Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No one buys books

elysian.press

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 752 posts

Re: No one buys books

#351

Post by Ray20 »

omoikane wrote: post #187
Kon-Peki wrote: post #113

I'm in a very heavy library family; we are checking out and reading a few hundred books per year between all of us. Yet we still buy a few books, and I bet that if we made an inventory of the books we currently own that are in the house, it would number in the hundreds. But... most were purchased secondhand. I take my daughter to the bookstore every few months; it is always busy. While she is browsing, I also look ar…

> $15-20 US book prices seem weirdly expensive. I just sampled the prices from the best sellers here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/bestsellers/books/ The US prices averages out to ~$15, while the Japanese prices average out to $10. You might say most of that is due to the current exchange rate (1 USD = 154 JPY), but then most books listed on Amazon Japan's "novels" best sel…

Aren't in Japan average selled fiction book is way smaller?

Re: No one buys books

#352

Post by fragmede »

somenameforme wrote: post #344
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.…

Another nice benefit of paper is that the company that sold it can't just bust down your door, steal the book, drop off a few bucks, and then go back along their merry way. Amazon did exactly this with, amongst other books, 1984. Such a perfectly appropriate book.

You've got to wonder what the hapless Amazon employee asked to implement this felt, and how much leeway they had in which book for that to happen to first.

Re: No one buys books

#353

Post by keiferski »

deadbabe wrote: post #324
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #38

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 love the idea of owning books you can’t find anywhere else. One of the main reasons I don’t bother going to bookstores is because I know everything there is just gonna be on Amazon anyway, and with reviews. But the idea of coming across a strange book few people have read, and finding unconventional wisdom and writing inside that no publisher would ever put out, sounds exciting! I think more people should write boo…

Pretty much all of the physical books I own are like this: rare and impossible to find online, in digital format or otherwise. People really overestimate how many books have been digitized.

Re: No one buys books

#354

Post by p1dda »

Our brains our overloaded with text these days with all the scrolling of news, email, texts and at work which mostly involves even more text.

Reading a great book has great value, I think most people would agree, but to even get to the cognitive state where we could even consider doing this, we have to reduce our enormous load of text that is not work-related. I started doing this a few years back and I got back into reading in my spare time and I will never regret it.

Re: No one buys books

#355

Post by shiroiushi »

LargeWu wrote: post #288
johnloeber wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worrying about the environmental impact of books is misguided. You use far more paper products in the course of your everyday life: paper bags, cardboard packaging, paper towels, etc. etc. Even for an avid reader, the impact is negligible.

With paper books I'm more concerned with having to have space to put it when I'm done. But, I find it more enjoyable to read a physical book, and am more likely to re-read it.

Another nice thing about paper books is that you can lend them out to your friends when you're finished reading them. This saves a bit of space, plus your friends can just pick them up and read them without worrying about a bunch of BS like whether it's compatible with their e-reader, if the DRM will work, if the publisher will revoke the rights for some reason, etc.

Re: No one buys books

#356

Post by vundercind »

bombcar wrote: post #122
vundercind wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s also a highly effective sorting algorithm - anything still talked about ten years after it came out is probably worth some time. I will say that it seems entirely possible to relatively quickly see all US animated kids movies …

> I will say that it seems entirely possible to relatively quickly see all US animated kids movies

Decent or better ones… maybe.

There’s a deep bench of poor-to-terrible animated kids’ movies that were straight to VHS/DVD/streaming. For god’s sake, there are like nine Land Before Time movies alone.

Re: No one buys books

#357

Post by kstrauser »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #306

I used to buy and read a lot of physical books. Around 2013-204, I started moving to eBooks, and Amazon Kindle played a significant role in my journey. But a couple of years later, I had an epiphany while discussing books with my daughter, “I never see you read books. You are just reading on your computer (kindle) or the phone and are not reading.” Since then, I have returned to reading physical books with an approxi…

> They are less distracting and help the kids focus.

That’s such an incredibly personal preference though. It’s far easier for me to read with an ereader when I don’t have to have 2 hands holding a heavier hunk of paper wants to close itself if I let go for a moment. I have a huge book collection but I’ve switched almost entirely to ebooks because I find the ergonomics so much better. Physically fighting with dead tree media is more distracting than my ereader.

Re: No one buys books

#358

Post by ar_lan »

grepLeigh wrote: post #332

From the article: >>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?" I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local…

If anything did, it's Libby, except that directly just worked alongside libraries instead of disrupting them.

Re: No one buys books

#359

Post by chrismcb »

wenc wrote: post #325
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 read paper books because I can flip back and forth without friction, and I can underline and scribble. I don't know why eReader interfaces make these two functions -- critical for deep reading -- so difficult. Kindle is optimized for linear reading only. So beach reading and long romances. But if you do the kind of reading that Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" proposes (skimming, inspectional reading, writing…

While you can scribble, you can easily highlight and comment on books. Going back and forth is maybe slightly harder than a book, but it isn't "so difficult." I'm not saying reading on a Kindle is better than a paper book. But I didn't think it is as bad s you claim it is. I personally like it because I can read anywhere. I don't need to carry a large heavy book around.

Re: No one buys books

#360

Post by dsign »

> 35 books out of 100 are profitable

I don't think that's right. It's just too good. Imagine that you are an author and maybe you pay one line editor and get beta-readers for free, maybe you do your own cover, and you don't print a large batch of your book and because you are the author, you can't pay yourself an advance. That kind of resourcefulness that a trad publisher can't afford would allow that same 35/100, maybe a little higher, or maybe a little lower, depending on how you do with self-promotion. Still, it means that if you are not a terrible writer, or one who consistently writes stuff nobody wants to read, you will make money with one book out of three. Which I think is too good.

Post reply on HN