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

371–380 of 752 posts

Re: No one buys books

#371

Post by initplus »

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…

It's not disruption to make me wait 5 weeks to read a digital file through my local library's Libby service. It's an outdated business model using artificial scarcity that isn't effective at getting books onto readers devices. Spotify doesn't make me take out a hold on the artist I want to listen to. Netflix doesn't make me queue to watch the latest release.

Re: No one buys books

#372

Post by lannisterstark »

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.

I don't think they can do that with my calibre, and calibre-web collection lol.

Re: No one buys books

#373

Post by fifticon »

isnt there a logical twist in all this.. The problem is that there are so many _different_ books. I have a house not exactly filled, but certainly loaded with books. So people certainly buy books. But of each book, I seldomly have more than one or two. It's a bit like random numbers filling the interval 0-1. each number has 0 probability, but they fill out the infinite space 0-1 fully. But how horrible it would be to only have the 10 best selling books. The bible, anyone..

Re: No one buys books

#374

Post by dotnet00 »

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 haven't had much trouble focusing on reading on computers, my only expectation is for the device to be touch screen and a pressure sensitive pen. The touch screen makes moving through pages trivial (for casual reading on say, my kindle, I have the habit of laying back and just tapping with my nose to flip pages lol) and the pen makes it trivial to mark up more serious reading material. With paper books I tend to not be near them right when I need them, and tend to be too wary of just marking them up. With digital stuff, and all the syncing we have between devices these days, I pretty much always have multiple devices at hand where the material is accessible.

I do still prefer physical books for things like art, I find it easier to study it and understand how it's put together that way (maybe because a physical copy forces me to look at the piece as a whole, rather than getting distracted by and overfocusing on minute details that turn out to not matter until I grasp the whole structure). However, even there, once I do understand how to look at the art, I can go with the digital version just fine.

Re: No one buys books

#375

Post by emodendroket »

> I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

I know this is in some way an irritating thing to say, but this is exactly what I would have guessed before I read the article. It's cool to see numbers put to it but I don't think this was a secret.

I am struck by the coda where the antitrust intervention did nothing to preserve a healthy market. Kind of a common story.

Re: No one buys books

#376

Post by omoikane »

Ray20 wrote: post #351
omoikane wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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?

Did you mean page count? For the novels I read, 200-300 per volume seems common. This seems comparable to the English novels I have, so it feels like less money for roughly same amount of content.

Because many light novels come in series that are spread over several volumes, it's arguable that it costs more money to finish a story because you have to read all these volumes instead of one monolithic tome. I buy the volumes one by one as they are released and don't feel that the individual books are that expensive, but someone catching up on an old series might feel different.

If you mean physical size, the average English books does seem physically larger than the average Japanese book.

Re: No one buys books

#377

Post by Tor3 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #134

The only major reading I do these days is via audiobooks, I simply read them faster than via visually looking at the page. It might be my attention span, but somehow audio is just faster to literally cram words into the mind at high speed than consciously moving your eyes over a page.

I'm the opposite - I read many times faster than audio, so I have big problems with using e.g. Youtube to get information. It feels agonizingly slow to get the information over. I feel like I could get that in two minutes of reading versus listening for half an hour. When I read novels I take a few pages - depending on what I read - to get my mind into the story, and from then on what's written isn't text on paper (or e-reader) anymore, it's just a story unfolding in my mind. I don't "see" the text.

Re: No one buys books

#378

Post by emodendroket »

fifticon wrote: post #373

isnt there a logical twist in all this.. The problem is that there are so many _different_ books. I have a house not exactly filled, but certainly loaded with books. So people certainly buy books. But of each book, I seldomly have more than one or two. It's a bit like random numbers filling the interval 0-1. each number has 0 probability, but they fill out the infinite space 0-1 fully. But how horrible it would be to…

Is there? Lots of people read books digitally. I am sure more than 50 musical artists reached more than half a million people.

Re: No one buys books

#379

Post by astura »

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…

WTF is "deep reading?"

Re: No one buys books

#380

Post by [deleted] »

lrvick wrote: post #81

Most books today are sold with DRM and when the DRM servers are deactivated the books stop working. This happened with the Microsoft ebooks store and has happened with countless other DRM media. Sometimes books are automatically revised, or censored. Sometimes accounts holding DRM licenses are deleted or deactivated by mistake. The only way to actually own a book these days is to buy it on paper, or from one of the r…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN