14 ms·

E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead

123 points by sinak 11y ago

jstx 11y ago
Is this surprising when you are charged similarly for print and digital copies despite the production costs being nowhere near the same? Ebooks were supposed to be the cost effective, cut out the middlemen, pay the author directly format. What wasn't accounted for was that the book indexers have no incentive to pass on their savings to the consumer. edit: Let's not forget the artificial restrictions imposed by DRM, either. How difficult is it to share a digital book vs physical?
- pm24601 11y ago
  Yeap. DRM is the reason I don't buy e-books. When I am done with a book I want to be able to give it away or loan it out. I have also discovered that the ebook is not fully stored on my tablet, so I can't read it offline. (Google books) So forget e-books. If I buy a real book, I know I have the entire book!
- akgoel 11y ago
  Well, it's not surprising, but I'm not sure I agree with they psychology that ebooks should be cheaper. Pricing for books is not just a markup over marginal cost. I have this discussion every day in our office - our price is not based on our cost, our price is based on what our customer is willing to pay. If the price of ebooks has gone up, the publishers are trying to find a balance of maximizing revenues and profit across the every distribution channel, while also taking into account any lost sales due to piracy. Why should publishers give up rents to readers just because costs have gone down?
  - saint_fiasco 11y ago
    Presumably because if you don't, other publishers might, and they will get your customers. For some weird reason, no publisher decided to do that. Except pirates, but they always do that.
    - tsotha 11y ago
      Publishers may be okay at the moment, but I still think they're doomed. There's literally no barrier to entry in the publishing business, which is eventually going to break their pricing cartel.
      - JupiterMoon 11y ago
        As a reader without unlimited time the publishing industry acts as a barrier to entry which filters out the worst books... We need a robust reviewing system which filters out shill reviews.
        tsotha 11y ago
        You don't need a publishing industry for that; you just need book reviews.
        douche 11y ago
        Goodreads? And some critical reading skills to pick out the shills?
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        Why should I waste time on this? I know that books in the SciFi section of my local bookshop will have a certain minimum standard without needing to wade through some reviews.
        douche 11y ago
        You have a better local bookstore than I do. Mine is all Star Wars expanded universe dreck (last decade or so, in prequel land or tying into a children's cartoon), Star Trek fan-fiction, Halo novelizations, etc. With some classic Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bova, and a very few other authors thrown in to class up the joint, although usually just the more well-known titles I've already read.
- ghaff 11y ago
  The production costs are probably not as different as you think. The variable cost of a hardcover book is in the neighborhood of a few dollars though the exact figure depends on the size of the print run and some of the costs are buried in the cut a distributor usually takes. (As a benchmark, an author-ordered PoD copy of my ~250 page trade paperback from Createspace costs $3.75 before shipping.) So e-books should be cheaper than physical books, all other things being equal, but the cost difference isn't as much as many assume.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    Publishers aren't that forthcoming on costs, but for large-print-run, mass-market paperbacks, numbers I've heard thrown about are a cost of less than $0.50/book. So I wouldn't expect much savings from going digital. Similar situation to software: the move from boxed software to digitally delivered software didn't make it any cheaper, because the cost of the box and CD-ROM was not really a significant part of the price.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mkozlows 11y ago
  It's not just that they have no incentive to pass on the savings, they actively do not want ebooks to become popular -- they've stated this outright at various points in their battles with Amazon, that their goal with ebook pricing/policies is to preserve their print business as much as possible, as they believe that's totally key to their future success.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    Yes, pretty much like Kodak, which invented the digital camera, trying to kill it off/keep it expensive so it didn't cut into film sales. How did that work out for them?
    - fsck--off 11y ago
      There was an interesting comment here about Kodak several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8978909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8978909
grishas 11y ago
One word: price. E-book prices have soared! Almost everything on Amazon is over $10 these days. They're often going for more than the paperback price, and certainly more than the prices you'd find at a discount bookseller.
- FranOntanaya 11y ago
  I imagine the ebook is the one both providing greater value, and having a harder time competing for production resources -- while paper may be overcapacity now.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    Clearly the ebook is not providing greater value if demand is slack compared to paper books..
helipad 11y ago
I've been really disappointed with the pricing of eBooks. A new book is available for pre-order, and here is the Amazon pricing: Kindle – $26.35 Hardcover – $19.23 Audible – $27.61 Audio CD – $30.00 All logic suggests the electronic version should be cheaper. Prices like this will likely drive me, and others, to piracy. Yes, the value of the book is what I am willing to pay for it, but I feel insulted by the pricing structure offered time and again.
- jonknee 11y ago
  Turns out Amazon knew what they were doing when they were selling ebooks for cheaper. The publishers come in with agency pricing and boom, sales plummet.
  - xlm1717 11y ago
    This is what is really frustrating about the article. It spends the entire first half boosting print books like there is something magical about them that prevents them from being disrupted like movies and TV were. >E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television. And only until near the end of the article does it reveal the actual reason why print is far from dead. >Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper. The publishers put print books on life support by artificially inflating the prices of e-books. They are just delaying the inevitable in my opinion.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Not surprising that print journalists in the publishing hub of the US are rooting for print.
    - coliveira 11y ago
      There is in fact something magical about printed books :-) Well, not magic, but books are not just the medium of data transfer, they are also integral part of the reading experience. This is unlike music, where it doesn't matter if you're playing the content from a CD or transferring it over the network. The feeling of reading a book will always be different from using a reading device, it doesn't matter how to great the device is. Once the novelty of e-readers wears off, you will start to see a steady-state of sales on paper and other media for books. It seems that it is already happening. I, for example, read books in printed as well as electronic forms. I use e-readers for the convenience, but there are some types of books that don't work in electronic format in my personal opinion - and I think there are lots of people like me.
hullo 11y ago
Buried paragraph at the end of the article that discounts the entire piece (as a piece about readers rather than as a piece about publishers): "It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar."
- hga 11y ago
  Indeed; in other recent (last month or so) reports that others have mentioned in blog postings, indie e-book sales are skyrocketing. Anecdotally, a number of indie authors are reporting healthy and increasing sales. And of course after the big five (and I suppose others) renegotiated their contracts with Amazon to agency pricing, to raise e-book prices above $10, often more than paperbacks and sometimes more than hardbacks (see other comments in this topic to that effect), their e-book sales, unit and revenue, took a substantial hit.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Yes. Their sales figures basically ignore any indie book without an ISBN (which is, like, 95% of them, and which are now the majority of sales on Amazon). Ebook sales from major publishers have slipped recently because they've jacked up the price to avoid cannibalizing their print sales. Unfortunately for them, the major publishers don't control the market any more. They (and the NYT) are whistling past the graveyard.
- Booktrope 11y ago
  Good point. It's a piece about traditional publishers (especially the big 5) not book sales in general. Also buried in the article is head of Kindle ops saying, Amazon's ebook sales are continuing to increase. It's not only possible that ebook sales are going up, there's very strong evidence of this. Check out the authorearnings.com site if you want to see just how fast the ebook market is moving away from traditional publishers to self-publishing and alternative approaches.
PLenz 11y ago
To me, this is the best news I've heard all day. See, used books made me - my local library as a kid was heavy on Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, and decades-old travel guides, not so much on other subjects. I very distinctly remember wanting to find Catch-22 and not only was it not available from my local, it wasn't available at any library in the county. But used book stores didn't have that problem. I found my copy of Catch-22 in the back of a Goodwill store. Tolkien came out of a Salvation Army. Scores more came from library sales and yard sales, each a quarter or a dollar at a time.
- TheGRS 11y ago
  Much of these books you can borrow for free on your kindle from a library though.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    Unfortunately you still have to physically go to the library to get them sent to your kindle. It's almost worth $5-10 to me to not have to do that. Edit: I think I need to have a chat with my library.
    - panzagl 11y ago
      No you don't, at least not universally. I get mine sent to me, I think most libraries use the same system (Overdrive).
