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No one buys books
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Re: No one buys books
#182To add to the woes of the publishing industry, a lot of sales are lost due to piracy. $300MM a year for the US alone (per a 2019 article). https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2019/07/28/us-publish...
> according to data from the Authors Guild
Despite the narrative that copyright holders in every industry like to push, a pirated copy is not equal to a lost sale. Their actual losses are likely a small fraction of that number.
Re: No one buys books
#183I like paper books. I get alot of enjoyment from giving them to friends to read. To me it’s like the difference between when I used to make a mix tape or mix cd and give to someone vs sharing a Spotify playlist.
Also I find that it adds character. Like if someone comes into my house they can see what type of stuff I’m into via my “analog” music movies and books.
Re: No one buys books
#184[flagged]
Re: No one buys books
#185[flagged]
Re: No one buys books
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
The older I get the less I trust myself to know how to administer or even to care how to work any current or future reading e-device. A printed book requires light as just about it's only dependency! I definitely agree with you about the distractions of digital devices. Switching to a book is a focused mode.
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 from condensation or the physical trauma of a backpack.
Re: No one buys books
#187I'm in a very heavy library family; we are checking out and reading a few hundred books per year between all of us. Yet we still buy a few books, and I bet that if we made an inventory of the books we currently own that are in the house, it would number in the hundreds. But... most were purchased secondhand. I take my daughter to the bookstore every few months; it is always busy. While she is browsing, I also look ar…
> $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 sellers seemed to be priced around ~$6 USD (~900 JPY), compared to the $18-22 in Amazon.com's "literature and fiction" list.
We can try the same exercise with
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books/
and the average comes out to ~$11 USD (~£9 GBP)
Re: No one buys books
#188I 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.
Re: No one buys books
#189[flagged]
Re: No one buys books
#190[flagged]