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While I find this article sad, it's ultimately inevitable as far as I see it. I read a lot, and I enjoy collecting books, but I ceased buying physical books a
by AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
While I find this article sad, it's ultimately inevitable as far as I see it.
I read a lot, and I enjoy collecting books, but I ceased buying physical books a long time ago. I've started backfilling my ebook collection based on my old physical collections. At some point, I will be able to find digital replacements for 99% of my physical book collections and I will eventually find a decent way to digitize the rest. Ultimately, digital books are just better for me. I can pull my Kindle out of my bag and have a copy of every book I've ever read and access to basically anything I might want to read. I may mourn the loss of paper books, I absolutely do mourn the loss of bookstores but ultimately ebooks are just a far superior product. The fact that they are cheaper doesn't personally factor into the equation to me.
Ultimately, I think the digital print industry is just shaking off vestiges that the physical print industry required and the digital economy no longer requires. In a few (more like 10-20) years the amount of value-add coming from the publishers to writers is going to drift close enough to zero that I think the whole industry will go closer to self-publishing and become far more egalitarian.
You'll pay someone to proof your book, someone to (digitally) typeset it, and someone to upload it to the top N digital distribution platforms. (Apple iBooks, Amazon, ?? who else) and the revenue cut from that will be far, far lower than what today's publishers get. You can obviously hire a publicist and have them do that facet of things too.
- na85 9y agoContrarily, I buy physical books and have stopped using my kindle entirely. I prefer to own the book, and not merely a license to use a DRM'ed instance of it.
- pritambaral 9y agoThis is exactly why I use EPUBs. On a non-Kindle e-ink reader, on my phones, and on my computers.
- Operyl 9y agoMeh, there’s a good number of writers that publish their books DRM-free, though. At least, most everything I read has a DRM-free edition for sale.
- mcguire 9y agoAnd then there's non-fiction, which never really works right as an ebook.
- freddie_mercury 9y agoI have hundreds of non-fiction ebooks. It works just fine most of the time. Non-fiction doesn't mean "programming books". The vast majority of non-fiction is plain text with no graphics, maps, or special content whatsoever.
- mcguire 9y agoFootnotes, weirdly, always seem to be a problem. Also, paging back to find a poorly remembered reference is hard.
- ghaff 9y agoFootnotes is one of my complaints about Kindle non-fiction. And personally I love using them. Not in the authoritative documentation sense but in the parenthetical commentary that you might be interested in but which I don’t really want to break the flow of writing to provide. A lot of non-fiction works ok on Kindle but it can be a bit hit or miss. I do generally prefer ebooks though just to decrease clutter at home and because I do a lot of long form reading while traveling.
- freddie_mercury 9y agoI can't say I've ever had problems with footnotes. They work fine for me. Paging back and forth can be slow, I agree. I usually use full-text search. Which doesn't work at all with paper books.
- AdamJacobMuller 9y agoI agree with your sentiment and therefore I use Calibre and strip the DRM.
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoI keenly pirate ebooks because I travel a great deal and I find a Kindle a handy, lightweight way to carry a large collection with me. However, I am still keenly buying paper books, too: eventually I will get tired of moving around so much, and it will be nice to have a home library to browse around in during my later years. Plus, there are certain genres like poetry that simply aren't enjoyable to read in ebook form. No reason people can't do both formats.
- Eric_WVGG 9y agoJust out of curiosity, why don’t you keenly buy your ebooks?
- AdamJacobMuller 9y agoI buy them (generally from Amazon) and then strip the DRM so that I do actually own them. Just as illegal as what he's doing but more ethical. I wish there was a better way for me to just pay the authors a fair price without giving Amazon and the publishers such a large cut, but, it is what it is.
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoI am from Eastern Europe on an average Eastern European salary and if I actually bought as much media as I want to consume, then I basically wouldn’t have money left for any other necessities in life. These days it is completely normal for people to preview music from YouTube or torrent communities before deciding to buy the physical artifact. I don’t see why books should be any different.