    - Kevguy 11y ago
      My library systems lets you check them out and download them completely online. Never need to leave the house.
TheGRS 11y ago
I hope this isn't the trend going forward. I don't get the traditionalist love of paperback books most of the time. Like the sort of people who go on and on about exploring book stores or the smell of new paper. I love my Kindle and I really hope to be able to use it as my primary reading source, its just so convenient, light, portable and unobtrusive (especially with that newer back-light option). But the price of new ebooks turns me off for sure, I wouldn't buy a new novel for $20+, in ebook, hardcover, paperback or ever really. $10 is the sweet spot for novels and I think Amazon was driving that well for awhile. I'll stick to older novels that are < $10. Let me also state that paper really does have its merits, at least for now until some smart tablet engineers can solve some problems with the format. I love a comic book as paperback, but that is because I don't think tablets or even color e-ink has quite gotten there yet. I also think technical reference books (like programming guides) are best served in paper. Again, I don't think its easy to flip through pages on a tablet or kindle, but maybe that will be solved some day too.
- Nav_Panel 11y ago
  I hold fairly different opinions, though I agree that digital reading sources can make sense for completely new books read for pleasure. As a longtime physical product, paper has a lot of benefits. My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years later I can trivially give my old Kindle eBooks to my children. On the other hand, I much prefer having searchable digital technical reference books. I find the flipping and index/table-of-contents referencing to be very "immersion-breaking" when I'm programming. For example, it's much quicker and easier to Ctrl+F for "XCHG" than it is to dig through the intimidating multi-thousand page Intel x86 Instruction Reference. When I was taking an OS course, I had to do this all the time, and I much preferred the pdf reference over the physical one.
  - derefr 11y ago
    > My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years later I can trivially give my old Kindle eBooks to my children. That's a problem with the current incarnation of ebooks as a set of cloud stores. Imagine e-books held—along with all the annotations made to them on your device—in something like a blockchain. Someone pushes you three bucks, and you push them a (license to a) book. Now the license, and the annotations, are in their account, accessible to all their devices.
arjn 11y ago
Physical books still trump e-books for me, though I use both. There is something nicer about a physical book which my e-reader is not able to replicate or replace.
chestnut-tree 11y ago
E-ink readers are small and suited mostly to black-and-white paperback-sized novels or non-fiction. That still leaves an enormous number of books (perhaps the majority) that don't fit the paperback size such as illustrated children's book, or oversized books or...anything with a non-standard layout or larger than paperback-size. Plus, the lack of colour in e-ink readers remains a severe limitation. E-books have taken their place alongside print but I don't think many people expected them to displace print books. Certainly not with the current crop of e-readers.
deegles 11y ago
What's the current law regarding resale of ebooks? Do I "own" them or am I merely licensing them?
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  You do not own them.
magic_beans 11y ago
When I'm 85 I'll still be able to open a book I bought in 2012 and read it. Text on paper ain't never changing file format.
- 36erhefg 11y ago
  You make an excellent point. With the prevalence of DRM and ownership, someday you might not be able to read your book, either due to old unsupported device or a format, or even the company going bankrupt. Even if neither of this happens, at some point the standards will change. If you don't use the "cloud" and risk the lockout, you will probably need to backup you information. The hardware changes, physical books don't. This is a worry for some.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  EPUB is HTML, and that's not going anywhere, either.
  - 36erhefg 11y ago
    Op is talking about time-spans longer than we've had the internet. Don't flatter yourself by thinking you can predict the future. ( Ironically, neither Firefox nor Opera opened a .epub file out-of-the-box. So much for compatibility. )
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      True but html has the advantage of being a text based markup. The chances are that a text editor in 2050 will open an epub are fairly high. I don't know what the odds of being able to view a 2015 .mobi file at all in 2050 is.
      - JupiterMoon 11y ago
        I'm wondering if the downvoters really think that plain text will be unreadable in 35 years? Seems strange. I can open asci files from the 1970's just fine today...
ChrisLTD 11y ago
I only buy ebooks these days. I love having access to the same material on any device without needing more bookshelves in my small apartment. However, I wish I didn't have to pay a premium for that convenience. I certainly cringe whenever I see a paperback price that's $2-3 cheaper than the ebook. I try not to even look at the used price.
- Evenjos 11y ago
  Indie authors usually charge less.
aetherson 11y ago
While lots of people are pointing to pricing as the reason for this decline, and that's obviously a big factor, I think you also have to look at the decline of the tablet here. Phones just don't produce a really great reading experience. Actual computers are obviously never going to be a big market. Dedicated e-readers probably don't make sense to people who aren't voracious readers. And tablets are increasingly being squeezed out of the market.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Maybe. OTOH, at least part of the tablet decline can be attributed to market saturation and the lack of an impetus to upgrade. So there are still a lot of tablets out there. You're probably right about the market for dedicated e-book readers although, they've also gotten very good for very little money.
- petra 11y ago
  >> Phones just don't produce a really great reading experience. If i'm not mistaken, the kindle is 6".Many phone are 5.5" or 5" which isn't that different - especially with the fact you can control the zoom.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    If I'm reading a book, I don't want to be zooming in and out. It's a pain to hold a phone one handed in a way that also promotes easy page turning without accidental page turning. Reading in bed while my partner sleeps is also a lot less intrusive on my Kindle than my phone (which annoys me too, as unless overridden, the brightness will be far too much in a dark room). I love my iPhone/iPad. But they don't compare to the Kindle for reading experience, at least for me. I just wish color eInk would get here already.
Booktrope 11y ago
More bad information about the publishing business from the NY Times. Ebook sales aren't declining generally; it's big publisher ebook sales that are declining. Ebook sales for self-pubbed authors and indie publishers are growing rapidly. If you have any doubts about this, check out the authorearnings.com website, which tracks sales of ebooks on Amazon and other platforms. Buried in the article is information from Amazon that ebook sales are continuing to rise. But this article isn't about ebook sales -- it's about big publisher ebook sales. The article also says that dedicated ebook reader sales have declined. This is true but not because of a shift away from ebooks. It's that ebook reading is shifting to tablets and phones, a trend that is widely recognized in the industry, but not in this article. The reason that big publishers (and some smaller publishers following the traditional model) are losing ebook sales is that, in the big Hachette - Amazon dustup last year, the big publishers won the ability to keep ebook prices ridiculously high and to prevent discounting by Amazon. So big publishers routinely price ebooks about the same or higher than paperbacks. Of course their ebook sales are suffering! But self-pubbed and indie publisher books are priced much lower than print books, and are of course gaining market share very quickly. The NY Times reports on publishing are all biased toward big traditional publishers - after all, that's essentially what the Times is. (To the Times' credit, they have a public editor who critiques their stories, and the public editor has said that the last two major stories in the Times about Amazon failed to meet journalistic standards.) They ignore information like what's on authorearnings.com because they're trying to get people to believe there's a trend away from ebooks. There certainly are some people who decide what kind of book to buy according to what they think the latest trend is. But if you're looking for accurate information about the book business, don't expect it from the Times.
- bduerst 11y ago
  This is a misconception - it's like saying Hollywood is worried about Youtube celebs. There was an episode on "What's the point" (a 538 podcast) where book publishers talked about how they use data in their industry. Publishers are primarily interested in cultivating "star" authors and use social media + a number of other signals to find them. They were asked about it and basically said that the hostility between publishers and self-published authors is only perceived, and in reality the self-publishing makes it easier to find the star authors and pick them up.
macjohnmcc 11y ago
I am not surprised. I wanted to buy a book and found the physical book price was $39 but I could get it used for about $8. The ebook was $28. Even without the used price option I would have rather had the physical book for the price difference between $39 and $28. Ebooks would be more worthwhile to me at the current prices IF you could get updated versions of the book (errata not new content).
ilamont 11y ago
