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No one buys books

elysian.press

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Re: No one buys books

#221

Post by hollandheese »

echelon_musk wrote: post #72
yreg wrote: 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.…

The older I get the less I trust myself to know how to administer or even to care how to work any current or future reading e-device. A printed book requires light as just about it's only dependency! I definitely agree with you about the distractions of digital devices. Switching to a book is a focused mode.

E-readers are often very simple devices. Their main audience is older people.

Light being a dependency of reading a printed book is one of the biggest plus for e-ink readers. You don't need light, they already come with it! It's so much easier reading with a Kindle (in dark mode) at bed time than it is a paper book.

Re: No one buys books

#222

Post by UncleOxidant »

SubmarineClub wrote: post #125
iamacyborg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another benefit to paper books, in my experience, is it's a lot easier to remember the rough location of a particular passage (towards the front, middle, near the end, etc.) than with digital A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.

It's pretty easy to highlight passages with most e-reader software. Some even let you write a note that goes with the highlight. You can then look through a list of all highlighted passages.

Re: No one buys books

#224

Post by hollandheese »

duderific wrote: post #188
yreg wrote: 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.…

I have a slightly different problem. What I miss about the physical book is its context - that is to say, the cover art, its particular weight, the font face, how the chapter numbers are printed, etc., which give a book its certain "feel." With an e-book, you don't get any of that, so all books have a kind of sameness.

Well you can get the cover art, but yeah. I mean you can get the differing font faces and etc. if the publisher built that into the file, but most don't go to that amount of effort on their e-books.

Re: No one buys books

#228

Post by kasey_junk »

makeitdouble wrote: post #196
paxys wrote: post #101

Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. You print books? Well we have e-books now. You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it. You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarte…

When you say "publishing industry" you're really saying "paper book industry", right ? Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher, and that's a tried and true successful model adopted all around the world. You'd have made the same argument for vinyl record publishers saying they're cornered into a niche, but no, as you point put artists will still want editorial power and support, so digital music is thr…

> Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher

Except that the biggest platform for ebooks (by a big stretch, they own ~70% of the market) is a company that you have a direct adversarial relationship with in most other parts of your business.

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