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

381–390 of 752 posts

Re: No one buys books

#381

Post by datascienced »

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 plus the emotion of sitting on a couch with a paper book vs. a device is very different. The feeling of flicking pages is better than the UI of book readers or smart phones.

Re: No one buys books

#382

Post by ar_lan »

shkkmo wrote: post #347
cm2012 wrote: post #327

319 comments and I don't see the simple fact that the article title is dead wrong. We are going through a massive book boom right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLSGuGOWoAArd-K.jpg:large . Book sales are the highest they've been in 20 years lol. So all the comments mourning books can relax.

The title is provocative clickbait, but the actual point is this: > 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). Given that spending p…

> The title is provocative clickbait, but the actual point is this.

It's an aside, but this is just so frustrating we have succumbed to this level. In principle I don't even want to read the article because the title is ridiculous, but on the other hand, they wouldn't generate any traffic if they don't because our brains are too fixated on "drama" and "controversy" that clickbait titles generate.

Re: No one buys books

#383

Post by datascienced »

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.

Or in other words you are doing research, a bit like a PhD and the book is a byproduct!

Like how HN was recently talking about 8 hours to code the first time, but half hour to retype the same code from memory the next day. The code is almost an small (but critical) artefact.

Re: No one buys books

#385

Post by Aeolun »

> Penguin Random House owns Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar intellectual property. The book has been on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list every week for 19 years.

This is insane. To be fair, it’s a fun book. But 19 years?!

Re: No one buys books

#386

Post by TheCapeGreek »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #186
ethbr1 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm on vacation, I always read paper books. Because I want minimal complexity. (Usually in the tropics, often with rum and a hammock) Dead tree books' short term failure modes are water and fire, and once failure is confined to emergencies-that-are-already-emergencies they impose no additional cognitive burden. Also, I suspect the physical friction involved in "swiping away from" paper books helps reset my dopam…

You forgot the third and fourth failure modes: weight and bag space. Books take a lot of it. An e-reader is thinner than any book and weighs the same no matter how many it's holding. I used to take my e-reader on field expeditions when I was an archaeologist. Never had one die or break even after months in places like Siberia. The number of notebooks that were ruined during those same expeditions is non-zero, usually…

Considering you're on HN, it's likely a safe bet to say you also travel with a laptop. In which case, an e-reader is still a waste of space because your laptop can just open ebooks too. Or if you don't, then your phone is still a better space saver for reading books with. Yet, you will likely prefer to take your e-reader with anyway (and its charger if it isn't the same as other devices).

This is why I find "saving space during travels" a very relative argument to make, because it's clearly down to preference.

Re: No one buys books

#387

Post by Aeolun »

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 don’t think it would have been possible for publishers to deal with the absolutely massive amount of books they’d have to vet to do what you’re saying.

That works if the absolute number of books written is very small, so everyone interested in books pulls from that pool.

The publishers could try to find a bunch of good books and get absolutely nothing.

Re: No one buys books

#388

Post by beautron »

duderific wrote: post #188
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 have a slightly different problem. What I miss about the physical book is its context - that is to say, the cover art, its particular weight, the font face, how the chapter numbers are printed, etc., which give a book its certain "feel." With an e-book, you don't get any of that, so all books have a kind of sameness.

I feel this strongly. Physical books make a deeper impression in my memory. There are all sorts of particularities of how the book was bound: it's size, it's smell, the texture of the paper, etc. It's like the book exists in its own unique space (vs all digital books existing in the single shared space of my computer/reader). I think a book's reading environment loses some richness when all these subtle little details are homogenized.

Re: No one buys books

#389

Post by greenie_beans »

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…

> Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good".

this still exists, but the presses are harder to find and mostly independent. FSG books are always good.

also, books these indie presses are always good: - tyrant (rip) - graywolf - new directions - NYRB

and some more, but idk your taste so not gonna recommend them.

Re: No one buys books

#390

Post by kaashif »

tombert wrote: post #366
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,…

> I realized that the only really different variable is the font size.

Didn't you say you're 13 years older than last time?

Post reply on HN