Small publisher here. I believe Ebook sales have been generally flat or declining for many titles for the following reasons: * Pricing issues * Huge influx of new/republished titles entering ebook distribution channels are outpacing demand, including many free or low-cost self-published titles * Kindle Fire sales negatively impacting ebook reading habits encourages people to do other things besides read (video, apps, games, etc.) * Decline of marketplaces/platforms that are unable to compete, e.g. Nook, Sony. * Subscription plans (especially Kindle Unlimited) eating away at paid digital downloads. * Some people prefer print Many established publishers are still focused on print because that’s where the sales are and that’s where they still wield considerable power. For the short technology guides I publish, print accounts for 70-80% of sales. Certain ebook marketplaces that could be doing well (Apple iBookstore, Google Play) have really stagnated, unfortunately.
- krasin 11y ago
  There's also an issue of Ebook lock-ins. Some people are tired to have their collection of purchased books in various incompatible formats available to read through different subsets of devices / apps.
  - ilamont 11y ago
    I agree that it is frustrating. I sell a lot of PDFs through Gumroad, and I think many of the buyers want that cross-platform compatibility (and the ability to print out specific pages). However, when I make ebook bundles available with .mobi, epub and PDF versions of a particular titles, relatively few people buy them.
    - FireBeyond 11y ago
      Do you charge more for the bundle? If so, sincere question: why, if it's the same content?
- DannoHung 11y ago
  As an ebook consumer, the single biggest reason I don't buy more ebooks is because I have to spend time and energy figuring out if the ebook has DRM or if I can remove the DRM afterwards. Also, I spend time thinking about the fact that if I ever move to Kindle, any epubs I have won't work regardless of DRM. I can't speak for other readers, but this is why I don't buy or read books as much as I used to. And I used to read a lot of books.
acd 11y ago
Sometime I wonder what the markering sales tag lines would be if the book was released after the e-book. Zero battery usage. Spill friendly throw it away. Environmentally friendly fully recycable without ewaste. High contrast If the price is similar, why go ebook unless you need it delivered right now? Ebook has an advantage of of library in your pocket, zero delivery time.
- mkaziz 11y ago
  That's outweighed by the fact that I don't own the ebook in the same way I own the book. The book is mine to keep, loan, rent, throw away, donate, etc, in a way that's not governed by esoteric license agreements. I can wait 2 days for that. If you can't wait, consider that if you buy a print book from Amazon that has an ebook available, Amazon will let you read the beginning of the book on your kindle app/device, until the paper book ships in.
panzagl 11y ago
For me a lot of the slow down has to do with how transparent it has made the publisher price model. I can buy a new book today for $15.00, wait a year and get it for $10, or wait longer and maybe get it for $5, if I haven't gotten it out of the library by then. Publishers want to tax me for my impatience, and I'm not going to fall for it.
- douche 11y ago
  The same thing is trashing the indie video game market on PC. Why buy a full-price game (unless you absolutely must have it now), when you can keep your ears open and snag it for pennies on a Humble Bundle deal, or at 10-25% on a Steam sale?
sebular 11y ago
This article just feels irrelevant and completely out of touch. As many people have pointed out here, e-books are insanely popular, just not necessarily through the traditional distributors. Personally, I also believe that there's only one reason why the paper book isn't far less popular than it is, and it's entirely temporary. Get out of the tech-minded echo chamber and ask a person why they would still buy a paper book when they could buy an e-book, and they'll pretty much only respond with "paper books just feel right to me". The problem is completely unrelated to pricing. Since the beginning of time, people have comfortably navigated the sliding price structure of books. Some people want to buy the next Hunger Games on day 1, and they pay $39.99 to buy the hardcover and find out what happens to Katniss. Some people wait until the hype dies down. Some people borrow from a friend, and yes, some people still go to the library. And those exact same rules apply to e-books. The entire conversation just reeks of idiocy and a bunch of industry coalitions blindly grasping around for places to point fingers because they apparently are overlooking the simple thing that everybody constantly says. I've already said it, but I'll say it again: "Paper books just feel right to me." Steve Jobs had a beautiful intuition about peoples' relationships with technology. It was a skill that's so painfully rare that he's still known as basically the only guy capable of figuring out what would make an advanced piece of technology attractive to an average person. Sadly, he was completely wrong about the iPad being an acceptable replacement for a book, and I feel like many people are continuing to follow him down the wrong path. This has nothing to do with distribution and pricing. It has nothing to do with the cost of manufacturing an e-book being far less than a paper book. People still pay tons of money for games on Steam. The single problem is that e-readers aren't good. They're garbage. That's it. Amazon is the clear leader, but it's not good enough. For anyone who wants to dominate the e-reader industry, here's your free advice: 1. Make an e-reader with a beautiful e-paper screen capable of displaying full color. 2. Make the screen refresh very quickly 3. Give it sensible touch gestures that you never accidentally trigger, and give it very useful physical buttons. 4. Make sure it can do everything a book can do. Can you quickly thumb through a 500 page novel on a kindle? Nope. Can you easily write something in the margin? Nope. Can you bookmark your current reading position, and also earmark a few other favorite spots in the book? Nope. 5. Give it a non-tech appearance. Make the damn thing out of wood. 6. Sell it in 3 sizes from day 1: The current standard paperback-ish size, as well as a smaller smartphone-sized one, and finally a large one, like ~15 inches. Aside from the challenges of building a better color e-paper screen with great refresh, the others are just so obvious and so stupidly ignored. I'm actually frustrated just writing this. Make the e-reader personal, make it a lovable object. People will not stop throwing their money at this.
DanBC 11y ago
One problem this article doesn't talk about is that people who get rejected from every publishing house (or who don't bother sending to traditional publishers) can now just throw their book on Amazon. Ploughing through the slush pile was never seen as a fun job, so it's weird that the stuff in that pile is now being sold. http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/may/23/theshockingtruthaboutthes http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/may/23/thesh... There's no sensible way for me to find decent new content, so I stick to authors I already know (until they put out a duff book, where I drop them) or I read things like One Story which has let me discover some amazing writers. (eg Caitlin Horrocks http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Is-Not-Your-City/dp/1932511911 http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Is-Not-Your-City/dp/1932511911 ) https://www.one-story.com/ https://www.one-story.com/
- Evenjos 11y ago
  Although any moron can self-publish a book, the serious ones stand apart with professional book covers and blurbs, marketing, and multiple novels. The ones who "trend" well often get picked up by traditional publishers or movie studios (as was the case with Andy Weir's "The Martian.") The traditional publishing industry consists of trend-chasers, not trend-setters. So yes, the self-publishing world is full of raw sewage, but there are some diamonds and gems in that sewage--and they usually look shiny, with endorsements and professional covers.
15charlimit 11y ago
I only buy physical books in "collector grade" hardcover form anymore, and those are very few and far between and mainly for display. It's infinitely more convenient to do 99% of normal reading on an e-reader. The recent surge in ebook pricing from amazon/etc does nothing but drive me to other (cheaper) forms of entertainment/leisure. I'm not spending $25 on an ebook, I don't care if it's by a NY Times Bestselling Author. $9.99 is comfortably within the "impulse purchase" range and still provides an enormous margin over cost of production/distribution. $20+ is well outside the "impulse purchase" range for an intangible product like an ebook. Not to mention that a "free" copy is literally 20 seconds and a few clicks away.
facepalm 11y ago
Could it just be the increased prices publishers forced on Amazon/ebooks? If a hardcover books costs the same as the ebook, I am also tempted to buy the hardcover. The thinking is that I can sell it once i have read it, but I tend to forget about the hassles associated with physical stuff. The ebook would still be the better choice for me, but human psyche is too easily fooled. Anyway, I expect that to be just a temporary "victory" for hardcover books. I also seem to remember William Gibson tweet that the losses in ebook sales are mainly in young readers who can't afford the pricier versions, but I have no source for that. So maybe both ebook and hardcover will simply lose out to YouTube.
uhtred 11y ago
This for me is good news. I love reading printed books. If it's a novel, then I enjoy being able to relax, away from an electronic screen, and go into another world for a time. I also love the feel and smell of books, and the cover art work. And browsing a book store to find my next read is, for me, much more of a pleasure than browsing Amazon. Also, there's something nice about a well filled bookshelf, and nosing through someone else's gives you a great sense of who that person is.
WalterBright 11y ago
I actually prefer to read scanned paperbacks on my ereader rather than the ebook versions. With my Samsung tablet they are the same size as a paperback, and the display looks like a paperback page. I like the typography, layout, and general imperfections of a scanned page. The letters are all slightly different, and are imperfectly placed. Ebooks are a bit too perfect and sterile. I'd like to take it a step further and have the background be a scanned blank page, again so it looks a bit imperfect like paper does. I buy the paperbacks, scan them (takes 5-10 minutes), then throw the book into the recycle bin.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  > I buy the paperbacks, scan them (takes 5-10 minutes), then throw the book into the recycle bin. Poe's law is pinging.
  - alayne 11y ago
