The future is bleak

[Dr Spoon]

"... He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. Almost as much as he loved the new Starbucks soma-latte, available for only 64 Work Units in the library cafe. You know, where the books used to be."

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

You can pry my paper bound books from my cold dead fingers. I simply hate e-readers. If others want to buy them, that's their call, I'm going to buy books as long as I can.

[Mad Monkey]

Nobody is suggesting that history books should be replaced by documentaries. Adding video clips is just an extension of adding pictures, both have the potential to complement and enhance a body of text if used sensibly.

The History Channel?

It might be a strain though to tie in clips of Hitler and World War II into every book.... There were other things in history that happened besides that.

[cseresz]

E-Book sales jump at the start of 2011

"e-book net sales increased to $69.9 million compared to $32.4 million in January, 2010"

"Adult hardcover sales fell from $55.4 million in January 2010 to $49.1 million in 2011, while adult paperback sales decreased 30 percent in the same period, according to the AAP."

[Grack21]

This is hideously fucking stupid.

:cheers: :agree:

[cseresz]

brutal times

[Emo Jon Snow]

I can't think of books as technology, the printing press is technology, but the written word is cultural. I'm not crazy about the idea of losing books forever, though it may be inevitable.

[Spring Bass]

Having had a Kindle for four months now, I can confidently say that I don't miss the paper versions of books. E-books are just so much more convenient. They're lighter, easier to mark (and you don't feel like you're desecrating your copy forever doing it), and quite easy to read (the new e-ink in the Kindle 3's is excellent).

[DanielAbraham]

It seems unlikely that either form of book (physical or e) is going away anytime soon. The thing that's interesting from my perspective is some of the unexpected things ebooks are doing to the industry. They are, for instance, making impulse buying of books much easier. And if they wind up being a real percentage of the sales, they also kill the death spiral that has ended a lot of mid-list writers' careers.

I'm still personally skeptical for several reasons -- I have books that were printed before I was born that still work just fine, but I don't have an electronic device more than 5 years old -- but I'm less fervently opposed than I once was. And as I get older and my eyes start to go, ebooks may be a godsend.

[SkynJay]

Ill be happy when they tie printed books with the ebook rights, even if it slightly raises the price of printed books.

As is I fear losing the rights to an ebook if a company goes belly up. I lovingly clutch my out of print copy of Eight Days of Luke, while wondering what people with the Boarders reader will be left

with if the reorganization dosnt go as planned.

Edit. What is a mid list writer?

[Ormond]

Edit. What is a mid list writer?

See

http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist

and

http://richardswheeler.blogspot.com/2011/03/whats-mid-list.html

[Spring Bass]

Ill be happy when they tie printed books with the ebook rights, even if it slightly raises the price of printed books.

As is I fear losing the rights to an ebook if a company goes belly up. I lovingly clutch my out of print copy of Eight Days of Luke, while wondering what people with the Boarders reader will be left

with if the reorganization dosnt go as planned.

Edit. What is a mid list writer?

That's my one serious concern, although I don't think Amazon is going to go out of business any time soon.

Ideally, the dying company would let you convert your e-books into a more broad format (like ePub, which the Kindle doesn't run, or PDF), which you could then store and back-up on your computer. Hell, you could even print off the PDF file of the book if necessary.

[Gregor Barksdale]

I'm still personally skeptical for several reasons -- I have books that were printed before I was born that still work just fine, but I don't have an electronic device more than 5 years old -- but I'm less fervently opposed than I once was. And as I get older and my eyes start to go, ebooks may be a godsend.

No electronic devices are going to work longer than a good book. But they're not what matters. The ebook files will work far longer than any book (provided you don't use some DRM crap and correctly do your backups).

[DanielAbraham]

No electronic devices are going to work longer than a good book. But they're not what matters. The ebook files will work far longer than any book (provided you don't use some DRM crap and correctly do your backups).

Yeah, I worked tech support too many years to have great faith in that, even. I know folks who are looking for zip drives so that they can get to their old backups. And I've got some early stories I wrote in college that are on 3.5 floppies formatted for Mac operating systems that don't exist in the wild anymore. I could probably save them i it were worth the effort, but it's not. And I don't assume that there's going to be anything that gracefully reads pdfs in twenty years either.

I'm not saying it's impossible to keep the files updated and functional, only that we're working with humans here, and our track record for that kind of thing isn't great.

