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No one buys books

elysian.press

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Re: No one buys books

#251

Post by wolverine876 »

lolinder wrote: post #143
WolfeReader wrote: post #23

Haven't libraries already been a "Netflix of books" for millenia now?

Most libraries that people have access to are more like "Disney+ for books". They have a limited selection of extremely mainstream books. If you're happy to make do with whatever they have on offer then you're fine, but if you want something specific you'll have to go out and buy it. Back in the DVD days and before everyone broke ranks and tried to start their own service, the thing that made Netflix great was that n…

The Internet Archive has a pretty big lending library.

Re: No one buys books

#253

Post by AlbertCory »

roughly wrote: post #114
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 do the same - I far prefer paper books for reading, and mostly because it makes an enormous difference in my ability to focus. Re: the ecological side - I'm not actually convinced that a paperback book is markedly more of an ecological burden than an e-reader and the rest of the associated infrastructure. I think it's possible the e-reader pencils out in the long term, but I think a full lifecycle accounting of the…

The undeniable minus of a Kindle e-reader is: the illustrations suck. They're just too small. Half the time, my "library" has book covers that I can't even make out.

Re: No one buys books

#254

Post by TheCoelacanth »

joe5150 wrote: post #210
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…

I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution. Those are entirely separate industries. There is almost no way for publishers to lose money because of tech that makes it cheaper and easier than ever to get books to consumers while retaining unprecedented control over pricing (fixed, never discounted or remaindered), resale (prohibited), and lending (also prohibited). Publis…

If you think that publishers spend almost nothing on producing ebooks, then you clearly understand nothing about the publishing industry.

Re: No one buys books

#255

Post by fmajid »

bombcar wrote: post #25

The entire book industry rides on the backs of bibles, hobbits, and extremely ravenous caterpillars. Seems almost poetic, somehow.

Maybe Gutenberg was right on his market positioning after all.

Re: No one buys books

#257

Post by maximilianthe1 »

antonyt wrote: post #175
karmakaze wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not good news. I just got my first eInk reader today and first thing I did was go through all the navigation setup pages. I have one professional development book and was going find a work of fiction to start. Hope it works out.

Chiming in with the others to say that my experience with e-readers has been great. Physical books can grow to be a huge burden over the years. For me personally, e-readers have not caused any loss of focus. In fact, the integrated dictionaries often keep me MORE focused than the interruption represented by pulling out a dictionary or googling a word. I'll acknowledge there is a tactile joy to physical paper that is…

Another massive advantage to using Kindle estead of iPad - enourmous battery life. My like 6-8 year old Kindle survives what feels like a month without recharge with active use. This enables you to just drop it in your backpack and be sure that it works the next time you feel like reading.

Re: No one buys books

#258

Post by makeitdouble »

kasey_junk wrote: post #228
makeitdouble wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Business is business. If a publisher is refraining from going into ebooks altogether because of Amazon, when they get the option to direct sell and also access the other ebook platforms as well, I feel they're not long for this world either way.

Re: No one buys books

#259

Post by joe5150 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #254
joe5150 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution. Those are entirely separate industries. There is almost no way for publishers to lose money because of tech that makes it cheaper and easier than ever to get books to consumers while retaining unprecedented control over pricing (fixed, never discounted or remaindered), resale (prohibited), and lending (also prohibited). Publis…

If you think that publishers spend almost nothing on producing ebooks, then you clearly understand nothing about the publishing industry.

Notwithstanding what I understand about the publishing industry, I'm talking about the marginal cost of distributing a .mobi or whatever versus manufacturing a printed book, not the entire cost of publishing an eBook.

Re: No one buys books

#260

Post by maximilianthe1 »

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.

While physical "progress bar" is much easier to remeber than digital one (on the side of the screen for pdfs), because you actually interact with it the whole time, i don't find (ha) finding a particular passage hard without it. I personally usually can remeber a phrase or just a word and search for them in a PDF to find the needed passage.
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