    I just assumed he had a multi sheet scanner and cut off the binding.
- knight17 11y ago
  How can you scan a paperback book in 10 minutes? Curious about the kind of hardware-software set up that allows to do that in 10 minutes
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    Cut off the binding and use a sheet feeding scanner. Turning the pages sideways runs them through twice as fast.
cyanbane 11y ago
It's definitely the price of ebooks. I started purchasing tangible books again in the last six months. They end up being almost always the same price as the ebook on Amazon, so I just donate the book to the public library when I am done with it.
dunham 11y ago
A recent WSJ article suggests that the recent price increases in ebooks have caused both the drop in sales of ebooks and a drop in overall revenue for the publishers. http://www.wsj.com/articles/e-book-sales-weaken-amid-higher-prices-1441307826
xbmcuser 11y ago
Big 5 publishers eBook sales have declined becuase of agency pricing. Overall eBook sales have not declined.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
There are three huge problems that e-books haven't solved, which has been holding them back. First, consumer surplus. (Read this if you haven't: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...) Printed books use different editions and market availability to segment the market and bring in a significant amount of consumer surplus revenue. e-books have very weak mechanisms to capture consumer surplus, and that represents a huge potential loss of revenue. In theory it might be possible to make that up on the other end with higher volume (see, for example, steam sales and humble bundles) but so far e-book sales models have been too constrained to enable that to happen very often. Second, commodity pricing. This is a big problem across the board in a lot of media (games, movies, music, etc.) but e-books have just doubled down on the same model. Books are not like dried beans, you don't just go to a store and buy books by the pound, but that's the model the industry has increasingly been rushing towards. With only popularity as the sole determinant of total revenue. This is a massively flawed model that hurts many talented writers and perverts the market in unhealthy ways. Third, ownership. People with physical books can gift them to others, or sell them, or loan them. They can let their friends, their children, their other relatives, or their family's friends borrow them and read them. They are a profound asset of learning and shared culture. An e-book, however, is still by default a jealously guarded personal possession that cannot be easily loaned, sold, gifted, or inherited. Given the importance of books, this is a profound disadvantage of e-books. Fourth, vendor lock-in. The average user experience with e-books represents a substantial dependency on a particular corporation (such as Amazon). If, say, Amazon went out of business it could be especially difficult to gain access to ones Amazon purchased e-books. Imagine, for example, some sort of world-wide disaster, and now there are no more new kindles, no more Amazon, etc. What happens when your one device storing all your books finally dies? This is similar to the ownership problem. Buying an e-book today is partly making a bet that the company that sold you that e-book will be around for as long as that book is relevant. Given the history of both corporations and of books, that's actually not a very smart bet. e-books have a lot of short-term advantages but they have a lot of long-term disadvantages, at least as they exist today. That's not an intractable problem but it's one that so far the big powers in the e-book world have been deaf to hearing.
habosa 11y ago
I don't know my own reasoning, but I am part of this trend. I have owned every Kindle model from the very first up until the paperwhite. There were about 3 or 4 years where I did not read paper books. But recently I have gone to paper-only, and my Kindle sits uncharged. I can think of a few things I like about paper books (although I still love the Kindle): * Bookstores are awesome and getting a recommendation from an employee is much better than browsing Amazon. * Used books are cheap! A used paperback is often cheaper than an eBook. * With paper I have sense of progress as I feel the right half of the book shrink as I read. * I can easily lend a friend a paper book, I have shared many books with people recently but with the Kindle they had to buy their own. However I still think the Kindle paperwhite is one of the best single-purpose electronic devices ever (rivaling the iPod Classics). Amazing screen, lightweight, fairly cheap, etc. It's just made to read with, unlike an iPad or a laptop.
nhebb 11y ago
One of the reasons that I don't buy more e-books is because my Kindle's battery charge is often depleted. Somewhere along the line, Amazon changed airplane mode such that ads are still displayed all the time. I haven't been an avid reader for the last year or two, and when I do get the urge, I pick up my Kindle only to find the battery is dead. While it's charging, I find something else to do. By the time I get the urge to read again, the battery is depleted again. When you're an avid reader who remembers to charge his device regularly, the Kindle is great. When you're an intermittent reader, it just another electronic brick.
JupiterMoon 11y ago
Multiple reasons why as a keen reader (a whale to the print publishing industry) I don't use ebooks. - DRM: When I pay for a book I want it on any of my devices my whole life and I don't want to have to strip some crappy DRM first. - price: I can't justify how much more ebooks cost. - battery life: I get bored having to keep my existing devices charged I don't need another one to keep charged. - First sale: one has the right to lend physical books to friends and family, to me this social aspect is part of the reading experience. - Tracking: I like that I can buy a book for cash and no one counts how many pages I read and when I read it. Books are partly about intellectual freedom and tracking is the enemy of intellectual freedom. - Difficult to keep my place: For technical books I can look stuff up in books I know based upon rough location very quickly. E-reader devicies (in my opinion) need more skeumorphism.
Havoc 11y ago
If they priced the e-books a bit more reasonably then they'd sell more.
- visarga 11y ago
  I'd be willing to pay 10 bucks for a thousand page views of any books from Google Books (not all from a single book). I like to dig around. A page view should count as a page where I spent more than 5 seconds. What counts for me most is the full text search with highlight capability, and of course, the sheer number of books they have in there. A single book should be much cheaper. I see ebooks priced at 100 bucks in the Google Books store.
  - Havoc 11y ago
    To be honest the paying per page view somehow rubs me the wrong way. It'll make me think about cost whilst enjoying the book which I don't want. I just want a reasonable price. e.g. I bought a book today. 10 GBP for paper. 5 for ebook. Thats pretty reasonable. Still good money but acknowledges that the real life costs are much lower. If its like 3% cheaper then thats just devoid of any link to real costs.
artumi-richard 11y ago
One thing I've noticed since using an e-reader that I've not heard anyone else mention, is that I've become far less happy with the quality of print and the quality of the paper in the physical books I'm buying. I once read a book [1] that had unusually high quality paper which made it noticeably denser and the pages had more flex in them, which made one handed reading a doddle. It wasn't flawless, as the print would smudge if I rubbed my slightly moist fingers against it. Still, every time I go to a book now I'm usually thinking "the type is too large" or "that font is awful" or "the paper is too thick". I think it's time the industry had another look at how paperbacks in particular should look and feel, given the influence of the e-reader. 1: http://www.amazon.com/Unreliable-Sources-20th-Century-Reported/dp/0330435639/ http://www.amazon.com/Unreliable-Sources-20th-Century-Report...
user_666 11y ago
The NYTimes misinterpreted the AAP data it reported: http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/23/nytimes-mistakes-legacy-publishing-stats-for-market-stats-foresees-the-decline-of-ebooks/ http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/23/nytimes-mistakes-le... A more complete look at the ebook market paints a very different picture: http://fortune.com/2015/09/24/ebook-sales/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/24/ebook-sales/ https://stratechery.com/2015/are-ebooks-declining-or-just-the-publishers-oyster-goes-out-of-business-media-notes/ https://stratechery.com/2015/are-ebooks-declining-or-just-th...
ionised 11y ago
I've got a Kindle Paperwhite which I've used every so often but I still prefer 'wads of dead tree' books. I bought it thinking 'hey this is the future!' and expecting myself to get a lot of use out of it but I just haven't really. Last five books I've read have been physical copies. The only use I really get out of it now is if I want something on short notice and am not willing to wait for a physical delivery, which isn't often. People cite the storage space of e-books as a plus for using them over paper books, so you can have lots of books when you're on the move. I've never understood this though. When I'm commuting to work, or travelling on a plane or something, how likely is it I'm going to read two or more books in one sitting? I can see it if you need lots of technical texts at hand for reference or something, but most people use e-books to read novels and I don't understand why you need your entire library of novels at your fingertips while you take the train 40 minutes to another town. You're not going to read two or more books in that travel time. If I'm sitting at home I will always prefer a hard copy of whatever I'm reading. In spite of how awesome people claim e-ink to be now I still find it much easier and more relaxing to read from paper, especially if it's a technical manual. Perhaps it's because I'm staring at computer screens all day at work, and when I program at home or play games. The last thing I want when reading for pleasure and to relax is to stare down at another screen. Plus there is something meditative in the act of reading from a physical copy that I just don't get from an electronic device. Then there is the issue of DRM which I am against in forms, and the dumb prices that are charged for e-books.

