14 ms·

Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books

227 points by mgrayson 7y ago

emodendroket 7y ago
> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? [...] > Then there’s the question of what you get for your money with an eBook. According to the publishers in that recent case in the CJEU, you get a perpetual licence (not ownership) to access their copyright content, which never deteriorates in the same way that physical books do. As a result, the publishers claimed successfully, you aren’t free to sell on your licence, and can only do so if they, the copyright owners, agree. In other words, you pay much the same price for something which immediately on purchase becomes worthless. Well... what's the difference there? That doesn't seem like it, since it's no less true of movies or music. Actually, my guess is that most people never read most of the books they buy. Maybe they intend to, but it ends up mostly being some kind of affirmation of the kind of person they are. While the e-book experience has a lot to recommend it if your object is actually to read a lot of books (particularly outside the house), it doesn't do much to burnish your bookshelf.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  Movies and songs sell digitally because of convenience. I can watch what I want now, instead of waiting two days or making a two hour trip to a store that may or may not have that movie. But reading a book is a much larger commitment than watching a movie or listening to a song. Thus it's more planned and waiting a bit isn't as much of a factor.
  - emodendroket 7y ago
    I question the premise that books are rarely impulse-bought. That's kind of the idea of Hudson Books, for instance. Besides that, digital books are actually much more convenient in some important ways -- if I want to read a dense technical book on my way to work and a thick novel on my way back, I might not bother with the physical books because I don't want to lug them around. With the Kindle that's no problem.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      Reading is a trade-off. Sure, an ebook reader is lighter and smaller than a book, but reading on an LCD is 20% slower than on paper, meanwhile eInk screens are rather slow. Both are only slowly catching up to books in terms of print quality (i.e. pixel density). Also books don't require a battery and have often better UX in terms of annotations etc. In some situations the ebook will win (e.g. when traveling), in other situations the book is still superior.
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        Physical books are expensive, ebooks can be pirated. That is a huge difference.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > According to the publishers in that recent case in the CJEU, you get a perpetual licence (not ownership) to access their copyright content, which never deteriorates in the same way that physical books do. What crap argument is that? In reality, a random physical book has expected useful lifetime longer than most publishers, longer than Internet and anything recognizable as personal computing ever existed. Books don't deteriorate into uselessness for decades. Licensed content on-line typically disappears after few years, very often together with the service that you rented it from in the first place.
  - emodendroket 7y ago
    Does it really though? In 100 years I think people will care more about Citizen Kane or Michael Jackson than Rich Dad, Poor Dad or Excel 95 for Dummies.
    - mplanchard 7y ago
      It doesn’t seem fair to compare classics of two media with books that are definitively not in the same league. I definitely want to be able to pick up my copy of Pale Fire in 30 years and read it. Similarly with The Idiot. Those physical books will definitely still be functional in three decades. And, if a copy is lost or damaged, it’s easy to get a cheap replacement at a used bookstore, something that isn’t possible with ebooks.
      - emodendroket 7y ago
        Of course, but the point of the comparison is that there is no shortage of forgettable books. I predict it will be quite easy to download a new digital copy of The Idiot in 30 years if you lose access to the one you have today as well.
        catalogia 7y ago
        There is no shortage of forgettable anythings. If that was your point, it's a poor one. If you could predict ahead of time what might be valued in the future, then you could discard the rest. But you cannot do that, since you are not from the future. Scraps of data once thrown away as mundane are now valued in the present by researchers; there is no reason to believe this won't continue to be true into the future. Even your poorly contrived example of mundane data was debunked easily by another commenter. Keep what can reasonably be kept, and let future researchers worry about filtering it. Preemptive filtering will only deprive future researchers of data they'll desire for reasons you cannot presently fathom.
dangoor 7y ago
As an indie author, I've paid more attention to what's going on in publishing than the average person over the last few years. This article has some things I could quibble with, but the overall premise is, I think, true. Publishers don't like the ebook market, and my guess is that it's because of how little control they have over it. In the world of ebooks, indies actually have the upper hand. For one, we don't have the overhead of big publishers, so we can sell ebooks at more reasonable prices (while pocketing more than authors with traditional contracts). We have the ability to move more quickly and thus take advantage of new features (like Amazon's ad platform) earlier. We can sell worldwide with a click, instead of negotiating messy contracts. With print on demand, we can also have our books in print. But publishers definitely have the upper hand there and, I presume, always will. Also, as an indie I have the option to make my books available DRM-free. Personally, I _like_ ebooks, especially for fiction. They weigh nothing. They have search. My highlights can get aggregated together. I can switch devices and even switch between ebook and audiobook. Further, I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me.
- germinalphrase 7y ago
  Are there any platforms you find more effective than others for sales/building an audience?
- est31 7y ago
  > I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me. Actually, I believe that used ebooks can sell for almost the same price as "new" ones. Unlike with physical books, there is literally no difference in reading experience between an ebook that has been sold a hundred times and an ebook that's new. However, as someone who reads books and who would appreciate a right for resale for ebooks, I don't appreciate it for being able to make money from reselling it. I am more interested about the effects: that I have actual ownership over the ebook. That the place which sold me the ebook going bankrupt doesn't disrupt my abilities to read it. That I can lend it to a friend. etc. Now, if you allowed resale, ebooks would have close to "new" resale values, and more importantly, resale values of ebooks which have been sold three or four times would stay the same. This would create the problem that people could buy an used ebook, read it, and then resell it afterwards for the same price, basically reading the ebook for free. Now libraries are doing something similar with physical books, but they are inconvenient to use. You need to get to the library, stand in queue, handle the books, think about bringing them back in time, etc. But ebooks don't have such limitations and you could build a super convenient solution around ebook lending. While it's great that people read books, it's sadly not really good for publishers or authors. I kinda understand them that they want to close this loophole. Still, you could allow for resale in some different fashion. E.g. a resale tax of 10% of the value or something. In my opinion that would be the optimum, and a solution that's fair to everyone.
resoluteteeth 7y ago
The title is misleading and makes it sound like the publishers are actually trying to kill e-books which is not the case.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Yeah the author is being deliberately dense. To make a point I guess. The idea that e-books are licenses is self-serving for the publishing industry. Since they can't control distribution of an e-book after it leaves their site, they want legal controls. So they can sell the book more than once.
- derstander 7y ago
  I don’t know what sort of actions would fall under your definition of trying to kill e-books. But from my (admittedly unsophisticated) point of view, some publishers seem willing to at least hamstring them if it will net them more traditional sales. [0] https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775150979/you-may-have-to-wait-to-borrow-a-new-e-book-from-the-library https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775150979/you-may-have-to-wai...
