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> There’s a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the reality th

> There’s a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the reality that very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library. With a digital book (or any other digital good) I lose all of that. Since I'm getting so much less, why should I pay the same price? The digitization makes it impossible for businesses to control the distribution of their products, unless they go full DRM and effectively prevent people from owning the things they buy – but in that case, there should be no surprise that people don't want to pay quite as much.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
The authors and publishers created this problem and the marketplace is pushing back. I was buying a lot of e-books when they were significantly cheaper than paper. Now that's no longer true and I've renewed my library card for the first time in 20 years. I already own too many paper books and I don't want any more. But I also refuse to pay as much for e-books as paper. Libraries to the rescue.
avar 7y ago
As a consumer, the digital e-book is inherently more valuable than a physical book. I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books. There's all sorts of other value, like search functions, not having to fill my house or storage box with books, and avoiding that awkward every-other-page-sucks while reading a book laying sideways in bed.
- nikbackm 7y ago
  Those are properties of the e-reader rather than the e-book itself, in other words, not something you should be paying for when buying the book.
- kelnage 7y ago
  But such a back and forth that could go on forever. Many e-books vendors frequently reduce their value by limiting access to a specific app/reader, or limit how useful the functionality you describe can be. For example, search is very much restricted within Kindle (e.g. I can't search for words across my entire library, I have to go into a specific book). And whilst it is true that some people are limited in how much physical space they have access to, it is certainly not universal. Hence putting a hard price on this functionality is nigh impossible - whereas re-sale value is often easier to estimate and clearly tangible to the consumer. Claiming that they are equal is certainly not clear to me.
  - avar 7y ago
    I'm not claiming they're equal, I'm pointing out that the GP's "since I'm getting so much less, why should I pay the same price" point is subjective, and not a statement of fact. Sure, some people prefer hardcopies, good for them. But claiming that e-books being priced similarly is some market failure is taking it too far, for some of us it seems perfectly reasonable. If e-books were priced higher (even as much as 50% more) I'd still buy them over physical copies.
    - fragmede 7y ago
      The "market" has decided that Amazon deserves a near-total monopoly on the e-book reader market, which allows them to unfairly pressure publishers who have no realistic alternative if they actually want online sales. (Publishers are not a fan of Kindle unlimited.) Just recently Amazon released a book ahead of embargo and they will face zero repercussion for doing so. A market that had more than one way to "publish" books online would be a different ballgame than the one we're playing now
      - JetSpiegel 7y ago
        > Amazon released a book ahead of embargo and they will face zero repercussion for doing so. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49592021 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49592021
- heinrichhartman 7y ago
  I feel exactly the opposite. I hate reading stuff on screens. - It hurts my eyes when I do this for hours. - It comes with lots of distractions. - Digital Annotations are a PITA - Zapping through a book works much better in hard-copy If I am supposed to spent 1h+ reading your content. You better make sure I can buy a printed copy.
  - mellosouls 7y ago
    If you are reading on a proper* e-reader, eyestrain shouldn't be an issue. *ie classic Kindle with e-ink or similar, not a tablet like iPad/Android equivalent or the annoyingly named Amazon "Kindle" Fire etc. Not great for tech manuals, admittedly
    - eyegor 7y ago
      Actually if you're willing to pay for it, you can buy 10+" eink screens with wacom digitizers on top (drawing pen support). They're quite good for tech papers and manuals because they're a similar size to real paper, no eye strain, you can draw notes directly on them, and ofc you can cram tons of papers/textbooks/manuals into something that weighs next to nothing. Edit: if you're curious, look into the likebook mimas as a starting point. There are other options, that just happens to be the one I've used.
      - uneekname 7y ago
        As a student that looks like exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm never going to shell out $400 for one when I can get an early-gen Kindle for free. Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.
        pgeorgi 7y ago
        > Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays. Unlikely to happen: similar to silicon, eink's yield (that is, amount of parts produced with no errors) goes down quickly (quadratic if not cubic, I forgot) with increasing size. A system based on lots of eink chiplets with small enough margins that you can tile them could scale up, but the margins are also a difficult area.
