E-books lack the ability to share, sell, and pass it on. That's fine, but the market won't bear nearly the same price as a paper book that can do all those things. An e-book should in all fairness cost perhaps a third or fourth of a paper book — i.e., the price of a paperback edition divided by the average number of readers it tends to have. Not pricing the goods accordingly leads to where we are now: mass piracy of e-books and hardly anyone feeling guilty about it.
I don't read e-books myself (I take delight in my collection of paper books), but as far as I know sharing USB-drives filled with thousands of e-books is common in a lot of circles — with middle-aged people in particular. Compare this with piracy in games, music, and video, which is comparatively rare due to the affordable and easy legal alternatives, and it is hard not to see that the market is simply not offering the best solution.
Edit: I pay for netflix, I pay for amazon prime, and I'm a member of a really good tv piracy site. My wife is happy with the TV access we have. My thing is video games so I don't actually care about TV.
I'm fairly certain, without adding it all up, that at $60 we'd save money just buying/library-ing/redboxing, $40's just where I'd start to go "hm, better run the numbers" and there's a chance it'd work out against paying for streaming, so I'd call it a decent upper bound on what I'd probably be willing to pay for such a thing. Hell, I'm paying almost that now, but the fact that I can still only find maybe 1/3 of what I want to watch available on my three services is why Amazon's set not to renew next year and Netflix is on the chopping block soon (3rd service is a cheap, niche one with mostly anime, b-movies, and some original web animation stuff, sticking with it pretty much just because it's cheap).
I click it. It takes me to Amazon, where I am already logged in. I can watch the trailer or "buy" (digital purchase, so "long term rental") it for $20(!). There's no indication I can stream it with Prime. Even knowing it's available I can't figure out how to do it from this screen—I'd have to just search again on Amazon and hope for the best.
Video 'rentals' are grossly overpriced. I've never rented anything from Prime, and their prices would have to drop to about 10% for me to feel like I'm getting value. I think ~$0.25/hr would be fair.
Media companies are resistant to discounting the cost of discrete pieces of content despite the supply of entertaining free video exploding a thousand fold in the past decade.
It was a nice little golden age for a few years, shame things can't stay this way forever because of corporate greed.
Personally I think I'll cancel my Netflix soon. There really isn't much quality content anymore, there have been zero improvements to the recommender system despite users' griping, and the prices keep getting higher.
The market is not about fairness. The prices are about what some segment of the market will pay.
> it is hard not to see that the market is simply not offering the best solution.
They are selling physical books for folks who want the traditional experience and the reuse benefits you describe, and Ebooks for folks who want the convenience of that experience. So they continue to cater to their paying customers.
It doesn’t seem reasonable to follow a race to the bottom with people who pirate ebooks. Some folks just do not pay for content.
One side effect of higher prices of the traditional publishers is that it opens a door to self published authors offering books in the lower price range you mention. These are often quite popular so obviously they are aware of the price point impact but for now are happy with capturing the premium market.
> Compare this with piracy in games, music, and video, which is comparatively rare
Can you cite figures for that? I would expect video and music and pc games to all have far higher rates of piracy.
It's all about perceived fairness. If a price doesn't seem fair and alternatives exists (e.g., paper books, piracy), consumers look elsewhere.
> One side effect of higher prices of the traditional publishers is that it opens a door to self published authors offering books in the lower price range you mention.
The masses want the new John Grisham, Danielle Steel, or whatever is popular right now. The odd self-published author gaining a small audience does not offset this.
> […] but for now are happy with capturing the premium market. […] Can you cite figures for that? I would expect video and music and pc games to all have far higher rates of piracy.
The publishing industry is rather miffed at not getting as far with e-books as they thought they might get. I don't have exact figures (although they shouldn't be hard to find), but publishers and their representative bodies have been complaining about e-book piracy in the media a lot.
In 2014 Dutch research company GfK estimated that only 10% of e-books on e-readers was paid for legally:
https://www.ad.nl/economie/e-readers-staan-vol-met-illegale-...
An interesting related article from a Dutch newspaper from a month ago for who can read it:
https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/keurige-boekendieven...
Nobody bats an eyelash at loading hundreds of pirated epubs on grandpa's new e-reader, and book clubs happily share their digital copies in Facebook groups.
The situation may vary by country, but in the Netherlands the vast majority of people pay for cable television or streaming services like Netflix, buy CD's or tracks on ITunes or subscribe to Spotify, and game on consoles or use Steam. Piracy is marginal; except for e-books, where it is commonplace.
How so? If you have the PDF file, it should be pretty easy to do all of these. Some or all of them may be illegal, but it is not the same as lacking the ability.
If it is DRM-protected, there are still ways around it.
Most importantly, my point is being ignored. I could have used epub instead as an example. It is irrelevant to the point I was making. I am not interested in a war over e-book formats.
I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books.
There's all sorts of other value, like search functions, not having to fill my house or storage box with books, and avoiding that awkward every-other-page-sucks while reading a book laying sideways in bed.
I hate reading stuff on screens.