  - resoluteteeth 7y ago
    That's almost identical to how movie companies restrict rentals (as opposed to sales) of videos for a period after movies are released, but nobody would claim that this means movie companies are trying to "kill digital video rentals." At the very least, "trying to kill e-books" would mean that publishers were actually attempting to convince people to buy paper books instead of e-books, which is not something they are doing. Moreover, when I first read the title of this article, I thought that publishers were actually considering ceasing publication of ebooks, which is definitely not what is being described.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      Someone mentioned Special Topics in Calamity Physics, so I looked it up. MSRP for the paperback is apparently $18 (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297621/special-topics-in-calamity-physics-by-marisha-pessl/); https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297621/special-topi... on Amazon the Kindle version is $13.99 while the paperback is $11.39. On the other hand, Barnes and Noble has the NOOK version for $13.99 and the paperback for $16.20, so maybe Amazon is trying to kill e-readers.
coding123 7y ago
I can't read a space fantasy/sci-fi book on the same device that has my addictive free cell game.
- crest 7y ago
  You can as soon as you converted it to EPUB.
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    I think the issue here is not the technological ability to read it but rather the personal ability to decide to read rather than playing the game.
- zrail 7y ago
  So don’t? There are dozens of eInk reading devices on the market.
- feydaykyn 7y ago
  My reader app is on my main screen and games are three levels deep, so that reading is quicker than any other activity. Works great!
officemonkey 7y ago
> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? Repeat after me: the average person doesn't read. The market for ebooks is a fraction of the market for movies and music. OTOH, there is a viable market because there are such things as "avid readers" (people who read more than one book a month.) Those are the people ereaders are made for. I predict that ebooks will be like jazz records: they not terribly popular, but they'll still be made because there's a devoted audience.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  The overall market for books is roughly the same as that for music and movies. Quick googling says $27 billion for books, $16 billion for music, $41 billion for movies in the US. Not digging in to those numbers but if we assume they're roughly in the correct ballpark then it's all similar market sizes.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    Is that including stuff like textbooks?
    - CriticalCathed 7y ago
      It does. It includes all publishers and academic journals. I would wager a huge portion of that 27 billion is textbooks in k-12 & university, and journals; though, I haven't been able to find the raw data. [0] https://www.bookstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BOOKSTATS_2013_GENERAL_PUBLIC_WEBSITE_HIGHLIGHTS.pdf https://www.bookstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BOOKSTA... (page 1, bottom)
- sfifs 7y ago
  Well NO ONE I personally know buys or keeps physical books any more except for children's books if they have kindergarten or primary school kids. Everyone's book collection is on the Kindle including middle school and high school kids. Living in a tropical/sub-tropical humid climate, the tendency of physical book collections to deteriorate or grow mould is a major liability especially if you have small kids.
amelius 7y ago
One problem with e-books is that you have nothing to show for it. Books have lost their collector value.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Most books purchased are mass market paperbacks. Those have only rarely had market value after being purchased. I can’t even give most of mine away.
james-skemp 7y ago
I can't help but compare this to the tabletop RPG space, something I've gotten into recently for inspiration. Over the last few months I've spent a good deal of money at DriveThruRPG. Distributed via (usually) watermarked PDF, with limited security. Prices are cheap, and often the electronic version is included for free if you get a print on demand version. Buy a product and want to get a bundle it's in later? Bundle price of the product is discounted (not the price you pay, which is fine). When I was buying electronic versions of programming books about a decade ago this is what I was hoping for. Instead I have useless files since they can no longer authenticate.
- pandesmos 7y ago
  I’m in the RPG space myself. Ive basically bootstrapped up a small but profitable publishing company in that scene (http://shop.swordfishislands.com http://shop.swordfishislands.com). I also like how DriveThruRPG gives drm free PDFs. The watermark is up to the creator (I don’t). I wish they took a smaller cut on their market though. :p There is also the Bundle of Holding, that does bundles of drm free rpg PDFs and content. It’s pretty great as well. My personal take is that the ebook/pdf/digital book market is replacing the “cheap paperback/trade” market. I use Kickstarter to raise funds for pretty deluxe offset print runs and am then pretty liberal with the digital copies (buy a book get the digital free, charity bundles, bundles, free in person download codes, etc). This seems to have been beneficial because the “infinite digital” product serves as a gateway to the “limited, special, ‘deluxe’” version. Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing (e.g., I have the digital I don’t need the paperback) so downplaying the digital seems like it would make sense long term for books that don’t make sense to exist in some sort of “deluxe, you’ll want this for 50 years” format.
  - james-skemp 7y ago
    I've got some of your stuff. :) I think from a BoH, in fact. (Whether part of a bundle or not, Questing Beast's videos are how I really know of your works.) > Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing Counter to that is people like Questing Beast, or the guy that did Grognardia, who like to have print. I've been going OSR systems and have purchased way more than I would have because they're electronic and won't take up (physical) space. I almost skipped Whitehack because I could only get a print copy via Lulu. Granted, you could purchase a PDF and then pay to have it printed, but your point about deluxe editions is dead on. That's why I bought my SO the illustrated Harry Potter books, and why she bought me the Final Fantasy Ultimania books; they're beautiful deluxe books that we'd cherish and pass on to our descendents.
brink 7y ago
I have a Kindle, but I often find myself buying the physical copy of books just for the satisfaction of having something I can physically touch. It's the same reason I go and buy physical copies of games from BestBuy when I can rather than buying games from Nintendo's e-shop.
- chance_state 7y ago
  My method is to torrent the ebook and buy the physical book (directly from the author where possible). I feel like it gives me the best of both worlds.
- wrycoder 7y ago
  A used copy on Amazon is often a fraction of the Kindle version price.
asimovfan 7y ago
Physical books are gone. The people who actually read books have already switched to e-books. I haven't bought a single physical book since i bought the first iteration of the amazon swindle. Some people who also read books will try to refute this argument, saying they still buy love and read physical books. So do i. I love physical books. I love them as a commodity. I love holding them, reading them, putting them on display after finishing them, but sadly, it's simply not convenient for someone who really reads. When i finish one book and want the next in the series, when i find out about a book that i am actually curious about what it is saying, i will simply get the e-book. The desire to read and convenience simply wins. I thought the last iteration of the generic ebook reader was my last purchase because it had the backlight, but now they came up with the yellow backlight so i have to buy this. Blue light causes macular degeneration and yellow light is so much more comfortable. Ebook readers are like a dream come true. When they came out, i thought wow, truth is probably solipsism.
- ghaff 7y ago
  You're over-generalizing. Yes, for just reading text eBooks work great--especially for travel. But I still buy tons on physical books as well where the graphic design (photos, etc.) is relevant.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Why PDF is not suitable for you?
    - ghaff 7y ago
      First of all, many books are not available in a PDF format. Secondly, for something like a cookbook, I like putting post-it tabs, writing notes, etc. Thirdly, some books are a larger form-factor than a typical tablet and the printing has a tactile dimension to it. To be clear, I like eBooks and frequently buy them. But I don't find them a 1:1 substitute for printed books.