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  > I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books. Isn't that a FOMO argument, though ? As a consumer the advantage of e-books are: ease of organization and ease of buying, no page flipping sounds in bed, ease of transportation. But what I really want ? A real, thick book, with something like 200-400 sheets made up of magical e-ink so I can have a physical map of the book I am reading.
  - cheschire 7y ago
    Imagine a ribbed touch sensitive bezel on a regular single-screen e-reader. When you rub your thumb across it, it flips the pages in the reader by a proportional amount.
  - nirvdrum 7y ago
    A multi-page e-ink book would be nice. I love my Kindle for certain types of reading, but when I read, I like to flip back to previous sections. Search doesn't work because I rarely know verbatim what I'm looking for or the search terms are flooded with answers from the entire book, when I really want it narrowed down to a particular area. With physical books, I just remember roughly how far into the book it was and can jump back there and start searching. I'd love to successfully replicate that with a Kindle.
    - toast0 7y ago
      Can you use the table of contents on your kindle? It's not the same, of course, and some books don't have a usable chapter system (too many or too few), but if you've got an idea of where you want to go, it should get you close.
      - nirvdrum 7y ago
        Unfortunately, I really only know roughly how thick the stack of pages was. I realize it's an imprecise metric. And I might be able to convert to a rough percentage and figure out a page number from there. But, then the page turning is just slow enough to make rapid scanning like that annoying.
- JackFaker 7y ago
  Are you arguing that convenience function enabled by the digital format is more valuable than ownership of a physical good?
- Fnoord 7y ago
  I like both. I'd like to think physical and digital books each have their pros and cons. I try to be pragmatic about the issue. Thinking back about school I remember the heavy weight of the backpack. That can be more efficient, I thought back then. Same with vacation however I don't want to unlock my ereader for border patrol, as a matter of principle. Not sure if we are at that point already. The point is, each have also privacy implications.
- potta_coffee 7y ago
  You can say it's more valuable, but not to me. I get almost zero enjoyment from reading digitally. I don't know why but paper books feel better. I don't like the interface on my kindle for actually reading. As a device it's good but as a book, it just sucks. Also, I'm usually only reading one or two books at a time, so I don't need an entire library with me. I do use the kindle for technical books, because those are boring to ready anyway.
Freak_NL 7y ago
People seem to instinctively feel that an e-book shouldn't cost as much as a real book. A paperback edition of a book often has multiple owners throughout its — sometimes considerable — lifespan. That's simply part of the deal, and it always has been. E-books lack the ability to share, sell, and pass it on. That's fine, but the market won't bear nearly the same price as a paper book that can do all those things. An e-book should in all fairness cost perhaps a third or fourth of a paper book — i.e., the price of a paperback edition divided by the average number of readers it tends to have. Not pricing the goods accordingly leads to where we are now: mass piracy of e-books and hardly anyone feeling guilty about it. I don't read e-books myself (I take delight in my collection of paper books), but as far as I know sharing USB-drives filled with thousands of e-books is common in a lot of circles — with middle-aged people in particular. Compare this with piracy in games, music, and video, which is comparatively rare due to the affordable and easy legal alternatives, and it is hard not to see that the market is simply not offering the best solution.
- fragmede 7y ago
  Video piracy's gone down specifically due to Netflix. As each brand stops allowing Neflix to host their content, and as long as income remains to flat for a large portion of America, I'm expecting video piracy to make a comeback as soon as people remember it exists. Subscribing to HBO, CBS, Disney, and whoever else, on top of Netflix, will soon become cost prohibitive. Doing without isn't a consideration, so illegal alternatives will thrive. (Not that they haven't been, but Netflix was sufficiently convenient that most people didn't bother.)
  - shantly 7y ago
    It's more about the convenience than the price, for me. I'd pay $30, maybe $40, per month for access to basically anything I want to watch (past that I may as well buy as I watch, and even at $40 I'd have to do the math to make sure it's sensible). It's having to keep up with several subscriptions, having to figure out where something is when I want to watch it, inconveniences like logging in on a new device, expired sessions on devices that don't have password managers (or keyboards...), multiple different interfaces (for basically the same thing) to stay familiar with, crap like that.
hrktb 7y ago
> a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library. For me this was true ten years ago. The tides have shifted. Now a physical copy means: it will degrade faster than my devices (think books for children). It will take physical place, we’ll have to find it (I can ping my iPad, not my books). Depending on the country it’s printed, it might not even come to my life, the price will be double, or it will be 3 weeks after the moment I wanted to read it. It wi be in a single place, I can’t share it with my family or even my devices the way I share my amazon account. There’s a physical limit to how many I can keep: floors cracking under the load is a thing of the past. It’d need a very compelling reason to buy any physical book at this point. I get the tradeoffs, but I had enough time with digital copies to make them work under the best conditions for me, making the upside way higher than the downsides.
