6 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoIs that including stuff like textbooks?
- CriticalCathed 7y agoIt 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 agoWell 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.
- k__ 7y agoI do, but only as a present.
- dejj 7y agoI order physical books by calling my bookstore, so I can pick it up there. To me, random access time in print is superior to ebooks. I wish it was possible to flash an entire bookshelf full of epaper tomes in seconds so I can reap the best of both worlds.
- mplanchard 7y agoMy wife and I have a collection of several hundred physical books, and while the size of our collection is unusual among our friends, nearly all of them have a collection of some size, even if it’s just in the 10-20 book range. Pretty much everyone I know has at least one category of books they prefer printed, often textbooks and cookbooks, even if they generally use ebooks. We’re in Austin, currently, so we don’t have the mold problem you mention, but I grew up in coastal Mississippi and New Orleans and never had that problem unless the books were stored out in a shed or something. Several of our physical books are ~200 years old, and while I understand that an ebook will conceivably live for that long, I am suspicious that it would remain useful, given changing devices, formats, publishers, etc.
- hrktb 7y agoAnecdotally I see a strong clustering. I have friends with a ton of books, and their other friends also heavily liking books and physical goods (CDs, cards etc.) in general. My other friends tend to have basically nothing in terms of physical books, music, movies. I’d wager it depends on how people see physical goods in general: is it an asset or a liability ? And the “minimalist” switch might become more and more attractive when people prefer to rent instead of going into debt.
- giaour 7y agoI buy physical books whenever they're cheaper than the Kindle version. Publishers don't want to compete with remaindered or used physical books.
- ghaff 7y agoFurthermore, eBooks just aren't a very good format for many types of books. Fiction that's 99% flowing text--and some non-fiction? Sure. But even though I buy $1 and $2 eBook cookbooks when there's some special going, it's mostly a lousy format for that sort of thing--much less "coffee table" books in general. eBooks have ended up being a sort of niche as you say. Not a wholesale revolution of the publishing industry. Probably not that much of a bigger deal than print on demand at the end of the day. TBH, a lot of the same forces that helped create eBooks have actually limited how many books a lot of people read. I'm pretty sure I read as many words as I ever did but I read fewer books.
- rta5 7y agoWhat is your evidence for the average person not reading? Trying to find some numbers I came across the following pew research poll that showed nearly 3/4th of their survey participants reading a book in one format or another in the last 12 months. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/25/one-in-five-americans-now-listen-to-audiobooks/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/25/one-in-five...
- lupire 7y agoAverage 4 books a year. Compare that to tv and movies, by count or hours.
- superhuzza 7y ago>Average 4 books a year. Where does it say that? Couldn't find that on Pew Research source.
- cosmodisk 7y agoThese are interesting stats
- chadlavi 7y ago> reading a book in one format or another in the last 12 months That study is a binary "read at least one book at all or read 0", doesn't indicate how many books the people who made it through one book finished. I would not call someone who reads one book a year an avid reader.
- rgoulter 7y agoTangential, but even movies and music are smaller than the games industry. The entire, global music industry, for 2016, was worth $16 Billion. The global movie box office total for 2016 was just over $38.6 Billion US dollars. [...] Meanwhile PC games alone earned $34 Billion (including sales, DLC, subscriptions and in-game transactions). Console games pulled in $30 Billion (including hardware, games and services). and Mobile games topped $40 Billion (sales and in-game transactions). https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Video-Game-industry-bigger-than-the-Film-and-Music-Industries https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Video-Game-industry-bigger-than... (Which isn't sourced, but the numbers seem consistent with this https://www.vanillaplus.com/2018/07/05/40093-video-games-market-worth-music-movies-combined-arent-csps-launching-games-services/ https://www.vanillaplus.com/2018/07/05/40093-video-games-mar...) I don't know what the numbers are for ebooks; this link says 1 billion US dollars revenue in the US market.
- hydgu 7y agoI think lumping console/PC games with mobile games is a mistake. There are some exceptions, but they usually work completely differently.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoBut they weren't lumped together. They are distinct line items in their post. Not sure what the concern is anyways, their claim is clearly supported by the numbers: games are much bigger than music and movies. You can ignore the mobile games figure and it's still true.
- danShumway 7y agoAppreciate the tangent. I knew the video game market was doing well, I didn't know it was doing this well. This is surprising to me, I wold have assumed movies would still be bringing in more revenue.
- lusmd 7y agoStreaming revenue is about the same as box office revenue, so the disparity isn't as big. But still, that's a lot of gaming revenue.
- cosmodisk 7y agoAt some point in history people would have killed for an ability to access almost any book without any problem. When we finally got to tne point, people rather watch films or scroll endlessly on Instagram.
- victor106 7y agoIn our reading club even the most ardent readers of only physical books converted to using iPads/Kindle. I hear the same from my other social circles as well. So it would be very hard at this point for the publishers to try to kill off ebooks. They should have done it at least 5-7 years if they ever had a chance.
- mcguire 7y agoYour argument applies to physical books, as well.
- ddingus 7y agoHmmm, just like Text Adventure games.