      - mavhc 7y ago
droro 7y ago
I'm finding the article's arguments pretty unconvincing. eBook prices might be high, but as I've grown older I've realized that the price of the content is typically well below the opportunity cost of consuming it. If a good portion of that money makes it back into creators' hands, I'm satisfied. The author spends some time complaining about the lack of first-sale doctrine, which is just a relic from the time when all content came on costly physical media. It would be wasteful to be forbidden from selling a book that you no longer want to read, so the reasoning went. The arguments get even more nonsensical ("eBooks don't appreciate in value", "You can't photocopy them") Meanwhile, they totally miss my biggest issue with eBooks: that they give significant power to platform providers, who may demand unreasonable concessions from authors and publishers. In the process of writing this, I wondered if there was a Bandcamp for eBooks. HN had an answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704436
gabrielrdz 7y ago
This is why I love Manning Books. I actually ordered a book off of Amazon that I forgot was produced by Manning, and I went to cancel the order and get it from Manning instead. That way I got the print version, the digital version and even free digital of the older editions of it. They've won me as a customer in that I'll always order off them if they have a book I want even if it's available on AMZ.
MisterTea 7y ago
> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? Well let's look at the technology involved: Books have been around since writing and evolved from clay tablets which we can still "read" to this very day so long as the text is intact. Nothing other than your eyeballs and hands are needed to interface with a book. No batteries, headphones, passwords, or wires. Plus reading a book is quite a different experience as your mind is actively painting images and creating sounds. Video and audio can present some wonderful sensations but ultimately arent as personal as the creations of your minds eye (and ear). So books as they are work very well and do exactly what they were meant to do. Plus reading on a screen sucks and who wants to buy another electronic gizmo with a good screen like e ink which will become obsolete, fail, or have your book deleted after some DRM copyright spat? Please no. Video and Audio NEED electronics. They are already hamstrung with a technological need so consuming via digital means is much more practical. And as far as physical media goes nowadays, it's less convenient than streaming. Though Music still enjoys a strong association with the medium being an art so it goes hand in hand with physical collecting which is why you still see tapes and vinyl. Like a book, you want to be able to hold it and also enjoy the art work. Some artists even release ultra limited handcrafted cases to house said physical media adding a more personal touch.
- fastball 7y ago
  eReaders are amazing. I have 3 books that I am reading at the same time that I literally carry everywhere I go because it is so easy. I never did that with physical books. Additionally, my Kindle was $90. Between all the books I can get for free from Project Gutenberg and how ebooks are often cheaper than physical books (and should probably be even cheaper given their effectively $0 distribution costs), my kindle has already paid for itself and then some, so the fact that it will become obsolete isn't a big deal (I've had it for 5 years). I can buy a new one in a year or so (or tomorrow) and very easily it will pay for itself. We also have plenty of storage mediums for digital data that last much, much longer than a paper book, so ebooks win on the "surviving a mass extinction event" front too. Hell, every book published today is starting out as an "ebook" anyway, given that they're all written digitally. Given that, it's even easier to distribute it digitally than physically.
mstolpm 7y ago
Slightly off topic, but I often wonder why there is no backlash on print media regarding the environmental aspect of this whole publishing industry. Most books are mass-printed, shipped to warehouses, then shipped to local sellers (or e.g. Amazon, that ships a single book to a buyer) - and the (huge) non-sellable rests are either deeply discounted or completely dumped. If you see a pile of the latest "bestseller" at the local store, its almost guaranteed that only a fraction is sold, the rest will be disposed. Moreover, most print books, magazines and newspapers aren't even fully read by the buyers, let alone multiple times. Its a huge industry producing, promoting and selling mostly single-use items. And the used market for most books is virtually non-existent: I had to move a couple of times and the paper weight was one of the biggest hurdles. I dumped lots of books because I couldn't find a buyer on the used market (handling would far exceed the value of the books, some companies buy used books only based on weight and condition) and even libraries and social services like the Caritas declined to take used books. So, I'm really wondering why we as a society aren't more demanding on the sustainable side of the publishing business, especially the environmental effects. Ebooks could perhaps be a much more environment-friendly alternative, but I agree that publishers and market places have done a lot to make them less attractive, affordable and available for most readers in comparison to printed alternatives.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > I had to move a couple of times and the paper weight was one of the biggest hurdles. It is painful, but packing and unpacking books is by far the least painful bit about moving. You can clear or stock a shelf in seconds and they transport well too.
  - caro_douglos 7y ago
    It’s all about that media mail price and not caring when they show up!
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Our culture holds print books as sacred objects. Talking about the environmental impact of books is like talking about the environmental impact of churches, or music halls, or war memorials, or grave stones: it doesn't even make sense to talk about it because people don't imagine those things at the level of costs and impacts, they are inherently worthwhile. If you propose printing less books, or even worse, destroying existing books that nobody reads to recycle their paper, you will quickly have a pitchfork-bearing mob at your door calling you a book-burner.
jccalhoun 7y ago
I love ebooks. I also hate drm so I only "buy" drmed ebooks if I can strip the drm and usually convert it to epub. I do wish that the highlights I make were actually saved to the epub file rather than in a separate file that is difficult to transport to another device.
dboreham 7y ago
New to me that ebooks have failed. I almost never buy physical books now.
sunflowerfly 7y ago
Amazon has a monopoly and monopsony in the ebook market. Oddly, the department of just does not seem to care. Their recent test of “does it hurt consumers” is too narrow. In this case the monopsony is hurting the entire industry.
hnarn 7y ago
When e-books came along, I can only assume publishers panicked and said "we have to protect these books from being copied somehow", so they crippled them with DRM, created their own standards, and so on. Years later, the only way to comfortably enjoy a purchased e-book from a major publisher (that uses DRM technology) is to: * Pay for the crippled e-book and download it to some Adobe application that is only used to unlock your crippled e-book. * Use a plugin for an open source application to strip the book of the DRM, creating a real e-book. * Send your "pirated" and de-DRM'd e-book to your device of choice as it can now be easily converted. The whole e-book market is backwards and is reminiscent of the way music was being sold around ~2005. You were forced to buy a CD so you could rip it to mp3 files and put them on your device. Sell mp3 files directly? Oh no, we can't do that, anyone can copy those! (Except you can, of course, copy the mp3 files created from the CD, so your guaranteed sale is one disc). Then comes the argument about making piracy uncomfortable: "Sure, books can be copied, but if we at least make them annoying to copy, people will gravitate towards buying them through legitimate channels" -- except they won't, because the reason people aren't buying through legitimate channels in the first place is the same reason for e-books as for music: they suck. They create problems for the users, they are price-inflated and overpriced (to prop up the dying physical copy-part of the industry), so everybody hates them. I'll buy a book online if it lacks DRM, but only then. Humble Bundles are great for this. But, if you publish a book and you use crippling DRM technology because you're scared of being copied, you are making the book market a worse place for everyone, and you are contributing to the problem. Only an absolute fool would think that going back to physical copies of books is the right move here -- and if that turns out to be what happens, I will gladly dedicate my time to digitizing books made by these consumer-hating Luddites, and spreading them online against their will. Find a new model, or die like the rest. Stop being scared of change, it's getting old.
