131–140 of 189 posts
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My father lost a great deal of his physical books in a flood. If they were bits, he wouldn't have.
Unless they were DRMed and the provider had gone out of business, or cut off his access for other reasons, or...
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Since it's trivial for an author to sell his works on his own website (and I've bought ebooks from such author sites), it's hard to see how Amazon could make itself a monopoly. Also, selling an ebook via Amazon does not preclude you from selling it yourself or through other venues.
That might work well if you're a known author or for buyers willing to spend time digging around but it doesn't help new authors reach a mass market. Self publishing will have some sort of a positive impact on things but the reality is that large aggregators will still have a very significant role for discovery and in the mass market.
BTW, I found some of those author self-sell web sites because of Reddit postings about their books. In these days of social media, I don't think the traditional gatekeeper role still applies.
At first look, I thought it would be more along the lines of, "snapshot a few randomly chosen pages from the book with your mobile camera, to prove that you've bought the book in the past and still own/have it now, and then you automaticaly get the ebook version really cheap as a result."
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The value proposition of an ebook is that (on average) it's a better reading experience. More portable, more comfortable, instantly accessible. The value proposition of a physical book is that is a physical artifact with concrete ownership; you can sell it, lend it, put it on a shelf for guests to see, forget it and rediscover it a decade later, or have your grandchildren find it in your attic in 80 years. These two…
To me, the publishers have destroyed most of that value by producing such cheaply-made physical books. If you open a hardback from several decades ago, it feels different, like a real book. Most hardbacks now look fine if you don't try to hold them open and read them. I only buy them reluctantly, and less often. If DRM weren't so common I'd hardly buy them at all. -- From the things-were-all-right-when-I-was-a-kid fi…
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One of the things I hate the most about reading books is holding them up while reading. eReaders have solved this problem for me, and now I am a happy camper!
You... don't have to hold an eReader up? One of the worst things about reading ebooks on my iPad 2 is the weight.
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Unless they were DRMed and the provider had gone out of business, or cut off his access for other reasons, or...
In general, I don't buy DRMed books that I want to keep long term for just that reason. I buy the physical book, cut the back off, scan it to a pdf and throw the book into the recycling bin.
On the book scanning note though, do you have a special book scanner? I've never seen one outside of professional shops and turning the pages seems like a ginormous hassle.
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This is a major pain point for me, and this solves half of it. Every time I buy a book, I have to do a lot of thinking: Is is good enough I'll want to lend it? Will I need to travel with it? Is it worth getting rid of some other book on my bookshelf to make room for it? Am I going to refer to it? If so, will it be just the occasional text search, or do I need the random access of a physical book? There is often no go…
I go through this a lot too. I've bought books in ebook format that I've regretted, because I can't lend them easily. Conversely I've bought physical books which I wish were ebooks, because I don't reference them that often, and they're really wasting space. Not being limited to one or the other format would be great! Although what happens when you buy the physical book, get the ebook for cheap, then on-sell the phys…
My guess is that some people will do it accidentally, but that the number of people doing it as a book cost-reduction strategy will be pretty low. The net yield on selling used books is not good. And I'd guess further that for 98% of on-sold physical books, people will never go back and look at the ebook again.
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I think Charles Stross writings on ebooks is interesting and insightful. He should know: he's a tech-savvy best-selling author. (He hangs around here too: [1]) He wrote a couple of posts a year and a half ago, they still apply. In them, he explains how Amazon is making itself a monopoly, and that isn't good for anyone but them. What's been most informative to me is how tiny publishers actually are, and how little mon…
> It's also why I buy my books hardcover now: more cash for the author. Isn't this true, Amazon or not? Hardcovers cost the customer more than paperbacks or ebooks, so the author should be getting hopefully a larger cut of the sale. I think this program (if it has enough titles that I've bought in the past) is going to be awesome. I've never bought a Kindle because paying almost the same price for the Kindle version…
That would be way too easy to game. I.e. set up an Amazon Marketplace account, "sell" yourself and/or accomplices lots of books for "reasonable" prices, with the money minus some vig including Amazon's charges going back to the "buyers", then they buy el-cheapo Kindle copies for real.