[Sunspear]

I'd really love for some physical book/ebook combo deals to come out, I'd pay a small premium to get both, but not double. That way you'd get the best of both worlds, the permanence of real books and the convenience of ebooks. I see value in getting both right now depending on the circumstances. A book that I really like and I've been looking forward to, I'll go out and buy it and find space for it an my shelf, but something that's more of an impulse buy or something I'm not quite as sure of and taking a chance on, I'll just go with the ebook. And of course if you talking about books that are out of print, ebooks can be your only choice (if they have even bothered to do an ebook yet). Thats one of the things I'm looking forward to most about ebooks, the concept of out of print should become obsolete.

I'm not to worried about losing my ebooks yet, the vast majority of mine were just downloaded from project gutenburg, no problem to redownload those. The books I bought, well there's a copy on Barnes and Noble's servers, a copy on my ereader, and a copy on my computer. That's enough redundancy for me, so I'll call it an acceptable risk. You can't get offsite backup of a physical book, a fire could wipe out your entire collection, while could just redownload your ebooks from your account. So its just yet another trade off. The drm worries me more than losing the file itself, though for now cracks exist so I'm ok for the time being, but in the future more draconian drm schemes could drive me away.

[Gregor Barksdale]

Yeah, I worked tech support too many years to have great faith in that, even. I know folks who are looking for zip drives so that they can get to their old backups. And I've got some early stories I wrote in college that are on 3.5 floppies formatted for Mac operating systems that don't exist in the wild anymore. I could probably save them i it were worth the effort, but it's not. And I don't assume that there's going to be anything that gracefully reads pdfs in twenty years either.

I'm not saying it's impossible to keep the files updated and functional, only that we're working with humans here, and our track record for that kind of thing isn't great.

Yes. These are not backups (I made the mistake too, in the past). A backup is something that can be restored. If it can't be restored easily, it's not a backup. It requires maintenance, even minimal. And if it's not done, the physical book forgotten in some box will certainly last longer.

[Ormond]

I'm not to worried about losing my ebooks yet, the vast majority of mine were just downloaded from project gutenburg, no problem to redownload those. The books I bought, well there's a copy on Barnes and Noble's servers, a copy on my ereader, and a copy on my computer. That's enough redundancy for me, so I'll call it an acceptable risk. You can't get offsite backup of a physical book, a fire could wipe out your entire collection, while could just redownload your ebooks from your account. So its just yet another trade off. The drm worries me more than losing the file itself, though for now cracks exist so I'm ok for the time being, but in the future more draconian drm schemes could drive me away.

I can understand how replacing ebooks which are from Project Gutenberg wouldn't be much of a worry.

However, I don't think the risk of losing all one's paper books is on the same level as losing an ebook collection. Yes, it is certainly possible for one's physical library to be wiped out by a fire or a flood. But those events are rare; the great majority of human beings are not going to experience such an event personally in their lifetimes. Almost everyone who has worked on a computer regularly, however, has experienced the frustrating loss of documents, with those of us who aren't computer experts often not being able to figure out what we did wrong to cause that (if anything). Therefore the average person is going to believe, rightly or wrongly, that losing ebooks would be a much more common occurrence, and one that's likely to happen to them personally at some point. This may be closer to a "nuisance" than a "tragedy" compared to a complete fire loss, but it's still a nuisance a lot of us who prefer paper books would rather avoid.

[Sunspear]

However, I don't think the risk of losing all one's paper books is on the same level as losing an ebook collection.

I didn't say it was on the same level, I just said it was an acceptable risk. You can never eliminate all risk but you can get it down to a manageable level. In my opinion ebooks have reached that level for a decent number of people. And its a different kind of risk too, a book can be sturdy but if destroyed its gone for good. A digital file may be easier to lose, but if you have multiple copies in different places you would need to lose all of them at once to really lose the book. Of course this assumes that you make more copies when you lose one, if you do nothing ,they could be lost one at a time over a long time period. So it does take more vigilance.

I should also point out that right now by default ebooks have more redundancy and therefore less risk than most people's mp3s or digital photos. So I don't see the average consumer balking at ebooks because he has to take the same risk he takes every time he buys something from itunes, even less so in fact since itunes doesn't let you redownload you file again at a later date (if I recall correctly). Though more people should take their backups more seriously, if you don't it comes back to bite you really bad.

[cseresz.reborn]

http://www.telegraph...ales-slump.html

Printed book sales slump

Britons bought 7.6 million novels over the first eight weeks of 2012, almost two and a half million fewer than they bought in the opening weeks of 2011, new figures show.

Almost 1.4 million e-readers were sold in the UK over Christmas, double the amount sold the year before. In stark contrast to the decline in sales of physical books, e-book sales are soaring.

[SkynJay]

Im guilty! Half my buys this year have been ebooks, most the others used. I have failed the industry.