- zuppy 7y ago
  I keep hearing again and again the same argument regarding DRM. I really doubt people (not the technical ones found here) care about DRM. They didn’t care when the music industry implemented it, see how much the music pirating has fallen. I think what they care about is convenience. The convenience of instant access to hundreds of thousands of books, recommendations, ratings.
Havoc 7y ago
Worse the latest gen kindles have firmware/DRM that can't be cracked (yet). I was sorta OK with all their bullshit because I knew I could break it (for personal use/backup) Might need to steal my mom's ancient kindle
djsumdog 7y ago
I hate that I need to break DRM to keep a copy of an ebook. There was that famous case where Amazon found out they didn't have a license for a book in Canada and pulled it from everyone's devices. The book? Orwell's 1984. We have DRM free music from BandCamp, iTunes, CDBaby, AmazonMusic and others. But the only place to get DRM free books is Kobo, and it's not a huge selection. Offer me a DRM free book where most of my money goes to the authors and I'd be all over it. This recent trend has lead me back to pirating the larger or older titles.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  If you want "most" of your money to go to the author, you'll need to look outside traditional book publishing - even Amazon ebook publishing will take a 70% cut. Your best bet is supporting your preferred authors on Patreon, Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms, and asking them to refrain from adopting DRM. The crowd-funding model works very well for this, because you aren't restricted to paying per-copy in the first place.
- billpollock 7y ago
  Our ebooks have always been DRM free. Always will be.
petre 7y ago
No worries, everybody will pirate e-books, just like it happened with music. Indie publishers will make some money, probably more than going through a publishing house because they can sell directly to the customer and cut out the publisher. A 70% cut on eBooks sales is outright theft imho. If I were a book author and Amazon took a 70% cut, I would rather publish it online for free under a license that prohibits commercial distribution of the work (in exchange for money).
- ossworkerrights 7y ago
  Not every culture is based on theft.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Did you give or receive any books for Christmas? If so, were they physical books, or electronic ones? I suspect that, while many of us have exchanged real, printed books as presents, eBooks were far less popular, and unless you give a voucher, they’re almost impossible to give as presents anyway. So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? Huh? You can't give digital copies of movies, music, or games as Christmas gifts for exactly the same reasons. What is this paragraph supposed to have established? > eBook readers are still incredibly primitive, and won’t even let you refer to two or more sections of the book at the same time. You can’t photocopy them, copy quotations, or do anything remotely advantageous. Kindles have supported copying quotations since at least 2010.
BooneJS 7y ago
No! Since buying a Kindle I don’t have nearly the same guilt over my stash of unread ebooks compared to the reminder I see of physical booms. I read a lot, but not as much as I buy. :/
mFixman 7y ago
I have a Kindle which I loved and used to be my main way to read books when I lived in a third world country. I've pretty much abandoned it since I moved to a next-day Amazon delivery country. Dead-tree books are much more convenient in the ideal case when I'm in a comfortable position at home, and I never have the foresight to buy an e-book to read something on vacation without having to carry a physical tome of whichever book I'm reading right now.
tharne 7y ago
Publishers don't need to kill e-books, they were never a good product to begin with, which is why they've mostly failed to replace paper books. The author missed the most obvious reason e-books have hit a wall. Compared to hard-copy books, e-books offer a vastly worse user experience, with the only benefit being lower price and easier storage. Paper books are incredibly durable, easy on the eyes even for very long periods of reading, affordable, and a nice break from staring at a screen all day. Even children prefer paper books to kindles and other e-readers, so it's not a matter of nostalgia or people refusing to change. Paper books are just a really great user experience as far as media goes. The comparison to other media like music and video is also completely wrong. Records, tapes, video cassettes, etc. are all new technologies, less than 100 years old in most cases. So eight-tracks and CDs getting replaced with mp3s and streaming services is a case of a new technology being displaced by a slightly newer technology. Books on the other hand have had centuries, even millennia to develop and perfect the user experience, which they largely have (I can't take credit for this last argument, Nassim Taleb points this fact out in his Incerto series).
- arkades 7y ago
  You may be underestimating the value of easy storage. I’m a city dweller, and I’ve been outright barred by my spouse from purchasing any more books - we just don’t have the room.
- BenjiWiebe 7y ago
  I'm an avid reader. I'll sometimes read a book a day. I don't have the room or money for reading and buying that many physical books. I'm getting to the point where I even prefer the interface of an ebook. I can search, long press a word look it up, read in the dark without carefully positioning a lamp, change the brightness, change the font size, change the font....
- KingMachiavelli 7y ago
  I think you're completely backwards about how much ebooks are failures and in what manner. And your comparison to other media is incomplete. > Compared to hard-copy books, e-books offer a vastly worse user experience, with the only benefit being lower price and easier storage. For novels, ebooks are a vastly better user experience. Adjustable font size, lighter weight, adjustable brightness and color temperature. There is no curved page warping of the text, each page is perfectly flat and legible. You can actually have the book with you when carrying around a book all day can get impractical. I suppose I should preface this with the fact that if you aren't using an e-ink screen then you really aren't using e-books properly. > Even children prefer paper books to kindles... There is a learning curve and pre-novel children books are more of a visual medium than text so children have exposure to page turning prior to actually reading. > So eight-tracks and CDs getting replaced with mp3s and streaming services is a case of a new technology being displaced by a slightly newer technology. [...] Books on the other hand have had centuries... This comparison still feels off... The technology of CDs, records, etc. is all pretty new but the content is just as old as the content in books e.g live concerts, live plays, oral history, etc. Bound, mass printed books were just ahead of their time compared to music & video since the latter two contain a lot more actual data (bytes/item) so incremental improvements matter much more. Of course, I too think there are reasons why e-books don't completely replace physical novels/books. 1. Format is only good for novels and stuff without lots of diagrams or images. Textbooks are a huge market and having e-readers the size of them is kind of impractical at this current time. Even so lots of students prefer the PDFs anyway so it's kind of a toss up. 2. Upfront cost. e-readers are not cheap for a lot of people and people don't read a ton in general so paying for an e-reader + books vs the free library is a tough sell. (Most people don't know or don't know how to use free ebooks services through public institutions and a lot of the time they don't work on all e-readers, etc.) I think there is also some generational trends that work against e-books such as the older & less tech savvy perhaps reading more but having learned preferences for books BUT I haven't researched this theory yet.
bwb 7y ago
For me, ebooks are life changing. I read around 100 to 150 books a year and i can carry an infinity of books in my pocket no matter where i am at in the world! And, 99% of the time ebooks are cheaper when i compare.... I put ebooks right after electricity and i dearly hope my print books disappear.
soapboxrocket 7y ago
This is how an industry sets itself up for disruption.
acollins1331 7y ago
This is a poorly written rambling article that doesn't even make an attempt to address the title.