- orbifold 7y ago
  Physical books last at least ~50 years. That is longer than any physical computer lasts and longer than any of the companies that offer cloud services (IBM doesn't offer e-Books yet) have existed. There is a good chance that some of them will go bankrupt over this time.
  - someguydave 7y ago
    which is why you should get your e-books as drm-free local files
    - ForHackernews 7y ago
      And store those files where? Do you own any working digital media from 1969? I know my carefully curated collection of 5.25" floppy discs are all corrupt and unreadable today.
      - selimthegrim 7y ago
        Temperature variation? What was their advertised lifetime?
dageshi 7y ago
Honestly, the opposite is true for me. Ebooks download immediately and take up zero space, you can carry them all with you in one device. Way better than physical books as far as I'm concerned. Also, in terms of the sheer entertainment to cost ratio books are incredibly good value at current pricing.
- shantly 7y ago
  I think the divide here's largely along the lines of what people read. E-readers are king for light fiction or airport nonfic, for instance, but pretty awful for heavy nonfiction reading (think: textbooks), with everything else falling somewhere in between—poetry: somewhat bad on ereaders but maybe tolerable, depending on what it is; good, older literature, depends on how much you want/need footnotes or to refer to other parts of the book, and how inclined you are to annotate; books of any kind used for actual research, you probably want several open at once and a bunch more with tons of bookmarks in them that you can have open to a certain spot (you remember which one with spatial memory and maybe bookmark color) in a few seconds, which gets dicey with e-readers, even if you have more than one; and so on. Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens.
  - sib 7y ago
    "Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens." True - and this, for me, is another benefit of eBooks; I can and do read the same eBook on multiple different devices depending on my current mix of needs or priorities.
Noos 7y ago
The ebook takes up no space, and can't be damaged or lost. It doesn't even have physical dimensions, so if you want you can read it on a tiny ultra portable screen or a large tablet for ease of use. All ebooks have large print options where as physical books these are separate purchases and may not be able to even have for anything but the most popular books. ebooks are searchable to a word level, where physical books rely on indexing. There's a lot of benefits to ebooks as well.
dawnerd 7y ago
I feel the same way about video games. When I do buy them, I try to buy a physical copy that I can sell/lend/whatever. Digital copies are pretty much useless once you're done playing them. Also kinda ridiculous that digital copies cost the same as physical, or often times cost more when the physical copies go on sale.
zajio1am 7y ago
> With a digital book (or any other digital good) I lose all of that. AFAIK, first-sale doctrine is accepted in both US and EU. There are ECJ judicates confirming legality of reselling used software. So i am pretty sure i can sell, trade or donate my e-books.
rabboRubble 7y ago
Not to mention libraries may only loan an ebook X number of times. A librarian told me this when I asked if there was a way to donate my digital ebook to them for their collection. Answer: no. Reason: because the ebook they have has a lending cap.
8ytecoder 7y ago
E-Books have some convenience that physical books don't: 1. I can pick it up from any device I have at any time, 2. I can pick up any book depending on my mood at that point in time (I usually read one fiction, one non-fiction and one craft related simultaneously) 3. I can highlight and keep notes with the book that's in a form I can just copy-paste later. More than a few times I have now bought the e-book even though I own the physical book. For me these things make the cost worth it. That said I lament the things you mention above. I want to be able to "own" the book and be able to transfer or resell after I'm done. I also want guarantee that I can keep reading the book forever. Either that or a more Spotify model (Amazon Kindle Unlimited has limited selection so far) that I can just rent x number of books and month and don't have to own it. I'd be fine with that. It's the in between model where I have to pay more than paperback but can't resell it or even give it to a friend that bothers me - if anything as a matter of principle.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  Stick it in Calibre, there are conversion plugins the deal with drm.
- zknz 7y ago
  Kindle unlimited is absolute junk; it's not curated. It's just a muddied lot of self-published spam. I just gave up trying to find content.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  Seconding the Calibre recommendation. It'll strip the DRM from your Kindle books with one click.
GuB-42 7y ago
A way to (maybe) reconcile consumer and publisher expectation would be to offer an ebook to physical book service. Sell the eBook for about the same price as a paperback but let the buyer exchange the eBook for a physical book for a fee that depends on the requested quality. Paperbacks would be something like $1 (fair since you already paid for the same price as the paperback), but a hardcover could be $10 or so.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