123 points by sinak 11y ago

jstx 11y ago

Is this surprising when you are charged similarly for print and digital copies despite the production costs being nowhere near the same? Ebooks were supposed to be the cost effective, cut out the middlemen, pay the author directly format. What wasn't accounted for was that the book indexers have no incentive to pass on their savings to the consumer. edit: Let's not forget the artificial restrictions imposed by DRM, either. How difficult is it to share a digital book vs physical?

pm24601 11y ago
Yeap. DRM is the reason I don't buy e-books. When I am done with a book I want to be able to give it away or loan it out. I have also discovered that the ebook is not fully stored on my tablet, so I can't read it offline. (Google books) So forget e-books. If I buy a real book, I know I have the entire book!
akgoel 11y ago
Well, it's not surprising, but I'm not sure I agree with they psychology that ebooks should be cheaper. Pricing for books is not just a markup over marginal cost. I have this discussion every day in our office - our price is not based on our cost, our price is based on what our customer is willing to pay. If the price of ebooks has gone up, the publishers are trying to find a balance of maximizing revenues and profit across the every distribution channel, while also taking into account any lost sales due to piracy. Why should publishers give up rents to readers just because costs have gone down?
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  Presumably because if you don't, other publishers might, and they will get your customers. For some weird reason, no publisher decided to do that. Except pirates, but they always do that.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    Publishers may be okay at the moment, but I still think they're doomed. There's literally no barrier to entry in the publishing business, which is eventually going to break their pricing cartel.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      As a reader without unlimited time the publishing industry acts as a barrier to entry which filters out the worst books... We need a robust reviewing system which filters out shill reviews.
      - tsotha 11y ago
        You don't need a publishing industry for that; you just need book reviews.
      - douche 11y ago
        Goodreads? And some critical reading skills to pick out the shills?
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        Why should I waste time on this? I know that books in the SciFi section of my local bookshop will have a certain minimum standard without needing to wade through some reviews.
        douche 11y ago
        You have a better local bookstore than I do. Mine is all Star Wars expanded universe dreck (last decade or so, in prequel land or tying into a children's cartoon), Star Trek fan-fiction, Halo novelizations, etc. With some classic Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bova, and a very few other authors thrown in to class up the joint, although usually just the more well-known titles I've already read.
ghaff 11y ago
The production costs are probably not as different as you think. The variable cost of a hardcover book is in the neighborhood of a few dollars though the exact figure depends on the size of the print run and some of the costs are buried in the cut a distributor usually takes. (As a benchmark, an author-ordered PoD copy of my ~250 page trade paperback from Createspace costs $3.75 before shipping.) So e-books should be cheaper than physical books, all other things being equal, but the cost difference isn't as much as many assume.
- _delirium 11y ago
  Publishers aren't that forthcoming on costs, but for large-print-run, mass-market paperbacks, numbers I've heard thrown about are a cost of less than $0.50/book. So I wouldn't expect much savings from going digital. Similar situation to software: the move from boxed software to digitally delivered software didn't make it any cheaper, because the cost of the box and CD-ROM was not really a significant part of the price.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mkozlows 11y ago
It's not just that they have no incentive to pass on the savings, they actively do not want ebooks to become popular -- they've stated this outright at various points in their battles with Amazon, that their goal with ebook pricing/policies is to preserve their print business as much as possible, as they believe that's totally key to their future success.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Yes, pretty much like Kodak, which invented the digital camera, trying to kill it off/keep it expensive so it didn't cut into film sales. How did that work out for them?
  - fsck--off 11y ago
    There was an interesting comment here about Kodak several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8978909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8978909

grishas 11y ago

One word: price. E-book prices have soared! Almost everything on Amazon is over $10 these days. They're often going for more than the paperback price, and certainly more than the prices you'd find at a discount bookseller.

FranOntanaya 11y ago
I imagine the ebook is the one both providing greater value, and having a harder time competing for production resources -- while paper may be overcapacity now.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Clearly the ebook is not providing greater value if demand is slack compared to paper books..

helipad 11y ago

I've been really disappointed with the pricing of eBooks. A new book is available for pre-order, and here is the Amazon pricing: Kindle – $26.35 Hardcover – $19.23 Audible – $27.61 Audio CD – $30.00 All logic suggests the electronic version should be cheaper. Prices like this will likely drive me, and others, to piracy. Yes, the value of the book is what I am willing to pay for it, but I feel insulted by the pricing structure offered time and again.

jonknee 11y ago
Turns out Amazon knew what they were doing when they were selling ebooks for cheaper. The publishers come in with agency pricing and boom, sales plummet.
- xlm1717 11y ago
  This is what is really frustrating about the article. It spends the entire first half boosting print books like there is something magical about them that prevents them from being disrupted like movies and TV were. >E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television. And only until near the end of the article does it reveal the actual reason why print is far from dead. >Higher e-book prices may also be driving readers back to paper. The publishers put print books on life support by artificially inflating the prices of e-books. They are just delaying the inevitable in my opinion.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Not surprising that print journalists in the publishing hub of the US are rooting for print.
  - coliveira 11y ago
    There is in fact something magical about printed books :-) Well, not magic, but books are not just the medium of data transfer, they are also integral part of the reading experience. This is unlike music, where it doesn't matter if you're playing the content from a CD or transferring it over the network. The feeling of reading a book will always be different from using a reading device, it doesn't matter how to great the device is. Once the novelty of e-readers wears off, you will start to see a steady-state of sales on paper and other media for books. It seems that it is already happening. I, for example, read books in printed as well as electronic forms. I use e-readers for the convenience, but there are some types of books that don't work in electronic format in my personal opinion - and I think there are lots of people like me.

hullo 11y ago

Buried paragraph at the end of the article that discounts the entire piece (as a piece about readers rather than as a piece about publishers): "It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books, which often cost less than a dollar."

hga 11y ago
Indeed; in other recent (last month or so) reports that others have mentioned in blog postings, indie e-book sales are skyrocketing. Anecdotally, a number of indie authors are reporting healthy and increasing sales. And of course after the big five (and I suppose others) renegotiated their contracts with Amazon to agency pricing, to raise e-book prices above $10, often more than paperbacks and sometimes more than hardbacks (see other comments in this topic to that effect), their e-book sales, unit and revenue, took a substantial hit.
Turing_Machine 11y ago
Yes. Their sales figures basically ignore any indie book without an ISBN (which is, like, 95% of them, and which are now the majority of sales on Amazon). Ebook sales from major publishers have slipped recently because they've jacked up the price to avoid cannibalizing their print sales. Unfortunately for them, the major publishers don't control the market any more. They (and the NYT) are whistling past the graveyard.
Booktrope 11y ago
Good point. It's a piece about traditional publishers (especially the big 5) not book sales in general. Also buried in the article is head of Kindle ops saying, Amazon's ebook sales are continuing to increase. It's not only possible that ebook sales are going up, there's very strong evidence of this. Check out the authorearnings.com site if you want to see just how fast the ebook market is moving away from traditional publishers to self-publishing and alternative approaches.

PLenz 11y ago

To me, this is the best news I've heard all day. See, used books made me - my local library as a kid was heavy on Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, and decades-old travel guides, not so much on other subjects. I very distinctly remember wanting to find Catch-22 and not only was it not available from my local, it wasn't available at any library in the county. But used book stores didn't have that problem. I found my copy of Catch-22 in the back of a Goodwill store. Tolkien came out of a Salvation Army. Scores more came from library sales and yard sales, each a quarter or a dollar at a time.

TheGRS 11y ago
Much of these books you can borrow for free on your kindle from a library though.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Unfortunately you still have to physically go to the library to get them sent to your kindle. It's almost worth $5-10 to me to not have to do that. Edit: I think I need to have a chat with my library.
  - panzagl 11y ago
    No you don't, at least not universally. I get mine sent to me, I think most libraries use the same system (Overdrive).
  - Kevguy 11y ago
    My library systems lets you check them out and download them completely online. Never need to leave the house.

TheGRS 11y ago

I hope this isn't the trend going forward. I don't get the traditionalist love of paperback books most of the time. Like the sort of people who go on and on about exploring book stores or the smell of new paper. I love my Kindle and I really hope to be able to use it as my primary reading source, its just so convenient, light, portable and unobtrusive (especially with that newer back-light option). But the price of new ebooks turns me off for sure, I wouldn't buy a new novel for $20+, in ebook, hardcover, paperback or ever really. $10 is the sweet spot for novels and I think Amazon was driving that well for awhile. I'll stick to older novels that are < $10. Let me also state that paper really does have its merits, at least for now until some smart tablet engineers can solve some problems with the format. I love a comic book as paperback, but that is because I don't think tablets or even color e-ink has quite gotten there yet. I also think technical reference books (like programming guides) are best served in paper. Again, I don't think its easy to flip through pages on a tablet or kindle, but maybe that will be solved some day too.