227 points by mgrayson 7y ago

> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? [...] > Then there’s the question of what you get for your money with an eBook. According to the publishers in that recent case in the CJEU, you get a perpetual licence (not ownership) to access their copyright content, which never deteriorates in the same way that physical books do. As a result, the publishers claimed successfully, you aren’t free to sell on your licence, and can only do so if they, the copyright owners, agree. In other words, you pay much the same price for something which immediately on purchase becomes worthless. Well... what's the difference there? That doesn't seem like it, since it's no less true of movies or music. Actually, my guess is that most people never read most of the books they buy. Maybe they intend to, but it ends up mostly being some kind of affirmation of the kind of person they are. While the e-book experience has a lot to recommend it if your object is actually to read a lot of books (particularly outside the house), it doesn't do much to burnish your bookshelf.

wongarsu 7y ago
Movies and songs sell digitally because of convenience. I can watch what I want now, instead of waiting two days or making a two hour trip to a store that may or may not have that movie. But reading a book is a much larger commitment than watching a movie or listening to a song. Thus it's more planned and waiting a bit isn't as much of a factor.
- emodendroket 7y ago
  I question the premise that books are rarely impulse-bought. That's kind of the idea of Hudson Books, for instance. Besides that, digital books are actually much more convenient in some important ways -- if I want to read a dense technical book on my way to work and a thick novel on my way back, I might not bother with the physical books because I don't want to lug them around. With the Kindle that's no problem.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    Reading is a trade-off. Sure, an ebook reader is lighter and smaller than a book, but reading on an LCD is 20% slower than on paper, meanwhile eInk screens are rather slow. Both are only slowly catching up to books in terms of print quality (i.e. pixel density). Also books don't require a battery and have often better UX in terms of annotations etc. In some situations the ebook will win (e.g. when traveling), in other situations the book is still superior.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Physical books are expensive, ebooks can be pirated. That is a huge difference.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> According to the publishers in that recent case in the CJEU, you get a perpetual licence (not ownership) to access their copyright content, which never deteriorates in the same way that physical books do. What crap argument is that? In reality, a random physical book has expected useful lifetime longer than most publishers, longer than Internet and anything recognizable as personal computing ever existed. Books don't deteriorate into uselessness for decades. Licensed content on-line typically disappears after few years, very often together with the service that you rented it from in the first place.
- emodendroket 7y ago
  Does it really though? In 100 years I think people will care more about Citizen Kane or Michael Jackson than Rich Dad, Poor Dad or Excel 95 for Dummies.
  - mplanchard 7y ago
    It doesn’t seem fair to compare classics of two media with books that are definitively not in the same league. I definitely want to be able to pick up my copy of Pale Fire in 30 years and read it. Similarly with The Idiot. Those physical books will definitely still be functional in three decades. And, if a copy is lost or damaged, it’s easy to get a cheap replacement at a used bookstore, something that isn’t possible with ebooks.
    - emodendroket 7y ago
      Of course, but the point of the comparison is that there is no shortage of forgettable books. I predict it will be quite easy to download a new digital copy of The Idiot in 30 years if you lose access to the one you have today as well.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        There is no shortage of forgettable anythings. If that was your point, it's a poor one. If you could predict ahead of time what might be valued in the future, then you could discard the rest. But you cannot do that, since you are not from the future. Scraps of data once thrown away as mundane are now valued in the present by researchers; there is no reason to believe this won't continue to be true into the future. Even your poorly contrived example of mundane data was debunked easily by another commenter. Keep what can reasonably be kept, and let future researchers worry about filtering it. Preemptive filtering will only deprive future researchers of data they'll desire for reasons you cannot presently fathom.

dangoor 7y ago

As an indie author, I've paid more attention to what's going on in publishing than the average person over the last few years. This article has some things I could quibble with, but the overall premise is, I think, true. Publishers don't like the ebook market, and my guess is that it's because of how little control they have over it. In the world of ebooks, indies actually have the upper hand. For one, we don't have the overhead of big publishers, so we can sell ebooks at more reasonable prices (while pocketing more than authors with traditional contracts). We have the ability to move more quickly and thus take advantage of new features (like Amazon's ad platform) earlier. We can sell worldwide with a click, instead of negotiating messy contracts. With print on demand, we can also have our books in print. But publishers definitely have the upper hand there and, I presume, always will. Also, as an indie I have the option to make my books available DRM-free. Personally, I _like_ ebooks, especially for fiction. They weigh nothing. They have search. My highlights can get aggregated together. I can switch devices and even switch between ebook and audiobook. Further, I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me.

germinalphrase 7y ago
Are there any platforms you find more effective than others for sales/building an audience?
est31 7y ago
> I think there are very few print books that actually have real resale value, so that's not a big factor for me. Actually, I believe that used ebooks can sell for almost the same price as "new" ones. Unlike with physical books, there is literally no difference in reading experience between an ebook that has been sold a hundred times and an ebook that's new. However, as someone who reads books and who would appreciate a right for resale for ebooks, I don't appreciate it for being able to make money from reselling it. I am more interested about the effects: that I have actual ownership over the ebook. That the place which sold me the ebook going bankrupt doesn't disrupt my abilities to read it. That I can lend it to a friend. etc. Now, if you allowed resale, ebooks would have close to "new" resale values, and more importantly, resale values of ebooks which have been sold three or four times would stay the same. This would create the problem that people could buy an used ebook, read it, and then resell it afterwards for the same price, basically reading the ebook for free. Now libraries are doing something similar with physical books, but they are inconvenient to use. You need to get to the library, stand in queue, handle the books, think about bringing them back in time, etc. But ebooks don't have such limitations and you could build a super convenient solution around ebook lending. While it's great that people read books, it's sadly not really good for publishers or authors. I kinda understand them that they want to close this loophole. Still, you could allow for resale in some different fashion. E.g. a resale tax of 10% of the value or something. In my opinion that would be the optimum, and a solution that's fair to everyone.

resoluteteeth 7y ago

The title is misleading and makes it sound like the publishers are actually trying to kill e-books which is not the case.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Yeah the author is being deliberately dense. To make a point I guess. The idea that e-books are licenses is self-serving for the publishing industry. Since they can't control distribution of an e-book after it leaves their site, they want legal controls. So they can sell the book more than once.
derstander 7y ago
I don’t know what sort of actions would fall under your definition of trying to kill e-books. But from my (admittedly unsophisticated) point of view, some publishers seem willing to at least hamstring them if it will net them more traditional sales. [0] https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775150979/you-may-have-to-wait-to-borrow-a-new-e-book-from-the-library https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775150979/you-may-have-to-wai...
- resoluteteeth 7y ago
  That's almost identical to how movie companies restrict rentals (as opposed to sales) of videos for a period after movies are released, but nobody would claim that this means movie companies are trying to "kill digital video rentals." At the very least, "trying to kill e-books" would mean that publishers were actually attempting to convince people to buy paper books instead of e-books, which is not something they are doing. Moreover, when I first read the title of this article, I thought that publishers were actually considering ceasing publication of ebooks, which is definitely not what is being described.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Someone mentioned Special Topics in Calamity Physics, so I looked it up. MSRP for the paperback is apparently $18 (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297621/special-topics-in-calamity-physics-by-marisha-pessl/); https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297621/special-topi... on Amazon the Kindle version is $13.99 while the paperback is $11.39. On the other hand, Barnes and Noble has the NOOK version for $13.99 and the paperback for $16.20, so maybe Amazon is trying to kill e-readers.

