gives them a huge advantage because when people go onto Amazon, they—if the book isn’t there for what they are searching for, they could create that book.

This is a really weird thing to say. It seems to assume that people are indifferent to the quality of the writing in the books they read.

Re: No one buys books

#70

I'm currently writing a book about independent thinking and I have zero expectations that it will sell even a single copy. However, the net gain I will get from having completed the goal of writing the book is invaluable to me personally.

I had this idea for a hard science fiction story that I have been thinking about for years. Nobody else is going to write it, so I started. 20 000 words in my beta readers say it is good, so I think I will continue. And I don’t expect to sell it, but I want to know what happens and so do the beta readers. So on we go.
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