Nav_Panel 11y ago
I hold fairly different opinions, though I agree that digital reading sources can make sense for completely new books read for pleasure. As a longtime physical product, paper has a lot of benefits. My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years later I can trivially give my old Kindle eBooks to my children. On the other hand, I much prefer having searchable digital technical reference books. I find the flipping and index/table-of-contents referencing to be very "immersion-breaking" when I'm programming. For example, it's much quicker and easier to Ctrl+F for "XCHG" than it is to dig through the intimidating multi-thousand page Intel x86 Instruction Reference. When I was taking an OS course, I had to do this all the time, and I much preferred the pdf reference over the physical one.
- derefr 11y ago
  > My dad can give me a book he read in college, just grab it off the shelf. I can go buy books extremely cheaply secondhand, sometimes free. I can't imagine paying $10 for an ebook when I can go to a used bookstore and pay $3, and then I own it forever. Additionally, once I own it I can share it, give it away, write in the margins, dog-ear pages, leave post-it notes, etc. I also can't imagine a world where 20 years later I can trivially give my old Kindle eBooks to my children. That's a problem with the current incarnation of ebooks as a set of cloud stores. Imagine e-books held—along with all the annotations made to them on your device—in something like a blockchain. Someone pushes you three bucks, and you push them a (license to a) book. Now the license, and the annotations, are in their account, accessible to all their devices.

arjn 11y ago

Physical books still trump e-books for me, though I use both. There is something nicer about a physical book which my e-reader is not able to replicate or replace.

chestnut-tree 11y ago

E-ink readers are small and suited mostly to black-and-white paperback-sized novels or non-fiction. That still leaves an enormous number of books (perhaps the majority) that don't fit the paperback size such as illustrated children's book, or oversized books or...anything with a non-standard layout or larger than paperback-size. Plus, the lack of colour in e-ink readers remains a severe limitation. E-books have taken their place alongside print but I don't think many people expected them to displace print books. Certainly not with the current crop of e-readers.

deegles 11y ago

What's the current law regarding resale of ebooks? Do I "own" them or am I merely licensing them?

InclinedPlane 11y ago
You do not own them.

magic_beans 11y ago

When I'm 85 I'll still be able to open a book I bought in 2012 and read it. Text on paper ain't never changing file format.

36erhefg 11y ago
You make an excellent point. With the prevalence of DRM and ownership, someday you might not be able to read your book, either due to old unsupported device or a format, or even the company going bankrupt. Even if neither of this happens, at some point the standards will change. If you don't use the "cloud" and risk the lockout, you will probably need to backup you information. The hardware changes, physical books don't. This is a worry for some.
Turing_Machine 11y ago
EPUB is HTML, and that's not going anywhere, either.
- 36erhefg 11y ago
  Op is talking about time-spans longer than we've had the internet. Don't flatter yourself by thinking you can predict the future. ( Ironically, neither Firefox nor Opera opened a .epub file out-of-the-box. So much for compatibility. )
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    True but html has the advantage of being a text based markup. The chances are that a text editor in 2050 will open an epub are fairly high. I don't know what the odds of being able to view a 2015 .mobi file at all in 2050 is.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      I'm wondering if the downvoters really think that plain text will be unreadable in 35 years? Seems strange. I can open asci files from the 1970's just fine today...

ChrisLTD 11y ago

I only buy ebooks these days. I love having access to the same material on any device without needing more bookshelves in my small apartment. However, I wish I didn't have to pay a premium for that convenience. I certainly cringe whenever I see a paperback price that's $2-3 cheaper than the ebook. I try not to even look at the used price.

Evenjos 11y ago
Indie authors usually charge less.

aetherson 11y ago

While lots of people are pointing to pricing as the reason for this decline, and that's obviously a big factor, I think you also have to look at the decline of the tablet here. Phones just don't produce a really great reading experience. Actual computers are obviously never going to be a big market. Dedicated e-readers probably don't make sense to people who aren't voracious readers. And tablets are increasingly being squeezed out of the market.

ghaff 11y ago
Maybe. OTOH, at least part of the tablet decline can be attributed to market saturation and the lack of an impetus to upgrade. So there are still a lot of tablets out there. You're probably right about the market for dedicated e-book readers although, they've also gotten very good for very little money.
petra 11y ago
>> Phones just don't produce a really great reading experience. If i'm not mistaken, the kindle is 6".Many phone are 5.5" or 5" which isn't that different - especially with the fact you can control the zoom.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  If I'm reading a book, I don't want to be zooming in and out. It's a pain to hold a phone one handed in a way that also promotes easy page turning without accidental page turning. Reading in bed while my partner sleeps is also a lot less intrusive on my Kindle than my phone (which annoys me too, as unless overridden, the brightness will be far too much in a dark room). I love my iPhone/iPad. But they don't compare to the Kindle for reading experience, at least for me. I just wish color eInk would get here already.

Booktrope 11y ago

More bad information about the publishing business from the NY Times. Ebook sales aren't declining generally; it's big publisher ebook sales that are declining. Ebook sales for self-pubbed authors and indie publishers are growing rapidly. If you have any doubts about this, check out the authorearnings.com website, which tracks sales of ebooks on Amazon and other platforms. Buried in the article is information from Amazon that ebook sales are continuing to rise. But this article isn't about ebook sales -- it's about big publisher ebook sales. The article also says that dedicated ebook reader sales have declined. This is true but not because of a shift away from ebooks. It's that ebook reading is shifting to tablets and phones, a trend that is widely recognized in the industry, but not in this article. The reason that big publishers (and some smaller publishers following the traditional model) are losing ebook sales is that, in the big Hachette - Amazon dustup last year, the big publishers won the ability to keep ebook prices ridiculously high and to prevent discounting by Amazon. So big publishers routinely price ebooks about the same or higher than paperbacks. Of course their ebook sales are suffering! But self-pubbed and indie publisher books are priced much lower than print books, and are of course gaining market share very quickly. The NY Times reports on publishing are all biased toward big traditional publishers - after all, that's essentially what the Times is. (To the Times' credit, they have a public editor who critiques their stories, and the public editor has said that the last two major stories in the Times about Amazon failed to meet journalistic standards.) They ignore information like what's on authorearnings.com because they're trying to get people to believe there's a trend away from ebooks. There certainly are some people who decide what kind of book to buy according to what they think the latest trend is. But if you're looking for accurate information about the book business, don't expect it from the Times.

bduerst 11y ago
This is a misconception - it's like saying Hollywood is worried about Youtube celebs. There was an episode on "What's the point" (a 538 podcast) where book publishers talked about how they use data in their industry. Publishers are primarily interested in cultivating "star" authors and use social media + a number of other signals to find them. They were asked about it and basically said that the hostility between publishers and self-published authors is only perceived, and in reality the self-publishing makes it easier to find the star authors and pick them up.

macjohnmcc 11y ago

I am not surprised. I wanted to buy a book and found the physical book price was $39 but I could get it used for about $8. The ebook was $28. Even without the used price option I would have rather had the physical book for the price difference between $39 and $28. Ebooks would be more worthwhile to me at the current prices IF you could get updated versions of the book (errata not new content).

ilamont 11y ago

Small publisher here. I believe Ebook sales have been generally flat or declining for many titles for the following reasons: * Pricing issues * Huge influx of new/republished titles entering ebook distribution channels are outpacing demand, including many free or low-cost self-published titles * Kindle Fire sales negatively impacting ebook reading habits encourages people to do other things besides read (video, apps, games, etc.) * Decline of marketplaces/platforms that are unable to compete, e.g. Nook, Sony. * Subscription plans (especially Kindle Unlimited) eating away at paid digital downloads. * Some people prefer print Many established publishers are still focused on print because that’s where the sales are and that’s where they still wield considerable power. For the short technology guides I publish, print accounts for 70-80% of sales. Certain ebook marketplaces that could be doing well (Apple iBookstore, Google Play) have really stagnated, unfortunately.