The authors and publishers created this problem and the marketplace is pushing back. I was buying a lot of e-books when they were significantly cheaper than paper. Now that's no longer true and I've renewed my library card for the first time in 20 years. I already own too many paper books and I don't want any more. But I also refuse to pay as much for e-books as paper. Libraries to the rescue.

avar 7y ago

As a consumer, the digital e-book is inherently more valuable than a physical book. I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books. There's all sorts of other value, like search functions, not having to fill my house or storage box with books, and avoiding that awkward every-other-page-sucks while reading a book laying sideways in bed.

nikbackm 7y ago
Those are properties of the e-reader rather than the e-book itself, in other words, not something you should be paying for when buying the book.
kelnage 7y ago
But such a back and forth that could go on forever. Many e-books vendors frequently reduce their value by limiting access to a specific app/reader, or limit how useful the functionality you describe can be. For example, search is very much restricted within Kindle (e.g. I can't search for words across my entire library, I have to go into a specific book). And whilst it is true that some people are limited in how much physical space they have access to, it is certainly not universal. Hence putting a hard price on this functionality is nigh impossible - whereas re-sale value is often easier to estimate and clearly tangible to the consumer. Claiming that they are equal is certainly not clear to me.
- avar 7y ago
  I'm not claiming they're equal, I'm pointing out that the GP's "since I'm getting so much less, why should I pay the same price" point is subjective, and not a statement of fact. Sure, some people prefer hardcopies, good for them. But claiming that e-books being priced similarly is some market failure is taking it too far, for some of us it seems perfectly reasonable. If e-books were priced higher (even as much as 50% more) I'd still buy them over physical copies.
  - fragmede 7y ago
    The "market" has decided that Amazon deserves a near-total monopoly on the e-book reader market, which allows them to unfairly pressure publishers who have no realistic alternative if they actually want online sales. (Publishers are not a fan of Kindle unlimited.) Just recently Amazon released a book ahead of embargo and they will face zero repercussion for doing so. A market that had more than one way to "publish" books online would be a different ballgame than the one we're playing now
    - JetSpiegel 7y ago
      > Amazon released a book ahead of embargo and they will face zero repercussion for doing so. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49592021 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49592021
heinrichhartman 7y ago
I feel exactly the opposite. I hate reading stuff on screens. - It hurts my eyes when I do this for hours. - It comes with lots of distractions. - Digital Annotations are a PITA - Zapping through a book works much better in hard-copy If I am supposed to spent 1h+ reading your content. You better make sure I can buy a printed copy.
- mellosouls 7y ago
  If you are reading on a proper* e-reader, eyestrain shouldn't be an issue. *ie classic Kindle with e-ink or similar, not a tablet like iPad/Android equivalent or the annoyingly named Amazon "Kindle" Fire etc. Not great for tech manuals, admittedly
  - eyegor 7y ago
    Actually if you're willing to pay for it, you can buy 10+" eink screens with wacom digitizers on top (drawing pen support). They're quite good for tech papers and manuals because they're a similar size to real paper, no eye strain, you can draw notes directly on them, and ofc you can cram tons of papers/textbooks/manuals into something that weighs next to nothing. Edit: if you're curious, look into the likebook mimas as a starting point. There are other options, that just happens to be the one I've used.
    - uneekname 7y ago
      As a student that looks like exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm never going to shell out $400 for one when I can get an early-gen Kindle for free. Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.
      - pgeorgi 7y ago
        > Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays. Unlikely to happen: similar to silicon, eink's yield (that is, amount of parts produced with no errors) goes down quickly (quadratic if not cubic, I forgot) with increasing size. A system based on lots of eink chiplets with small enough margins that you can tile them could scale up, but the margins are also a difficult area.
johnchristopher 7y ago
> I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books. Isn't that a FOMO argument, though ? As a consumer the advantage of e-books are: ease of organization and ease of buying, no page flipping sounds in bed, ease of transportation. But what I really want ? A real, thick book, with something like 200-400 sheets made up of magical e-ink so I can have a physical map of the book I am reading.
- cheschire 7y ago
  Imagine a ribbed touch sensitive bezel on a regular single-screen e-reader. When you rub your thumb across it, it flips the pages in the reader by a proportional amount.
- nirvdrum 7y ago
  A multi-page e-ink book would be nice. I love my Kindle for certain types of reading, but when I read, I like to flip back to previous sections. Search doesn't work because I rarely know verbatim what I'm looking for or the search terms are flooded with answers from the entire book, when I really want it narrowed down to a particular area. With physical books, I just remember roughly how far into the book it was and can jump back there and start searching. I'd love to successfully replicate that with a Kindle.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Can you use the table of contents on your kindle? It's not the same, of course, and some books don't have a usable chapter system (too many or too few), but if you've got an idea of where you want to go, it should get you close.
    - nirvdrum 7y ago
      Unfortunately, I really only know roughly how thick the stack of pages was. I realize it's an imprecise metric. And I might be able to convert to a rough percentage and figure out a page number from there. But, then the page turning is just slow enough to make rapid scanning like that annoying.
JackFaker 7y ago
Are you arguing that convenience function enabled by the digital format is more valuable than ownership of a physical good?
Fnoord 7y ago
I like both. I'd like to think physical and digital books each have their pros and cons. I try to be pragmatic about the issue. Thinking back about school I remember the heavy weight of the backpack. That can be more efficient, I thought back then. Same with vacation however I don't want to unlock my ereader for border patrol, as a matter of principle. Not sure if we are at that point already. The point is, each have also privacy implications.
potta_coffee 7y ago
You can say it's more valuable, but not to me. I get almost zero enjoyment from reading digitally. I don't know why but paper books feel better. I don't like the interface on my kindle for actually reading. As a device it's good but as a book, it just sucks. Also, I'm usually only reading one or two books at a time, so I don't need an entire library with me. I do use the kindle for technical books, because those are boring to ready anyway.