- It hurts my eyes when I do this for hours.
- It comes with lots of distractions.
- Digital Annotations are a PITA
- Zapping through a book works much better in hard-copy
If I am supposed to spent 1h+ reading your content. You better make sure I can buy a printed copy.
*ie classic Kindle with e-ink or similar, not a tablet like iPad/Android equivalent or the annoyingly named Amazon "Kindle" Fire etc.
Not great for tech manuals, admittedly
Edit: if you're curious, look into the likebook mimas as a starting point. There are other options, that just happens to be the one I've used.
I'm aware of the new breed of large readers but haven't been able to try any, and I'm concerned they won't be powerful or sturdy enough compared to the fragile, sloooow DX to justify the outlay. I don't have much use for notes.
I realise the DX is a dinosaur though compared to the new ones you are talking about, and would love to be pleasantly surprised by a quantum leap...
...I find it a bit amusing that its model forms an emoticon that fits your general sense of the device.
Unlikely to happen: similar to silicon, eink's yield (that is, amount of parts produced with no errors) goes down quickly (quadratic if not cubic, I forgot) with increasing size.
A system based on lots of eink chiplets with small enough margins that you can tile them could scale up, but the margins are also a difficult area.
Distractions? Not in any of my e-readers.
Digital annotations suck, I'll grant that. But then again, I like my physical books and would never put markings on them, so for me this isn't a disadvantage.
Browsing is much better for physical books, but heavy hard bound books are much a pain to hold while reading.
Pros and cons to both.
The accessibility benefits of a good ereader (ie not a phone or tablet) are important for a lot of people.
Hence putting a hard price on this functionality is nigh impossible - whereas re-sale value is often easier to estimate and clearly tangible to the consumer. Claiming that they are equal is certainly not clear to me.
Sure, some people prefer hardcopies, good for them. But claiming that e-books being priced similarly is some market failure is taking it too far, for some of us it seems perfectly reasonable. If e-books were priced higher (even as much as 50% more) I'd still buy them over physical copies.
A market that had more than one way to "publish" books online would be a different ballgame than the one we're playing now
Yup, this is why I'm a fan of the likebook/boox type e readers. They all run stripped down versions of Android and many of them have SD card slots too. I use the likebook Mars (~$200) as my daily reader only (bigger ones are nice if your budget allows) and it is so much nicer than the Kindles imo. Default reader can handle all formats, you can dump your own fonts and dictionaries on it, and you can run the Kindle, kobo, libby, etc apps if you want to (since you can use Google play). Ofc being a cheap Chinese e reader it isn't exactly something that can run real apps at more than a couple fps but it's great for static content like books.
Isn't that a FOMO argument, though ?
As a consumer the advantage of e-books are: ease of organization and ease of buying, no page flipping sounds in bed, ease of transportation.
But what I really want ?
A real, thick book, with something like 200-400 sheets made up of magical e-ink so I can have a physical map of the book I am reading.
The value provided by a physical map of a book is knowing how far along you are in the book, yet that's also available in a visual form in an ebook as well. You can even riffle through pages on most e-readers as well, seeing a preview of the page as you move quickly forward or backwards.
Aside from weight, what value is the physical map really providing?
No, it provides more.
Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is.
Reading on e-reader is more linear than reading a paper book. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb...
Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.
When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-read for which you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing).
With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers.
E-reader have more friction.
That's a reason why I only read novels on e-reader and jot notes in a notepad for non-fiction books.
If I had the budget I'd only have physical books.
Any resources detailing this? It's the first I've heard of it.
> Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.
True, though the iPad is actually somewhat faster than a physical book, in my experience.
> you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing).
At least in my experience, the time required to flip a page is at least identical to (greater than, in most cases) that of a modern e-reader showing the next page.
> With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers.
> E-reader have more friction.
I simply can't agree with this. A well indexed ebook is easy to follow cross references in (such as footnotes), you can do an actual search on the content, and the lack of weight is something that can't be understated.
A specific example: I went through the "Physically Based Rendering" book a few years back. I simply can't understate how painful it was to deal with the physical book. It was the size of a large text book (it was a large textbook), heavy enough it never left my desk. More specifically, it was always flat on the desk, making it difficult to read.
It also had glossy pages that, to this day, want to stick together (not to mention being challenging to write on). Finding content in it that wasn't a chapter title included going to a glossary with a ton of page numbers, and flipping back and forth constantly (see comment about sticky pages) to see if page N was the one I was looking for.
There was no 'proprioception' between myself and the book, there was no convenience, there was only inconvenience. Even the authors recognized this, providing a digital copy of most of the code so you wouldn't spend all day typing code.
An e-reader version of the book could only have provided a better experience.
> Any resources detailing this? It's the first I've heard of it.
The link to the guardian article in my previous post has more details and a link to the original study.
> I simply can't agree with this. A well indexed ebook is easy to follow cross references in (such as footnotes), you can do an actual search on the content, and the lack of weight is something that can't be understated.