coding123 7y ago

I can't read a space fantasy/sci-fi book on the same device that has my addictive free cell game.

crest 7y ago
You can as soon as you converted it to EPUB.
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  I think the issue here is not the technological ability to read it but rather the personal ability to decide to read rather than playing the game.
zrail 7y ago
So don’t? There are dozens of eInk reading devices on the market.
feydaykyn 7y ago
My reader app is on my main screen and games are three levels deep, so that reading is quicker than any other activity. Works great!

officemonkey 7y ago

> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? Repeat after me: the average person doesn't read. The market for ebooks is a fraction of the market for movies and music. OTOH, there is a viable market because there are such things as "avid readers" (people who read more than one book a month.) Those are the people ereaders are made for. I predict that ebooks will be like jazz records: they not terribly popular, but they'll still be made because there's a devoted audience.

ikeboy 7y ago
The overall market for books is roughly the same as that for music and movies. Quick googling says $27 billion for books, $16 billion for music, $41 billion for movies in the US. Not digging in to those numbers but if we assume they're roughly in the correct ballpark then it's all similar market sizes.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  Is that including stuff like textbooks?
  - CriticalCathed 7y ago
    It does. It includes all publishers and academic journals. I would wager a huge portion of that 27 billion is textbooks in k-12 & university, and journals; though, I haven't been able to find the raw data. [0] https://www.bookstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BOOKSTATS_2013_GENERAL_PUBLIC_WEBSITE_HIGHLIGHTS.pdf https://www.bookstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BOOKSTA... (page 1, bottom)
sfifs 7y ago
Well NO ONE I personally know buys or keeps physical books any more except for children's books if they have kindergarten or primary school kids. Everyone's book collection is on the Kindle including middle school and high school kids. Living in a tropical/sub-tropical humid climate, the tendency of physical book collections to deteriorate or grow mould is a major liability especially if you have small kids.

amelius 7y ago

One problem with e-books is that you have nothing to show for it. Books have lost their collector value.

falcolas 7y ago
Most books purchased are mass market paperbacks. Those have only rarely had market value after being purchased. I can’t even give most of mine away.

james-skemp 7y ago

I can't help but compare this to the tabletop RPG space, something I've gotten into recently for inspiration. Over the last few months I've spent a good deal of money at DriveThruRPG. Distributed via (usually) watermarked PDF, with limited security. Prices are cheap, and often the electronic version is included for free if you get a print on demand version. Buy a product and want to get a bundle it's in later? Bundle price of the product is discounted (not the price you pay, which is fine). When I was buying electronic versions of programming books about a decade ago this is what I was hoping for. Instead I have useless files since they can no longer authenticate.

pandesmos 7y ago
I’m in the RPG space myself. Ive basically bootstrapped up a small but profitable publishing company in that scene (http://shop.swordfishislands.com http://shop.swordfishislands.com). I also like how DriveThruRPG gives drm free PDFs. The watermark is up to the creator (I don’t). I wish they took a smaller cut on their market though. :p There is also the Bundle of Holding, that does bundles of drm free rpg PDFs and content. It’s pretty great as well. My personal take is that the ebook/pdf/digital book market is replacing the “cheap paperback/trade” market. I use Kickstarter to raise funds for pretty deluxe offset print runs and am then pretty liberal with the digital copies (buy a book get the digital free, charity bundles, bundles, free in person download codes, etc). This seems to have been beneficial because the “infinite digital” product serves as a gateway to the “limited, special, ‘deluxe’” version. Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing (e.g., I have the digital I don’t need the paperback) so downplaying the digital seems like it would make sense long term for books that don’t make sense to exist in some sort of “deluxe, you’ll want this for 50 years” format.
- james-skemp 7y ago
  I've got some of your stuff. :) I think from a BoH, in fact. (Whether part of a bundle or not, Questing Beast's videos are how I really know of your works.) > Paperbacks, even big ones are pretty cheap to produce, so I’d imagine there’d be more of a “sales cannibalism” between a paperback and ebook wing Counter to that is people like Questing Beast, or the guy that did Grognardia, who like to have print. I've been going OSR systems and have purchased way more than I would have because they're electronic and won't take up (physical) space. I almost skipped Whitehack because I could only get a print copy via Lulu. Granted, you could purchase a PDF and then pay to have it printed, but your point about deluxe editions is dead on. That's why I bought my SO the illustrated Harry Potter books, and why she bought me the Final Fantasy Ultimania books; they're beautiful deluxe books that we'd cherish and pass on to our descendents.

brink 7y ago

I have a Kindle, but I often find myself buying the physical copy of books just for the satisfaction of having something I can physically touch. It's the same reason I go and buy physical copies of games from BestBuy when I can rather than buying games from Nintendo's e-shop.

chance_state 7y ago
My method is to torrent the ebook and buy the physical book (directly from the author where possible). I feel like it gives me the best of both worlds.
wrycoder 7y ago
A used copy on Amazon is often a fraction of the Kindle version price.

asimovfan 7y ago

Physical books are gone. The people who actually read books have already switched to e-books. I haven't bought a single physical book since i bought the first iteration of the amazon swindle. Some people who also read books will try to refute this argument, saying they still buy love and read physical books. So do i. I love physical books. I love them as a commodity. I love holding them, reading them, putting them on display after finishing them, but sadly, it's simply not convenient for someone who really reads. When i finish one book and want the next in the series, when i find out about a book that i am actually curious about what it is saying, i will simply get the e-book. The desire to read and convenience simply wins. I thought the last iteration of the generic ebook reader was my last purchase because it had the backlight, but now they came up with the yellow backlight so i have to buy this. Blue light causes macular degeneration and yellow light is so much more comfortable. Ebook readers are like a dream come true. When they came out, i thought wow, truth is probably solipsism.

ghaff 7y ago
You're over-generalizing. Yes, for just reading text eBooks work great--especially for travel. But I still buy tons on physical books as well where the graphic design (photos, etc.) is relevant.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Why PDF is not suitable for you?
  - ghaff 7y ago
    First of all, many books are not available in a PDF format. Secondly, for something like a cookbook, I like putting post-it tabs, writing notes, etc. Thirdly, some books are a larger form-factor than a typical tablet and the printing has a tactile dimension to it. To be clear, I like eBooks and frequently buy them. But I don't find them a 1:1 substitute for printed books.
    - mavhc 7y ago

droro 7y ago

I'm finding the article's arguments pretty unconvincing. eBook prices might be high, but as I've grown older I've realized that the price of the content is typically well below the opportunity cost of consuming it. If a good portion of that money makes it back into creators' hands, I'm satisfied. The author spends some time complaining about the lack of first-sale doctrine, which is just a relic from the time when all content came on costly physical media. It would be wasteful to be forbidden from selling a book that you no longer want to read, so the reasoning went. The arguments get even more nonsensical ("eBooks don't appreciate in value", "You can't photocopy them") Meanwhile, they totally miss my biggest issue with eBooks: that they give significant power to platform providers, who may demand unreasonable concessions from authors and publishers. In the process of writing this, I wondered if there was a Bandcamp for eBooks. HN had an answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704436

gabrielrdz 7y ago

This is why I love Manning Books. I actually ordered a book off of Amazon that I forgot was produced by Manning, and I went to cancel the order and get it from Manning instead. That way I got the print version, the digital version and even free digital of the older editions of it. They've won me as a customer in that I'll always order off them if they have a book I want even if it's available on AMZ.

