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

361–370 of 752 posts

Re: No one buys books

#361

Post by GolfPopper »

kstrauser wrote: post #350
somenameforme wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of my ebooks are infected with DRM. Lots of online stores will sell you ebooks without that nonsense.

And if they won't, there are ways to pay for a copy (in whatever way most benefits the author), and then then get your DRM-free copy.

Re: No one buys books

#362

Post by antod »

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.…

> Yes, it's not particularly ecological

If it makes you feel better, just think of your bookshelf as a carbon sequestration facility.

Re: No one buys books

#363

Post by r0s »

> Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that…..

I guarantee any book-length post on substack will get substantially LESS views than that.

This person discovered what any aspiring writer who cares already knows: Publishing like music runs on proven revenue generating content and gambles on the next big hit. Same as it ever was, and Amazon changes nothing about that fact.

Maybe publishing consolidates and changes, companies boom or bust but the business itself has always been like this.

Re: No one buys books

#364

Post by thaumasiotes »

eszed wrote: post #323
thaumasiotes wrote: post #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.

Looking at the best-selling Amazon-published titles leaves the impression that this is the case.

The observation in the essay that "the romance category has already gone independent" also leaves that impression - for the romance category.

But the fact that one of two profitable genres is "franchise authors" suggests the opposite. Franchise authors become franchise authors by producing high-quality writing.

Re: No one buys books

#365

Post by zymhan »

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.…

Who cares about the ecological impact of buying a book?

You have missed the forest for the trees.

Re: No one buys books

#366

Post by tombert »

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 am kind of the opposite; I have found it much easier to read on Kindle simply because I can make the text as big as I want.

In high school, I remembered that I really struggled to read The Once and Future King, and I never finished it. I eventually assumed I was too dumb to understand it, and that it’s just not for me.

Fast forward about 13 years, and I decide to give the book a try again, this time on the Kindle, and I surprisingly was able to get through it really quickly and didn’t have any issues understanding it.

I don’t think that I’ve gotten appreciably smarter than I was in high school, and I realized that the only really different variable is the font size. As a teenager I was reading my dad’s hand me down copy, which had tiny text on fairly small pages. With the Kindle I make the font gigantic. I have to turn the page more often, but that doesn’t really bother me.

Overwhelmingly I find it easier to read stuff if the text is really big; I am not sure why. My eyesight is fine, and I am not dyslexic (I was tested as a teenager), but tiny text is just really hard for me to read, while big text isn’t.

Re: No one buys books

#367

Post by eszed »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #364
eszed wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the best-selling Amazon-published titles leaves the impression that this is the case.

The observation in the essay that "the romance category has already gone independent" also leaves that impression - for the romance category. But the fact that one of two profitable genres is "franchise authors" suggests the opposite. Franchise authors become franchise authors by producing high-quality writing.

What does "franchise author" mean? I'm not familiar with the term.

Re: No one buys books

#368

Post by Tor3 »

daly wrote: post #303

I have about 6000 books, about 1000 of these are on Kindle. Of the 6000, most have bookmarks. I read at least the first 50 pages of most of them. I've finished a couple hundred so far. I found my old business cards make perfect bookmarks. I guess "No one buys books" isn't strictly true. I tried to write 4 books. I was told that I'd likely sell less that 1000. Beyond that would be considered a major win. I finished on…

I'm not sure I understand the "I read at least the first 50 pages of most of them". Did you somehow receive 6000 books in one huge batch and you're just checking them out, one by one?

I mean, I've thousands of books in my collection (though I've had to dump a ton of them lately due to space restrictions.. that's sad), and I've read all of them end-to-end. If a book is so bad that I can't finish it.. it does happen with "free" Kindle books, but for my paper book collection I think there are maybe two or three I didn't read all through.

Re: No one buys books

#369

Post by Tor3 »

eszed wrote: post #304
jwells89 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe another factor is frequency of moving, because that’d disincline people from buying significant amounts of any kind of heavy and/or bulky media, of which books are both. More than a small bookshelf’s worth is a real pain to haul around.

This. I donated half a lifetime's collection of physical books a few years ago, when I moved into my girlfriend's apartment. I kept books which are either a) impossible to get electronically (mostly technical or academic works), or b) worthless on screen (mostly large-format photography and art books, or c) for which I have a sentimental attachment to the physical artifact (a couple of first editions; some gifts; som…

I've done the DRM ripping in the past, but from what I've understood Calibre or other tools are unable to do that for the latest DRM variants Amazon is using. Is that correct? I would like to back up my entire Kindle collection as it is now.

Re: No one buys books

#370

Post by lannisterstark »

ar_lan wrote: post #358
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.

I sincerely hope one day they get off their asses and implement casting that their predecessor, overdrive, had.

speaking of, btw, your library likely has 'partner' libraries where you can borrow stuff too using overdrive/libby. You can often see a list on top right of the overdrive page of your respective library.

Post reply on HN