krasin 11y ago
There's also an issue of Ebook lock-ins. Some people are tired to have their collection of purchased books in various incompatible formats available to read through different subsets of devices / apps.
- ilamont 11y ago
  I agree that it is frustrating. I sell a lot of PDFs through Gumroad, and I think many of the buyers want that cross-platform compatibility (and the ability to print out specific pages). However, when I make ebook bundles available with .mobi, epub and PDF versions of a particular titles, relatively few people buy them.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    Do you charge more for the bundle? If so, sincere question: why, if it's the same content?
DannoHung 11y ago
As an ebook consumer, the single biggest reason I don't buy more ebooks is because I have to spend time and energy figuring out if the ebook has DRM or if I can remove the DRM afterwards. Also, I spend time thinking about the fact that if I ever move to Kindle, any epubs I have won't work regardless of DRM. I can't speak for other readers, but this is why I don't buy or read books as much as I used to. And I used to read a lot of books.

acd 11y ago

Sometime I wonder what the markering sales tag lines would be if the book was released after the e-book. Zero battery usage. Spill friendly throw it away. Environmentally friendly fully recycable without ewaste. High contrast If the price is similar, why go ebook unless you need it delivered right now? Ebook has an advantage of of library in your pocket, zero delivery time.

mkaziz 11y ago
That's outweighed by the fact that I don't own the ebook in the same way I own the book. The book is mine to keep, loan, rent, throw away, donate, etc, in a way that's not governed by esoteric license agreements. I can wait 2 days for that. If you can't wait, consider that if you buy a print book from Amazon that has an ebook available, Amazon will let you read the beginning of the book on your kindle app/device, until the paper book ships in.

panzagl 11y ago

For me a lot of the slow down has to do with how transparent it has made the publisher price model. I can buy a new book today for $15.00, wait a year and get it for $10, or wait longer and maybe get it for $5, if I haven't gotten it out of the library by then. Publishers want to tax me for my impatience, and I'm not going to fall for it.

douche 11y ago
The same thing is trashing the indie video game market on PC. Why buy a full-price game (unless you absolutely must have it now), when you can keep your ears open and snag it for pennies on a Humble Bundle deal, or at 10-25% on a Steam sale?

sebular 11y ago

This article just feels irrelevant and completely out of touch. As many people have pointed out here, e-books are insanely popular, just not necessarily through the traditional distributors. Personally, I also believe that there's only one reason why the paper book isn't far less popular than it is, and it's entirely temporary. Get out of the tech-minded echo chamber and ask a person why they would still buy a paper book when they could buy an e-book, and they'll pretty much only respond with "paper books just feel right to me". The problem is completely unrelated to pricing. Since the beginning of time, people have comfortably navigated the sliding price structure of books. Some people want to buy the next Hunger Games on day 1, and they pay $39.99 to buy the hardcover and find out what happens to Katniss. Some people wait until the hype dies down. Some people borrow from a friend, and yes, some people still go to the library. And those exact same rules apply to e-books. The entire conversation just reeks of idiocy and a bunch of industry coalitions blindly grasping around for places to point fingers because they apparently are overlooking the simple thing that everybody constantly says. I've already said it, but I'll say it again: "Paper books just feel right to me." Steve Jobs had a beautiful intuition about peoples' relationships with technology. It was a skill that's so painfully rare that he's still known as basically the only guy capable of figuring out what would make an advanced piece of technology attractive to an average person. Sadly, he was completely wrong about the iPad being an acceptable replacement for a book, and I feel like many people are continuing to follow him down the wrong path. This has nothing to do with distribution and pricing. It has nothing to do with the cost of manufacturing an e-book being far less than a paper book. People still pay tons of money for games on Steam. The single problem is that e-readers aren't good. They're garbage. That's it. Amazon is the clear leader, but it's not good enough. For anyone who wants to dominate the e-reader industry, here's your free advice: 1. Make an e-reader with a beautiful e-paper screen capable of displaying full color. 2. Make the screen refresh very quickly 3. Give it sensible touch gestures that you never accidentally trigger, and give it very useful physical buttons. 4. Make sure it can do everything a book can do. Can you quickly thumb through a 500 page novel on a kindle? Nope. Can you easily write something in the margin? Nope. Can you bookmark your current reading position, and also earmark a few other favorite spots in the book? Nope. 5. Give it a non-tech appearance. Make the damn thing out of wood. 6. Sell it in 3 sizes from day 1: The current standard paperback-ish size, as well as a smaller smartphone-sized one, and finally a large one, like ~15 inches. Aside from the challenges of building a better color e-paper screen with great refresh, the others are just so obvious and so stupidly ignored. I'm actually frustrated just writing this. Make the e-reader personal, make it a lovable object. People will not stop throwing their money at this.

DanBC 11y ago

One problem this article doesn't talk about is that people who get rejected from every publishing house (or who don't bother sending to traditional publishers) can now just throw their book on Amazon. Ploughing through the slush pile was never seen as a fun job, so it's weird that the stuff in that pile is now being sold. http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/may/23/theshockingtruthaboutthes http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/may/23/thesh... There's no sensible way for me to find decent new content, so I stick to authors I already know (until they put out a duff book, where I drop them) or I read things like One Story which has let me discover some amazing writers. (eg Caitlin Horrocks http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Is-Not-Your-City/dp/1932511911 http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Is-Not-Your-City/dp/1932511911 ) https://www.one-story.com/ https://www.one-story.com/

Evenjos 11y ago
Although any moron can self-publish a book, the serious ones stand apart with professional book covers and blurbs, marketing, and multiple novels. The ones who "trend" well often get picked up by traditional publishers or movie studios (as was the case with Andy Weir's "The Martian.") The traditional publishing industry consists of trend-chasers, not trend-setters. So yes, the self-publishing world is full of raw sewage, but there are some diamonds and gems in that sewage--and they usually look shiny, with endorsements and professional covers.

15charlimit 11y ago

I only buy physical books in "collector grade" hardcover form anymore, and those are very few and far between and mainly for display. It's infinitely more convenient to do 99% of normal reading on an e-reader. The recent surge in ebook pricing from amazon/etc does nothing but drive me to other (cheaper) forms of entertainment/leisure. I'm not spending $25 on an ebook, I don't care if it's by a NY Times Bestselling Author. $9.99 is comfortably within the "impulse purchase" range and still provides an enormous margin over cost of production/distribution. $20+ is well outside the "impulse purchase" range for an intangible product like an ebook. Not to mention that a "free" copy is literally 20 seconds and a few clicks away.

facepalm 11y ago

Could it just be the increased prices publishers forced on Amazon/ebooks? If a hardcover books costs the same as the ebook, I am also tempted to buy the hardcover. The thinking is that I can sell it once i have read it, but I tend to forget about the hassles associated with physical stuff. The ebook would still be the better choice for me, but human psyche is too easily fooled. Anyway, I expect that to be just a temporary "victory" for hardcover books. I also seem to remember William Gibson tweet that the losses in ebook sales are mainly in young readers who can't afford the pricier versions, but I have no source for that. So maybe both ebook and hardcover will simply lose out to YouTube.

uhtred 11y ago

This for me is good news. I love reading printed books. If it's a novel, then I enjoy being able to relax, away from an electronic screen, and go into another world for a time. I also love the feel and smell of books, and the cover art work. And browsing a book store to find my next read is, for me, much more of a pleasure than browsing Amazon. Also, there's something nice about a well filled bookshelf, and nosing through someone else's gives you a great sense of who that person is.

