4 ms·

Well the market apparently disagrees with you. Ebook growth is flat or falling. People buy 5 traditional books for every ebook sold. Ebooks have their place. P

Well the market apparently disagrees with you. Ebook growth is flat or falling. People buy 5 traditional books for every ebook sold. Ebooks have their place. People tell me they like to take them on vacation as backup. I figure half our customers have dedicated ebook readers, and almost all of them have devices that have the capacity to read ebooks. Yet our sales are up, and we're hiring. I'll switch to ebooks when Soylent becomes the primary source of calories in this country. In the meantime I have a nice organic salad to eat and a stack of books to read. Source: I own a bookstore.

prostoalex 10y ago
For a new release if a hard copy of the book is priced at $20, the e-book is priced at $16 or so. When I'm done with hard copy, I typically either sell it on Amazon marketplace at roughly $12-14, while e-book's resale value is $0. I am not penny-pinching, but there are very few e-books that I want to actually own in order to re-read later, and I'd rather not have the digital junk pile up.
lb1lf 10y ago
My experience echo the trend you describe above. I have a Kindle. Love it to bits; it has replaced all the paperbacks I used to buy when traveling (Which I do. A lot.) Can't be beat for its compact size and instant gratification - within seconds of deciding I'd like a new book, it is downloaded. Absolutely terrible for anything but clean text, though - add illustrations to the mix, and it looks like it is rendered without any thought given to aesthetics whatsoever. Most photos are just greyish muddles which had better been left out. However, one (unexpected) change occurred after I'd had the Kindle for a while - I realized how much I missed holding an actual book while reading. During the six or so years since I bought my Kindle, I've bought (and mostly read!) 3-400 books; most of them hard covers and quite a lot from what one could call the anti-Kindle - publishers like The Folio Society. (For those not familiar with it - they go the extra mile to make every title they publish a small piece of art - good paper, proper smyth sewn bindings, more often than not an illustrator is commissioned, slipcases - still surprisingly affordable, at least to someone from Norway) ) Norwegian bibliophiles suffer from the fact that just about every bookstore is owned by one of the larger publishing houses - guess what that does to prices; a new novel costs some US$45-50 on release. They even got a law enacted which makes it a crime to sell a book at too deep a discount!
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  The Folio Society, Franklin Library, Limited Editions Club and other very nice editions are super popular. We'd sell more, but some people are shocked at the thought of paying $30-$80 for a single (second-hand) book. Some people are satisfied with video games about trains. Other people build model railways. Points on both sides really. :) (And some people go nuts and buy actual trains, but that's another story and a whole different price point.)

prostoalex 10y ago

For a new release if a hard copy of the book is priced at $20, the e-book is priced at $16 or so. When I'm done with hard copy, I typically either sell it on Amazon marketplace at roughly $12-14, while e-book's resale value is $0. I am not penny-pinching, but there are very few e-books that I want to actually own in order to re-read later, and I'd rather not have the digital junk pile up.

lb1lf 10y ago

My experience echo the trend you describe above. I have a Kindle. Love it to bits; it has replaced all the paperbacks I used to buy when traveling (Which I do. A lot.) Can't be beat for its compact size and instant gratification - within seconds of deciding I'd like a new book, it is downloaded. Absolutely terrible for anything but clean text, though - add illustrations to the mix, and it looks like it is rendered without any thought given to aesthetics whatsoever. Most photos are just greyish muddles which had better been left out. However, one (unexpected) change occurred after I'd had the Kindle for a while - I realized how much I missed holding an actual book while reading. During the six or so years since I bought my Kindle, I've bought (and mostly read!) 3-400 books; most of them hard covers and quite a lot from what one could call the anti-Kindle - publishers like The Folio Society. (For those not familiar with it - they go the extra mile to make every title they publish a small piece of art - good paper, proper smyth sewn bindings, more often than not an illustrator is commissioned, slipcases - still surprisingly affordable, at least to someone from Norway) ) Norwegian bibliophiles suffer from the fact that just about every bookstore is owned by one of the larger publishing houses - guess what that does to prices; a new novel costs some US$45-50 on release. They even got a law enacted which makes it a crime to sell a book at too deep a discount!

canadian_voter 10y ago
The Folio Society, Franklin Library, Limited Editions Club and other very nice editions are super popular. We'd sell more, but some people are shocked at the thought of paying $30-$80 for a single (second-hand) book. Some people are satisfied with video games about trains. Other people build model railways. Points on both sides really. :) (And some people go nuts and buy actual trains, but that's another story and a whole different price point.)