MisterTea 7y ago

> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? Well let's look at the technology involved: Books have been around since writing and evolved from clay tablets which we can still "read" to this very day so long as the text is intact. Nothing other than your eyeballs and hands are needed to interface with a book. No batteries, headphones, passwords, or wires. Plus reading a book is quite a different experience as your mind is actively painting images and creating sounds. Video and audio can present some wonderful sensations but ultimately arent as personal as the creations of your minds eye (and ear). So books as they are work very well and do exactly what they were meant to do. Plus reading on a screen sucks and who wants to buy another electronic gizmo with a good screen like e ink which will become obsolete, fail, or have your book deleted after some DRM copyright spat? Please no. Video and Audio NEED electronics. They are already hamstrung with a technological need so consuming via digital means is much more practical. And as far as physical media goes nowadays, it's less convenient than streaming. Though Music still enjoys a strong association with the medium being an art so it goes hand in hand with physical collecting which is why you still see tapes and vinyl. Like a book, you want to be able to hold it and also enjoy the art work. Some artists even release ultra limited handcrafted cases to house said physical media adding a more personal touch.

fastball 7y ago
eReaders are amazing. I have 3 books that I am reading at the same time that I literally carry everywhere I go because it is so easy. I never did that with physical books. Additionally, my Kindle was $90. Between all the books I can get for free from Project Gutenberg and how ebooks are often cheaper than physical books (and should probably be even cheaper given their effectively $0 distribution costs), my kindle has already paid for itself and then some, so the fact that it will become obsolete isn't a big deal (I've had it for 5 years). I can buy a new one in a year or so (or tomorrow) and very easily it will pay for itself. We also have plenty of storage mediums for digital data that last much, much longer than a paper book, so ebooks win on the "surviving a mass extinction event" front too. Hell, every book published today is starting out as an "ebook" anyway, given that they're all written digitally. Given that, it's even easier to distribute it digitally than physically.

mstolpm 7y ago

Slightly off topic, but I often wonder why there is no backlash on print media regarding the environmental aspect of this whole publishing industry. Most books are mass-printed, shipped to warehouses, then shipped to local sellers (or e.g. Amazon, that ships a single book to a buyer) - and the (huge) non-sellable rests are either deeply discounted or completely dumped. If you see a pile of the latest "bestseller" at the local store, its almost guaranteed that only a fraction is sold, the rest will be disposed. Moreover, most print books, magazines and newspapers aren't even fully read by the buyers, let alone multiple times. Its a huge industry producing, promoting and selling mostly single-use items. And the used market for most books is virtually non-existent: I had to move a couple of times and the paper weight was one of the biggest hurdles. I dumped lots of books because I couldn't find a buyer on the used market (handling would far exceed the value of the books, some companies buy used books only based on weight and condition) and even libraries and social services like the Caritas declined to take used books. So, I'm really wondering why we as a society aren't more demanding on the sustainable side of the publishing business, especially the environmental effects. Ebooks could perhaps be a much more environment-friendly alternative, but I agree that publishers and market places have done a lot to make them less attractive, affordable and available for most readers in comparison to printed alternatives.

lostlogin 7y ago
> I had to move a couple of times and the paper weight was one of the biggest hurdles. It is painful, but packing and unpacking books is by far the least painful bit about moving. You can clear or stock a shelf in seconds and they transport well too.
- caro_douglos 7y ago
  It’s all about that media mail price and not caring when they show up!
hannasanarion 7y ago
Our culture holds print books as sacred objects. Talking about the environmental impact of books is like talking about the environmental impact of churches, or music halls, or war memorials, or grave stones: it doesn't even make sense to talk about it because people don't imagine those things at the level of costs and impacts, they are inherently worthwhile. If you propose printing less books, or even worse, destroying existing books that nobody reads to recycle their paper, you will quickly have a pitchfork-bearing mob at your door calling you a book-burner.

jccalhoun 7y ago

I love ebooks. I also hate drm so I only "buy" drmed ebooks if I can strip the drm and usually convert it to epub. I do wish that the highlights I make were actually saved to the epub file rather than in a separate file that is difficult to transport to another device.

dboreham 7y ago

New to me that ebooks have failed. I almost never buy physical books now.

sunflowerfly 7y ago

Amazon has a monopoly and monopsony in the ebook market. Oddly, the department of just does not seem to care. Their recent test of “does it hurt consumers” is too narrow. In this case the monopsony is hurting the entire industry.

hnarn 7y ago

When e-books came along, I can only assume publishers panicked and said "we have to protect these books from being copied somehow", so they crippled them with DRM, created their own standards, and so on. Years later, the only way to comfortably enjoy a purchased e-book from a major publisher (that uses DRM technology) is to: * Pay for the crippled e-book and download it to some Adobe application that is only used to unlock your crippled e-book. * Use a plugin for an open source application to strip the book of the DRM, creating a real e-book. * Send your "pirated" and de-DRM'd e-book to your device of choice as it can now be easily converted. The whole e-book market is backwards and is reminiscent of the way music was being sold around ~2005. You were forced to buy a CD so you could rip it to mp3 files and put them on your device. Sell mp3 files directly? Oh no, we can't do that, anyone can copy those! (Except you can, of course, copy the mp3 files created from the CD, so your guaranteed sale is one disc). Then comes the argument about making piracy uncomfortable: "Sure, books can be copied, but if we at least make them annoying to copy, people will gravitate towards buying them through legitimate channels" -- except they won't, because the reason people aren't buying through legitimate channels in the first place is the same reason for e-books as for music: they suck. They create problems for the users, they are price-inflated and overpriced (to prop up the dying physical copy-part of the industry), so everybody hates them. I'll buy a book online if it lacks DRM, but only then. Humble Bundles are great for this. But, if you publish a book and you use crippling DRM technology because you're scared of being copied, you are making the book market a worse place for everyone, and you are contributing to the problem. Only an absolute fool would think that going back to physical copies of books is the right move here -- and if that turns out to be what happens, I will gladly dedicate my time to digitizing books made by these consumer-hating Luddites, and spreading them online against their will. Find a new model, or die like the rest. Stop being scared of change, it's getting old.

zuppy 7y ago
I keep hearing again and again the same argument regarding DRM. I really doubt people (not the technical ones found here) care about DRM. They didn’t care when the music industry implemented it, see how much the music pirating has fallen. I think what they care about is convenience. The convenience of instant access to hundreds of thousands of books, recommendations, ratings.