Freak_NL 7y ago

People seem to instinctively feel that an e-book shouldn't cost as much as a real book. A paperback edition of a book often has multiple owners throughout its — sometimes considerable — lifespan. That's simply part of the deal, and it always has been. E-books lack the ability to share, sell, and pass it on. That's fine, but the market won't bear nearly the same price as a paper book that can do all those things. An e-book should in all fairness cost perhaps a third or fourth of a paper book — i.e., the price of a paperback edition divided by the average number of readers it tends to have. Not pricing the goods accordingly leads to where we are now: mass piracy of e-books and hardly anyone feeling guilty about it. I don't read e-books myself (I take delight in my collection of paper books), but as far as I know sharing USB-drives filled with thousands of e-books is common in a lot of circles — with middle-aged people in particular. Compare this with piracy in games, music, and video, which is comparatively rare due to the affordable and easy legal alternatives, and it is hard not to see that the market is simply not offering the best solution.

fragmede 7y ago
Video piracy's gone down specifically due to Netflix. As each brand stops allowing Neflix to host their content, and as long as income remains to flat for a large portion of America, I'm expecting video piracy to make a comeback as soon as people remember it exists. Subscribing to HBO, CBS, Disney, and whoever else, on top of Netflix, will soon become cost prohibitive. Doing without isn't a consideration, so illegal alternatives will thrive. (Not that they haven't been, but Netflix was sufficiently convenient that most people didn't bother.)
- shantly 7y ago
  It's more about the convenience than the price, for me. I'd pay $30, maybe $40, per month for access to basically anything I want to watch (past that I may as well buy as I watch, and even at $40 I'd have to do the math to make sure it's sensible). It's having to keep up with several subscriptions, having to figure out where something is when I want to watch it, inconveniences like logging in on a new device, expired sessions on devices that don't have password managers (or keyboards...), multiple different interfaces (for basically the same thing) to stay familiar with, crap like that.

hrktb 7y ago

> a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library. For me this was true ten years ago. The tides have shifted. Now a physical copy means: it will degrade faster than my devices (think books for children). It will take physical place, we’ll have to find it (I can ping my iPad, not my books). Depending on the country it’s printed, it might not even come to my life, the price will be double, or it will be 3 weeks after the moment I wanted to read it. It wi be in a single place, I can’t share it with my family or even my devices the way I share my amazon account. There’s a physical limit to how many I can keep: floors cracking under the load is a thing of the past. It’d need a very compelling reason to buy any physical book at this point. I get the tradeoffs, but I had enough time with digital copies to make them work under the best conditions for me, making the upside way higher than the downsides.

