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No one buys books

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Re: No one buys books

#541

Post by awiesenhofer »

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 It's an outdated business model using artificial scarcity that isn't effective at getting books onto readers devices.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.

> outdated business model

It's NOT a business!

Re: No one buys books

#542

Post by bazoom42 »

devjab wrote: post #527
bazoom42 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries This sounds weird. Wouldn’t the books which are lent more also sell more? Childrens books are a big market for book stores and of course they want to sell the most popular books. Are you referring to some particular book which cannot be purchased? Also libriaries does not have to buy any book.

It may sound weird, but there is not a link between lending from libraries and book sales. Some children’s books sell well, but if you go to the sections of them in book stores you’ll rarely find more than a handful of Danish authors represented. The ones which the bookstores know will sell well. Our Libraries have to make all Danish published material available. Some of this is indeed not bought, but because childre…

Out of curiosity, can you provide some examples of these books which are artificially expensive, popular in libraries, but not for sale commercially?

> Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.

Politicians are supposed to set the overall guidelines but not to decide what individial books libraries purchase. Do you have examples where politicians pressure or force libraries to buy specific books?

Re: No one buys books

#543

Post by gverrilla »

ulfw wrote: post #514
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?

> So where is that "Street cred" going to come from

I suppose it is constituted by the same substance found in books that people buy, never read, and proudly display nevertheless.

Re: No one buys books

#544

Post by kasey_junk »

tallanvor wrote: post #511
kasey_junk wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s one way to describe it. The other way is to say Amazon used their outsized power in the book world, including disallowing pre sales and delaying shipments of regular books, to demand a price from the publishers.

It took a bunch of public pressure to change that arrangement.

I think you can easily say the publishers have bad ebook pricing strategy but Amazon certainly wasn’t using normal market practices for setting prices.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/13/amazon-hachett...

Re: No one buys books

#545

Post by r0ks0n »

grepLeigh wrote: post #434
yellow_postit wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny seeing this comment and the article about Seattle libraries reducing digital copies both on HNews front page at the same time. I love libraries. It also feels like all our public institutions in the US are crumbling under assault from all sides.

OverDrive (and Libby) were acquired by KKR, the behemoth PE firm responsible for bankrupting Toys R Us. KKR also acquired one of the Big Five publishing houses last year. I'm worried about public library funds being squeezed by an extractive PE playbook. I wonder what kind of negotiating power a regional library has in that situation. Do state library agencies have more leverage than regional libraries? Do large stat…

kkr is kanker in dutch

Re: No one buys books

#546

Post by loup-vaillant »

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…

> > [Rich & powerful assholes often maintain their status by unethical means.]

> This is conspiracy level thinking.

The prevalence of assholes is a documented thing (latest numbers I've heard was over 6% of clinical narcissists, reportedly a very conservative lower bound), and who would ever be surprised that high-status people like being high-status?

I don't know about libraries specifically, but the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious.

I am of course not denying the existence of nice rich people. Though I'm afraid they tend to be selected out of ludicrous wealth. In fact, I fully expect to find many more assholes among super-rich people than I would among the general population. (But I'm not sure either: the strife we find among some of the poorest people also tend to generate assholes…)

Re: No one buys books

#547

Post by kasey_junk »

makeitdouble wrote: post #342
kasey_junk wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not suggesting they are refraining from going into ebooks due to Amazon I’m suggesting it’s not a tried and true business model the world over. It’s mostly not a going business model outside of the profits Amazon brings in from it.

It's difficult to prove a negative. Ebooks are a growing market in the US, the EU and SEA (though TBH I have no idea about China amd India) It's been more than a decade that it's mainstream and takes about 10~20% of book sales depending on the country. Amwzon's profits are still split with the publishers and publishers have their own venues + competitors (in particular outside of the US) so I'm not sure why Amazon's…

Ebook sales have trended down in the US since 2013[0]. They got a pandemic bump in 2020 which didn’t put them over the peak years in 2013/14 and like many things had a correction downwards afterwards[1].

Amazon maintains 70% of the US ebook marketplace and keeps a much bigger portion of the money from books published through their publishing arm than they do book published through the traditional publishers. They also have less high standards for publishing. This makes it harder to find traditional published books on the biggest platform for selling them.

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/426799/e-book-unit-sales...

[1]https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/us-ebooks-sales-dec...

Re: No one buys books

#548

Post by satvikpendem »

Tor3 wrote: post #377
satvikpendem wrote: post #134

The only major reading I do these days is via audiobooks, I simply read them faster than via visually looking at the page. It might be my attention span, but somehow audio is just faster to literally cram words into the mind at high speed than consciously moving your eyes over a page.

I'm the opposite - I read many times faster than audio, so I have big problems with using e.g. Youtube to get information. It feels agonizingly slow to get the information over. I feel like I could get that in two minutes of reading versus listening for half an hour. When I read novels I take a few pages - depending on what I read - to get my mind into the story, and from then on what's written isn't text on paper (o…

I know what you mean with the last sentence, it feels the same for me when reading text too in that it disappears if I'm engrossed in the story. However, for audio, I listen at 3 to 5x speed so audio can be magnitudes faster than text. You should probably try increasing the speed of your YouTube videos, that's also what I do, plus I use add-ons like SponsorBlock which provide a "skip to video highlight" button as well as cutting out all of the filler content in a video.

Re: No one buys books

#549

Post by closetkantian »

rfarley04 wrote: post #521
closetkantian wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an exaggeration. I also live in Thailand, and I just got a library card at the very stately Neilson Hayes library last week. A bit pricey (3000 THB/year) but amazing ambience since the library was built in 1860.

Yea $100 bucks a year for a small historical library with a very limited selection of English books (that's 45 minutes away from me) doesn't really compare to a free library that's in every city in the US (or many libraries in bigger cities)

I mean there are actually quite a few public libraries here, but of course the selection is primarily in Thai. I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.

Re: No one buys books

#550

Post by bumby »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #546
Zenzero wrote: post #492

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. 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…

> > [Rich & powerful assholes often maintain their status by unethical means.] > This is conspiracy level thinking. The prevalence of assholes is a documented thing (latest numbers I've heard was over 6% of clinical narcissists, reportedly a very conservative lower bound), and who would ever be surprised that high-status people like being high-status? I don't know about libraries specifically , but the idea that rich…

The irony is that one of the largest contributions to the public library system was one of the richest guys ever. Carnegie funded over 2500.
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