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

511–520 of 752 posts

Re: No one buys books

#511

Post by tallanvor »

kasey_junk wrote: post #228
makeitdouble wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "publishing industry" you're really saying "paper book industry", right ? Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher, and that's a tried and true successful model adopted all around the world. You'd have made the same argument for vinyl record publishers saying they're cornered into a niche, but no, as you point put artists will still want editorial power and support, so digital music is thr…

> 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.

The adversarial relationship was basically the publishers' choice.

Remember that Amazon was willing to basically treat eBooks like normal books - negotiate the price they pay with the publishers and then sell the books at whatever price they want. The publishers are the ones who forced the agency model where retailers are forced to sell at a set price.

Re: No one buys books

#512

Post by yard2010 »

initplus wrote: post #371
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 It's an outdated business model using artificial scarcity that isn't effective at getting books onto readers devices.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.

Every time I want to try a book I open up Libby and then get angry about this stupidity.

So I just go to the better library - genesis, which is free and unlimited.

Re: No one buys books

#513

Post by janandonly »

I'm currently writing a book about the What? How? & Why? of Bitcoin.

For me, the gain and street cred I will receive from having completed a book is invaluable to me personally.

I'm writing this book in Dutch, so I really don't expect any sales. Okay, maybe a few if there was another bull-run and frenzy, but that's not why I am writing this book.

Re: No one buys books

#514

Post by ulfw »

janandonly wrote: post #513

I'm currently writing a book about the What? How? & Why? of Bitcoin. For me, the gain and street cred I will receive from having completed a book is invaluable to me personally. I'm writing this book in Dutch, so I really don't expect any sales. Okay, maybe a few if there was another bull-run and frenzy, but that's not why I am writing this book.

So where is that "Street cred" going to come from when no one knows you have a book because no one bought it?

Re: No one buys books

#515

Post by throw__away7391 »

atoav wrote: post #455
ddingus wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are. Every single public resource is seen as a potential market opportunity being squandered away, or as competition other players do not want to see in play.

Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money. If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want. Sadly many people seem to think they are really showing the folks up there by retreating from any form of self-education once they are out of school. The opposite couldn't be more true.

Ah yes, just last week me and my fellow billionaires at our secret biannual conference in Geneva were discussing how we can prevent people from reading books at the library. See, people reading is a threat to our power, one which we take very seriously. It is not going to be easy, especially seeing how many of us have donated millions of dollars to libraries and a few even have wings of libraries named after us, but the threat is too severe now, drastic measures must be taken.

Now seeing how people are on to our plot, the urgency is clear. I am proposing that over the next few decades we work secretly behind the scenes to gradually reduce funding for various local libraries which have seen visitors decline since the rise of the Internet.

Re: No one buys books

#516

Post by lrvick »

stubish wrote: post #430
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…

Most Kindle books are not sold with DRM, for many years now. I don't know about other platforms. Readers yelled at publishers until they stopped enabling it, and turned out it didn't make enough difference to keep annoying their core customer base.

Never seen a "download DRM-free ePub" option for any Amazon book url but if they have that, the Internet seems to not know about it on a cursory search.

If you mean it downloads the book exclusively to the Kindle app in a proprietary format only that app can read, then it is just a different form of DRM a user has to hack around.

Re: No one buys books

#517

Post by teitoklien »

Zenzero wrote: post #492
atoav wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money. If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want. Sadly many people seem to think they are really showing the folks up there by retreating from any form of self-education once they are out of school. The opposite couldn't be more true.

> Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money. If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want. This is conspiracy level thinking. Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued. The assault on public institutions like libraries comes from 2 places: 1) Stop wasting my tax do…

> Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.

They dont sit around scheming, they work, walk around doing it in action.

Company executives keep adding ingredients to processed food to make them addictive knowing it’ll hurt health outcomes and lead to more death.

Company executives continue to sell medicine that they sell for $20 or $10 in Europe or India, but charge americans $5000 or higher for the same medicine in the same package.

They shut down any research paper that outs them, by suppressing the findings, like Facebook or Junk food companies do whenever a research is conducted on their products.

We should celebrate our pioneers and innovators, but we shouldn’t ignore it blindly when MBA execs and Beancounters actively sabotage and hurt their own customers and the masses. Businesses are awesome, but it shouldnt be used to give a no questions asked green flag to anyone who runs businesses.

There are people actively lobbying for policies that lead to more american deaths, bankruptcies, families breaking into shambles, and the government watching from the sidelines and even sometimes helping to make it all happen.

Yes, there are people who do want to subdue the masses and keep them dumb, just as long as it helps them buy 1 more yacht or few more 0s in their bank balance.

I say it as a free market capitalist who is ardently anti-communist.

Re: No one buys books

#518

Post by Hendrikto »

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…

> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.

> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.

Both of those seem very positive to me.

Re: No one buys books

#519

Post by mrweasel »

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.…

It's also more ... social perhaps. I'm reading a book that an uncle bought, but never really got around to reading. I would have never picked up that book myself, but he brought it over an I stuck it in the bookshelf.

Similarly my dad has a bunch of books I bought years ago. It's not books that I'd want to re-read, but interesting enough. With ebooks that just not possible, unless you do some cumbersome DRM removal.

There's a lot of good things about ebooks, but the usability just isn't there yet. It is a nice alternative for long out of print books though.

I'd buy and read move, I think, if more stuff was translated to Danish, but most of the books you can get in Danish easily is repetitive crime novels. It's all variations of someone got brutally murdered and now some alcoholic Scandinavia cop / ex-cop with a broken love life has to solve the case for some reason.

Re: No one buys books

#520

Post by jacobyoder »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #515
atoav wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money. If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want. Sadly many people seem to think they are really showing the folks up there by retreating from any form of self-education once they are out of school. The opposite couldn't be more true.

Ah yes, just last week me and my fellow billionaires at our secret biannual conference in Geneva were discussing how we can prevent people from reading books at the library. See, people reading is a threat to our power, one which we take very seriously. It is not going to be easy, especially seeing how many of us have donated millions of dollars to libraries and a few even have wings of libraries named after us, but…

> few even have wings of libraries named after us

Public libraries? With easy access?

Post reply on HN