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No one buys books

elysian.press

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Re: No one buys books

#471

Post by globular-toast »

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'm the opposite. I stopped reading books because I was accumulating too many and it was difficult to find the ones I like without paying full price for new copies (which I'd eventually just discard). Also I find them cumbersome. Now I have a Kobo I read a lot. I can read on my side in bed. It's great.

However, paper is still the best format by far for text books and references. I can't stand having to use a screen for that. If I'm using a reference sheet I always print it out.

Re: No one buys books

#472

Post by vidarh »

thfuran wrote: post #168
Spivak wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to the digital age where it's possible for the author to self-publish the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books and giving authors 15%. So while I think it's been hard to make a living as an author I don't think it's necessarily the publisher's fault. Better to be the one's selling shovels than the ones mining for gold.

>the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books It seems to me that you're rather underestimating the importance of having something to put in the book.

Having written two novels, I will tell you it's far less work for a lot of writers to write the thing than getting decent sales. It varies - some do slave over their manuscripts for years, while others churn them out in a week, but selling books is hard work.

Re: No one buys books

#473

Post by youngtaff »

mike_hearn wrote: post #462
treflop wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a company that publishes books is going to be able to pivot to building an online book selling platform that easily. They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not bui…

Well, Amazon started out with almost no capital, so apparently they could have built an online book platform pretty easily. And the capital requirements of selling books online only fell over time as the tech got more widespread. Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselve…

In the early days Amazon relied on huge amounts of trade credit from the publishers / distributors

Seem to remember that if the publishers hadn’t been lax about Amazon’s delinquent debt the publishers could have forced Amazon into bankruptcy

(Worked for a major US technical / educational publishing house in the late 90s / early 00s)

Re: No one buys books

#474

Post by kwhitefoot »

Just to refute the title: I've sold a dozen of my textbooks in the last two weeks. I bought them almost fifty years ago for my applied physics degree. So some people are buying some books.

But yes of course no one buys most of the books that are published, I don't suppose that Lorrain and Corson sold more than a few thousand copies of Electromagnetic fields and waves (one of the books I sold) and I doubt that they made enough money to pay for the work it must have cost them.

It must be even worse for academic textbook authors nor that many university courses don't even use textbooks any more because they have switched to modular online instruction.

Re: No one buys books

#475

Post by tomgp »

OK, I haven't read the whole thing yet but this bit raised an eyebrow...

>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)._

Why do we view this as a vanity project and not the purpose of the whole endeavour? The celebrity books are just to raw material that allow them to dot heir real job; to make books those fragments of human connection widely available to the people who might need them, a service to readers and to future generations that isn't just about making money.

Re: No one buys books

#476

Post by hoseja »

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.…

What goes on in your head that you even consider the "ecologicity" of a book. It has no impact. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Stop feeling guilty about meaningless things.

Re: No one buys books

#478

Post by Tor3 »

nottorp wrote: post #432
Tor3 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes and no.. I do use the backlight on my Kindle if it's dark, but this changes how it looks. I have a Paperwhite Kindle. With the backlight on it's more like reading on LCD, though not as bad. The Kindle looks much nicer if I can use a bedside lamp instead of the backlight, just as I would with a paper book.

You still can't turn off the light on a Kindle completely can you? Always felt like a waste of battery on a beach...

There's a tiny amount of light, yes. I don't know why Amazon made it that way. It's not really visible.. not to me, at least. But it's probably one reason the battery is slowly drained, over weeks, even if not in use.

Re: No one buys books

#479

Post by avar »

tryptophan wrote: post #278
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright law is ridiculous and abusive (thank you supreme court). There is some role for domain knowledge, curation, and editing, but the article shows that's not what they make bucjs on: celebrity drivel, bibles, sat prep, and the copyright monopoly. It's just a cartel, just like the music labels are.

Man can we just kill these industries? Copyright law is so annoying and its supposed to promote quality...which we get none of. Free youtube tutorials are the best learning resource these days. The GDP hit would be insignificant too, like <.1%.

Are you under the impression that those YouTube tutorials aren't copyrighted?

Re: No one buys books

#480

Post by twelvedogs »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #306

I used to buy and read a lot of physical books. Around 2013-204, I started moving to eBooks, and Amazon Kindle played a significant role in my journey. But a couple of years later, I had an epiphany while discussing books with my daughter, “I never see you read books. You are just reading on your computer (kindle) or the phone and are not reading.” Since then, I have returned to reading physical books with an approxi…

i used to read a lot but buying paper books was a real pain for me, i read hundreds of books on the kindle but figured out i could just slap a video on my phone and actually sleep.

since then i've read maybe 15 books in the last couple years and my kids never see me reading, however we've read to them and had them read to us for their whole life and they now both read independently for fun. i don't think leading by example is anywhere near as important as reading with your kids

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