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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 miss

by 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.
- tharne 7y ago
  This really doesn't hold up. If people liked e-books and if they offered anything near the "vastly better user experience" folks here are claiming they do, they would sell better. The publisher conspiracy theory argument as to why they don't sell is also silly. Record companies, network television stations, and hollywood studios all tried their hardest to kill streaming music, mp3s, streaming video and so on. They failed miserably and those new mediums succeeded because they offered the user a great experience that they weren't getting previously. If anything, publishers have taken a much warmer approach to e-books than the recording industry did to digital music. Fortunately for them e-books just aren't very good and have mostly failed on their own. If e-books offered real benefits over traditional books that most customers actually valued, it wouldn't matter what publishers thought or did, e-books would succeed the way streaming music and television have. In terms of generational trends, the only folks I regularly see with e-books are retired baby boomers, so if anything I'd expect e-book sales to gradually decline as that generation rides into the sunset. I like technology as much as the next guy. Much of the time tech can offer serious improvements over the way something was done before, but sometimes it can't. We need to get over the knee-jerk belief that digital always equals "better".

by tharne 7y ago

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.

tharne 7y ago
This really doesn't hold up. If people liked e-books and if they offered anything near the "vastly better user experience" folks here are claiming they do, they would sell better. The publisher conspiracy theory argument as to why they don't sell is also silly. Record companies, network television stations, and hollywood studios all tried their hardest to kill streaming music, mp3s, streaming video and so on. They failed miserably and those new mediums succeeded because they offered the user a great experience that they weren't getting previously. If anything, publishers have taken a much warmer approach to e-books than the recording industry did to digital music. Fortunately for them e-books just aren't very good and have mostly failed on their own. If e-books offered real benefits over traditional books that most customers actually valued, it wouldn't matter what publishers thought or did, e-books would succeed the way streaming music and television have. In terms of generational trends, the only folks I regularly see with e-books are retired baby boomers, so if anything I'd expect e-book sales to gradually decline as that generation rides into the sunset. I like technology as much as the next guy. Much of the time tech can offer serious improvements over the way something was done before, but sometimes it can't. We need to get over the knee-jerk belief that digital always equals "better".