291–300 of 752 posts
Books are like the wayback machine. You can reread authors as they actually wrote their oeuvres without editing from modern day overzealous publishers who censor or otherwise alter the originals.
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.…
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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.
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> according to data from the Authors Guild Despite the narrative that copyright holders in every industry like to push, a pirated copy is not equal to a lost sale. Their actual losses are likely a small fraction of that number.
Is the thinking that the person who pirated it was never going to buy it anyways?
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Many successful artists in any medium say they create things for themselves; it's more a compulsion than a business activity. Some are lucky that others like it; some are even luckier that others like it during the creator's lifetime; the luckiest even make money from it!
If you want to make money you're often creating for your audience rather than for yourself too. For instance I know professional artists who don't enjoy their work that much since they end up having to please the client rather than make what they really want. Even for my own CC fiction my themes and language are affected by current trends and what I think my readers will like. Of course if you're lucky you can create…
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…
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> 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.
It’s mostly not a going business model outside of the profits Amazon brings in from it.
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I gotta admit: I rarely make time for any recent fiction. Too busy catching up on the last 5,000 years. I don’t expect that to change before I die. Film has a similar problem—there are plausibly low-thousands existing films worth my time, a whole lot of them 30+ years old. I could never watch a film made after 2000 and not run out of good entertainment in my lifetime. They’re damn lucky the Mouse got copyright extend…
There are gems coming out today that will be considered great works by our descendants. By avoiding current authors or media you miss out on the cultural story and critique/commentary that influences all our media. Sure, the last 5000 years are interesting, but isn't right now pretty amazing too? You might accidently read the best book ever written but you won't know until history plays out. But I think it's importan…
[edit] or, hell, not even major. Odds that a recommended-by-people-online got-some-hype-in-review-rags new book is gonna make me happier to have read it than, say, a 2nd-tier Maugham or Faulkner or something? Not great.
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FWIW - This (GP post) is not my experience with eReaders. Not sure if they have the eInk one or not (like the Fire or tablet ones), but I have the eInk sort. Anyway, I really like it because it's far lighter weight than a paperback, easier to hold, and I can have like the entire library on there and take it with me. I don't experience the distraction that they are referring to, because there's really not anything els…
Also, while I know the readership of HN skews young, but when you reach your 50s, having the ability to make the text larger in an ebook is a killer feature.