Havoc 7y ago

Worse the latest gen kindles have firmware/DRM that can't be cracked (yet). I was sorta OK with all their bullshit because I knew I could break it (for personal use/backup) Might need to steal my mom's ancient kindle

djsumdog 7y ago

I hate that I need to break DRM to keep a copy of an ebook. There was that famous case where Amazon found out they didn't have a license for a book in Canada and pulled it from everyone's devices. The book? Orwell's 1984. We have DRM free music from BandCamp, iTunes, CDBaby, AmazonMusic and others. But the only place to get DRM free books is Kobo, and it's not a huge selection. Offer me a DRM free book where most of my money goes to the authors and I'd be all over it. This recent trend has lead me back to pirating the larger or older titles.

zozbot234 7y ago
If you want "most" of your money to go to the author, you'll need to look outside traditional book publishing - even Amazon ebook publishing will take a 70% cut. Your best bet is supporting your preferred authors on Patreon, Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms, and asking them to refrain from adopting DRM. The crowd-funding model works very well for this, because you aren't restricted to paying per-copy in the first place.
billpollock 7y ago
Our ebooks have always been DRM free. Always will be.

petre 7y ago

No worries, everybody will pirate e-books, just like it happened with music. Indie publishers will make some money, probably more than going through a publishing house because they can sell directly to the customer and cut out the publisher. A 70% cut on eBooks sales is outright theft imho. If I were a book author and Amazon took a 70% cut, I would rather publish it online for free under a license that prohibits commercial distribution of the work (in exchange for money).

ossworkerrights 7y ago
Not every culture is based on theft.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> Did you give or receive any books for Christmas? If so, were they physical books, or electronic ones? I suspect that, while many of us have exchanged real, printed books as presents, eBooks were far less popular, and unless you give a voucher, they’re almost impossible to give as presents anyway. So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online? Huh? You can't give digital copies of movies, music, or games as Christmas gifts for exactly the same reasons. What is this paragraph supposed to have established? > eBook readers are still incredibly primitive, and won’t even let you refer to two or more sections of the book at the same time. You can’t photocopy them, copy quotations, or do anything remotely advantageous. Kindles have supported copying quotations since at least 2010.

BooneJS 7y ago

No! Since buying a Kindle I don’t have nearly the same guilt over my stash of unread ebooks compared to the reminder I see of physical booms. I read a lot, but not as much as I buy. :/

mFixman 7y ago

I have a Kindle which I loved and used to be my main way to read books when I lived in a third world country. I've pretty much abandoned it since I moved to a next-day Amazon delivery country. Dead-tree books are much more convenient in the ideal case when I'm in a comfortable position at home, and I never have the foresight to buy an e-book to read something on vacation without having to carry a physical tome of whichever book I'm reading right now.

tharne 7y ago

Publishers don't need to kill e-books, they were never a good product to begin with, which is why they've mostly failed to replace paper books. The author missed the most obvious reason e-books have hit a wall. Compared to hard-copy books, e-books offer a vastly worse user experience, with the only benefit being lower price and easier storage. Paper books are incredibly durable, easy on the eyes even for very long periods of reading, affordable, and a nice break from staring at a screen all day. Even children prefer paper books to kindles and other e-readers, so it's not a matter of nostalgia or people refusing to change. Paper books are just a really great user experience as far as media goes. The comparison to other media like music and video is also completely wrong. Records, tapes, video cassettes, etc. are all new technologies, less than 100 years old in most cases. So eight-tracks and CDs getting replaced with mp3s and streaming services is a case of a new technology being displaced by a slightly newer technology. Books on the other hand have had centuries, even millennia to develop and perfect the user experience, which they largely have (I can't take credit for this last argument, Nassim Taleb points this fact out in his Incerto series).

arkades 7y ago
You may be underestimating the value of easy storage. I’m a city dweller, and I’ve been outright barred by my spouse from purchasing any more books - we just don’t have the room.
BenjiWiebe 7y ago
I'm an avid reader. I'll sometimes read a book a day. I don't have the room or money for reading and buying that many physical books. I'm getting to the point where I even prefer the interface of an ebook. I can search, long press a word look it up, read in the dark without carefully positioning a lamp, change the brightness, change the font size, change the font....
KingMachiavelli 7y ago
I think you're completely backwards about how much ebooks are failures and in what manner. And your comparison to other media is incomplete. > Compared to hard-copy books, e-books offer a vastly worse user experience, with the only benefit being lower price and easier storage. For novels, ebooks are a vastly better user experience. Adjustable font size, lighter weight, adjustable brightness and color temperature. There is no curved page warping of the text, each page is perfectly flat and legible. You can actually have the book with you when carrying around a book all day can get impractical. I suppose I should preface this with the fact that if you aren't using an e-ink screen then you really aren't using e-books properly. > Even children prefer paper books to kindles... There is a learning curve and pre-novel children books are more of a visual medium than text so children have exposure to page turning prior to actually reading. > So eight-tracks and CDs getting replaced with mp3s and streaming services is a case of a new technology being displaced by a slightly newer technology. [...] Books on the other hand have had centuries... This comparison still feels off... The technology of CDs, records, etc. is all pretty new but the content is just as old as the content in books e.g live concerts, live plays, oral history, etc. Bound, mass printed books were just ahead of their time compared to music & video since the latter two contain a lot more actual data (bytes/item) so incremental improvements matter much more. Of course, I too think there are reasons why e-books don't completely replace physical novels/books. 1. Format is only good for novels and stuff without lots of diagrams or images. Textbooks are a huge market and having e-readers the size of them is kind of impractical at this current time. Even so lots of students prefer the PDFs anyway so it's kind of a toss up. 2. Upfront cost. e-readers are not cheap for a lot of people and people don't read a ton in general so paying for an e-reader + books vs the free library is a tough sell. (Most people don't know or don't know how to use free ebooks services through public institutions and a lot of the time they don't work on all e-readers, etc.) I think there is also some generational trends that work against e-books such as the older & less tech savvy perhaps reading more but having learned preferences for books BUT I haven't researched this theory yet.

bwb 7y ago

For me, ebooks are life changing. I read around 100 to 150 books a year and i can carry an infinity of books in my pocket no matter where i am at in the world! And, 99% of the time ebooks are cheaper when i compare.... I put ebooks right after electricity and i dearly hope my print books disappear.

soapboxrocket 7y ago

This is how an industry sets itself up for disruption.

acollins1331 7y ago

This is a poorly written rambling article that doesn't even make an attempt to address the title.