orbifold 7y ago
Physical books last at least ~50 years. That is longer than any physical computer lasts and longer than any of the companies that offer cloud services (IBM doesn't offer e-Books yet) have existed. There is a good chance that some of them will go bankrupt over this time.
- someguydave 7y ago
  which is why you should get your e-books as drm-free local files
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    And store those files where? Do you own any working digital media from 1969? I know my carefully curated collection of 5.25" floppy discs are all corrupt and unreadable today.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      Temperature variation? What was their advertised lifetime?

dageshi 7y ago

Honestly, the opposite is true for me. Ebooks download immediately and take up zero space, you can carry them all with you in one device. Way better than physical books as far as I'm concerned. Also, in terms of the sheer entertainment to cost ratio books are incredibly good value at current pricing.

shantly 7y ago
I think the divide here's largely along the lines of what people read. E-readers are king for light fiction or airport nonfic, for instance, but pretty awful for heavy nonfiction reading (think: textbooks), with everything else falling somewhere in between—poetry: somewhat bad on ereaders but maybe tolerable, depending on what it is; good, older literature, depends on how much you want/need footnotes or to refer to other parts of the book, and how inclined you are to annotate; books of any kind used for actual research, you probably want several open at once and a bunch more with tons of bookmarks in them that you can have open to a certain spot (you remember which one with spatial memory and maybe bookmark color) in a few seconds, which gets dicey with e-readers, even if you have more than one; and so on. Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens.
- sib 7y ago
  "Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens." True - and this, for me, is another benefit of eBooks; I can and do read the same eBook on multiple different devices depending on my current mix of needs or priorities.

Noos 7y ago

The ebook takes up no space, and can't be damaged or lost. It doesn't even have physical dimensions, so if you want you can read it on a tiny ultra portable screen or a large tablet for ease of use. All ebooks have large print options where as physical books these are separate purchases and may not be able to even have for anything but the most popular books. ebooks are searchable to a word level, where physical books rely on indexing. There's a lot of benefits to ebooks as well.

dawnerd 7y ago

I feel the same way about video games. When I do buy them, I try to buy a physical copy that I can sell/lend/whatever. Digital copies are pretty much useless once you're done playing them. Also kinda ridiculous that digital copies cost the same as physical, or often times cost more when the physical copies go on sale.

zajio1am 7y ago

> With a digital book (or any other digital good) I lose all of that. AFAIK, first-sale doctrine is accepted in both US and EU. There are ECJ judicates confirming legality of reselling used software. So i am pretty sure i can sell, trade or donate my e-books.

rabboRubble 7y ago

Not to mention libraries may only loan an ebook X number of times. A librarian told me this when I asked if there was a way to donate my digital ebook to them for their collection. Answer: no. Reason: because the ebook they have has a lending cap.

8ytecoder 7y ago

E-Books have some convenience that physical books don't: 1. I can pick it up from any device I have at any time, 2. I can pick up any book depending on my mood at that point in time (I usually read one fiction, one non-fiction and one craft related simultaneously) 3. I can highlight and keep notes with the book that's in a form I can just copy-paste later. More than a few times I have now bought the e-book even though I own the physical book. For me these things make the cost worth it. That said I lament the things you mention above. I want to be able to "own" the book and be able to transfer or resell after I'm done. I also want guarantee that I can keep reading the book forever. Either that or a more Spotify model (Amazon Kindle Unlimited has limited selection so far) that I can just rent x number of books and month and don't have to own it. I'd be fine with that. It's the in between model where I have to pay more than paperback but can't resell it or even give it to a friend that bothers me - if anything as a matter of principle.

pnutjam 7y ago
Stick it in Calibre, there are conversion plugins the deal with drm.
zknz 7y ago
Kindle unlimited is absolute junk; it's not curated. It's just a muddied lot of self-published spam. I just gave up trying to find content.
boring_twenties 7y ago
Seconding the Calibre recommendation. It'll strip the DRM from your Kindle books with one click.

GuB-42 7y ago

A way to (maybe) reconcile consumer and publisher expectation would be to offer an ebook to physical book service. Sell the eBook for about the same price as a paperback but let the buyer exchange the eBook for a physical book for a fee that depends on the requested quality. Paperbacks would be something like $1 (fair since you already paid for the same price as the paperback), but a hardcover could be $10 or so.