WalterBright 11y ago

I actually prefer to read scanned paperbacks on my ereader rather than the ebook versions. With my Samsung tablet they are the same size as a paperback, and the display looks like a paperback page. I like the typography, layout, and general imperfections of a scanned page. The letters are all slightly different, and are imperfectly placed. Ebooks are a bit too perfect and sterile. I'd like to take it a step further and have the background be a scanned blank page, again so it looks a bit imperfect like paper does. I buy the paperbacks, scan them (takes 5-10 minutes), then throw the book into the recycle bin.

mmanfrin 11y ago
> I buy the paperbacks, scan them (takes 5-10 minutes), then throw the book into the recycle bin. Poe's law is pinging.
- alayne 11y ago
  I just assumed he had a multi sheet scanner and cut off the binding.
knight17 11y ago
How can you scan a paperback book in 10 minutes? Curious about the kind of hardware-software set up that allows to do that in 10 minutes
- WalterBright 11y ago
  Cut off the binding and use a sheet feeding scanner. Turning the pages sideways runs them through twice as fast.

cyanbane 11y ago

It's definitely the price of ebooks. I started purchasing tangible books again in the last six months. They end up being almost always the same price as the ebook on Amazon, so I just donate the book to the public library when I am done with it.

dunham 11y ago

A recent WSJ article suggests that the recent price increases in ebooks have caused both the drop in sales of ebooks and a drop in overall revenue for the publishers. http://www.wsj.com/articles/e-book-sales-weaken-amid-higher-prices-1441307826

xbmcuser 11y ago

Big 5 publishers eBook sales have declined becuase of agency pricing. Overall eBook sales have not declined.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

There are three huge problems that e-books haven't solved, which has been holding them back. First, consumer surplus. (Read this if you haven't: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...) Printed books use different editions and market availability to segment the market and bring in a significant amount of consumer surplus revenue. e-books have very weak mechanisms to capture consumer surplus, and that represents a huge potential loss of revenue. In theory it might be possible to make that up on the other end with higher volume (see, for example, steam sales and humble bundles) but so far e-book sales models have been too constrained to enable that to happen very often. Second, commodity pricing. This is a big problem across the board in a lot of media (games, movies, music, etc.) but e-books have just doubled down on the same model. Books are not like dried beans, you don't just go to a store and buy books by the pound, but that's the model the industry has increasingly been rushing towards. With only popularity as the sole determinant of total revenue. This is a massively flawed model that hurts many talented writers and perverts the market in unhealthy ways. Third, ownership. People with physical books can gift them to others, or sell them, or loan them. They can let their friends, their children, their other relatives, or their family's friends borrow them and read them. They are a profound asset of learning and shared culture. An e-book, however, is still by default a jealously guarded personal possession that cannot be easily loaned, sold, gifted, or inherited. Given the importance of books, this is a profound disadvantage of e-books. Fourth, vendor lock-in. The average user experience with e-books represents a substantial dependency on a particular corporation (such as Amazon). If, say, Amazon went out of business it could be especially difficult to gain access to ones Amazon purchased e-books. Imagine, for example, some sort of world-wide disaster, and now there are no more new kindles, no more Amazon, etc. What happens when your one device storing all your books finally dies? This is similar to the ownership problem. Buying an e-book today is partly making a bet that the company that sold you that e-book will be around for as long as that book is relevant. Given the history of both corporations and of books, that's actually not a very smart bet. e-books have a lot of short-term advantages but they have a lot of long-term disadvantages, at least as they exist today. That's not an intractable problem but it's one that so far the big powers in the e-book world have been deaf to hearing.

habosa 11y ago

I don't know my own reasoning, but I am part of this trend. I have owned every Kindle model from the very first up until the paperwhite. There were about 3 or 4 years where I did not read paper books. But recently I have gone to paper-only, and my Kindle sits uncharged. I can think of a few things I like about paper books (although I still love the Kindle): * Bookstores are awesome and getting a recommendation from an employee is much better than browsing Amazon. * Used books are cheap! A used paperback is often cheaper than an eBook. * With paper I have sense of progress as I feel the right half of the book shrink as I read. * I can easily lend a friend a paper book, I have shared many books with people recently but with the Kindle they had to buy their own. However I still think the Kindle paperwhite is one of the best single-purpose electronic devices ever (rivaling the iPod Classics). Amazing screen, lightweight, fairly cheap, etc. It's just made to read with, unlike an iPad or a laptop.

nhebb 11y ago

One of the reasons that I don't buy more e-books is because my Kindle's battery charge is often depleted. Somewhere along the line, Amazon changed airplane mode such that ads are still displayed all the time. I haven't been an avid reader for the last year or two, and when I do get the urge, I pick up my Kindle only to find the battery is dead. While it's charging, I find something else to do. By the time I get the urge to read again, the battery is depleted again. When you're an avid reader who remembers to charge his device regularly, the Kindle is great. When you're an intermittent reader, it just another electronic brick.

JupiterMoon 11y ago

Multiple reasons why as a keen reader (a whale to the print publishing industry) I don't use ebooks. - DRM: When I pay for a book I want it on any of my devices my whole life and I don't want to have to strip some crappy DRM first. - price: I can't justify how much more ebooks cost. - battery life: I get bored having to keep my existing devices charged I don't need another one to keep charged. - First sale: one has the right to lend physical books to friends and family, to me this social aspect is part of the reading experience. - Tracking: I like that I can buy a book for cash and no one counts how many pages I read and when I read it. Books are partly about intellectual freedom and tracking is the enemy of intellectual freedom. - Difficult to keep my place: For technical books I can look stuff up in books I know based upon rough location very quickly. E-reader devicies (in my opinion) need more skeumorphism.

Havoc 11y ago

If they priced the e-books a bit more reasonably then they'd sell more.

visarga 11y ago
I'd be willing to pay 10 bucks for a thousand page views of any books from Google Books (not all from a single book). I like to dig around. A page view should count as a page where I spent more than 5 seconds. What counts for me most is the full text search with highlight capability, and of course, the sheer number of books they have in there. A single book should be much cheaper. I see ebooks priced at 100 bucks in the Google Books store.
- Havoc 11y ago
  To be honest the paying per page view somehow rubs me the wrong way. It'll make me think about cost whilst enjoying the book which I don't want. I just want a reasonable price. e.g. I bought a book today. 10 GBP for paper. 5 for ebook. Thats pretty reasonable. Still good money but acknowledges that the real life costs are much lower. If its like 3% cheaper then thats just devoid of any link to real costs.

artumi-richard 11y ago

One thing I've noticed since using an e-reader that I've not heard anyone else mention, is that I've become far less happy with the quality of print and the quality of the paper in the physical books I'm buying. I once read a book [1] that had unusually high quality paper which made it noticeably denser and the pages had more flex in them, which made one handed reading a doddle. It wasn't flawless, as the print would smudge if I rubbed my slightly moist fingers against it. Still, every time I go to a book now I'm usually thinking "the type is too large" or "that font is awful" or "the paper is too thick". I think it's time the industry had another look at how paperbacks in particular should look and feel, given the influence of the e-reader. 1: http://www.amazon.com/Unreliable-Sources-20th-Century-Reported/dp/0330435639/ http://www.amazon.com/Unreliable-Sources-20th-Century-Report...

user_666 11y ago

The NYTimes misinterpreted the AAP data it reported: http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/23/nytimes-mistakes-legacy-publishing-stats-for-market-stats-foresees-the-decline-of-ebooks/ http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/23/nytimes-mistakes-le... A more complete look at the ebook market paints a very different picture: http://fortune.com/2015/09/24/ebook-sales/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/24/ebook-sales/ https://stratechery.com/2015/are-ebooks-declining-or-just-the-publishers-oyster-goes-out-of-business-media-notes/ https://stratechery.com/2015/are-ebooks-declining-or-just-th...

ionised 11y ago

I've got a Kindle Paperwhite which I've used every so often but I still prefer 'wads of dead tree' books. I bought it thinking 'hey this is the future!' and expecting myself to get a lot of use out of it but I just haven't really. Last five books I've read have been physical copies. The only use I really get out of it now is if I want something on short notice and am not willing to wait for a physical delivery, which isn't often. People cite the storage space of e-books as a plus for using them over paper books, so you can have lots of books when you're on the move. I've never understood this though. When I'm commuting to work, or travelling on a plane or something, how likely is it I'm going to read two or more books in one sitting? I can see it if you need lots of technical texts at hand for reference or something, but most people use e-books to read novels and I don't understand why you need your entire library of novels at your fingertips while you take the train 40 minutes to another town. You're not going to read two or more books in that travel time. If I'm sitting at home I will always prefer a hard copy of whatever I'm reading. In spite of how awesome people claim e-ink to be now I still find it much easier and more relaxing to read from paper, especially if it's a technical manual. Perhaps it's because I'm staring at computer screens all day at work, and when I program at home or play games. The last thing I want when reading for pleasure and to relax is to stare down at another screen. Plus there is something meditative in the act of reading from a physical copy that I just don't get from an electronic device. Then there is the issue of DRM which I am against in forms, and the dumb prices that are charged for e-books.