> A specific example: I went through the "Physically Based Rendering" book a few years back. I simply can't understate how painful it was to deal with the physical book. It was the size of a large text book (it was a large textbook), heavy enough it never left my desk. More specifically, it was always flat on the desk, making it difficult to read.
Apple to oranges. The book you describe is 1200 pages of technical snippets that is largely used as a reference index. It's the perfect example where e-reader outclasses paper book, such is the case for dictionaries and encyclopaedia. I'd even venture to say that a laptop or an iPad would be better than an e-reader considering how important diagrams are in this example.
> Even the authors recognized this, providing a digital copy of most of the code so you wouldn't spend all day typing code.
Providing code for CS book was already common in the 90's when CD-ROM were bundled with books.
That's referencing a fiction novel, whereas you are referencing paper as better for non-fiction (and e-readers better for fiction) - a fairly major distinction.
> The book you describe is 1200 pages of technical snippets that is largely used as a reference index.
Sorry, but you're incorrect on this point. It's an entire physically based rendering literate program, written in such a way as to teach you about PBR in a highly linear fashion (with cross-referencing). It's written to be read from one end to the other.
But you wrote:
> Finding content in it that wasn't a chapter title included going to a glossary with a ton of page numbers, and flipping back and forth constantly (see comment about sticky pages) to see if page N was the one I was looking for.
So either you read it from one end to the other or you used it as reference material (which "(looking) to see if page N was the one I was looking for." strongly indicates).
Frankly, I am not interested in trying to convince you of anything. There are substantial evidences that paper and e-books have different strengths and all you are saying is that the strength I wrote about are wrong because you don't feel like it and your 1200 page monster should be the only point of data to refute what you don't want to agree with.
All the while asking for sources I gave in one of the first post, which tells me you take only what you want from the conversation.
Not interested.
That's a big "if".
My point is that it's not a conscious process, so the book/map isn't replaced by a simple location indicator. The experience of a book isn't reducible in this way.
This sounds a lot like the old "visual/auditory/physical learning" phenomenon to me. Were it truly the case, the old O'Reilly books would be the best possible resources for programmers, and not StackOverflow, blogs, and online programming language documentation.
No, blog posts and online documentation are hardly limited in such a fashion. They cover everything from corner cases to syntax introductions, to setting up the environment. Go, as a single example in a sea of examples, has their entire official getting started and other guides entirely online:
And while SO has recently limited itself to corner cases, it has not always been that way. It has been a resource providing information on culture, machine setups, and "where's the best info on getting started online" for a very long time.
> No, blog posts and online documentation are hardly limited in such a fashion.
I purposefully didn't mention online documentation because it's too easy to make the case that man pages are more often than not too obscure as starting material.
Blog posts don't cover everything. Online doc. does though (that's like... the point).
The way you are trying to build the argument that it's either paper books or online/e-books/blog/SO and there are mutually exclusive won't lead the conversation anywhere (note the usage of the word 'typically').
I am not getting into a cherry-picking argument contest with you. You prefer e-books and online doc and dislike paper books ? Fine by me.
Thinking back about school I remember the heavy weight of the backpack. That can be more efficient, I thought back then. Same with vacation however I don't want to unlock my ereader for border patrol, as a matter of principle. Not sure if we are at that point already. The point is, each have also privacy implications.
For me this was true ten years ago.
The tides have shifted. Now a physical copy means: it will degrade faster than my devices (think books for children). It will take physical place, we’ll have to find it (I can ping my iPad, not my books). Depending on the country it’s printed, it might not even come to my life, the price will be double, or it will be 3 weeks after the moment I wanted to read it. It wi be in a single place, I can’t share it with my family or even my devices the way I share my amazon account. There’s a physical limit to how many I can keep: floors cracking under the load is a thing of the past.
It’d need a very compelling reason to buy any physical book at this point. I get the tradeoffs, but I had enough time with digital copies to make them work under the best conditions for me, making the upside way higher than the downsides.
That’s very carefully handled books.
My kids books are in no shape in a matter of months. Then adults also spill, grease, and tear their books. I had to buy some cheap second hand copies for a series with no digital release and they’re gross, I made them grossier, and they’re going to the trash bin after me (there’s no shortage of them in the world).
My amazon account is outlasting most physical books I bought in these in the last decade (I also hate amazon kindle’s lack of book organization, biting me hard at the number of books I have, but that’s another topic)
PS: for people going through 3~4 books a week, storing books for 50 years is a nightmare.
I have original-run Animorphs books, over 20 years old, from when I was age 8-13, all looking near-new. The pages are a bit yellow from age, but there's otherwise no damage. Same for the rest of my collection (some of which were published earlier, though I think Animorphs might be the oldest-printed ones I have).
The collection my have been careful curated but it was improperly stored. The (onerous) way to "store" them, (in hindsight,) would be to copy each of them would have been to copy them all to 3.25" disk when those came out, then (briefly) to zip disks, then CD-R, DVD-R, Bluray-R, and then also included a drive to read them in this backup, once it became apparent that spinny plastic frisbees were no longer a popular data storage format. Or copied the data to archival LTO tape, going up in number as new standards came out.
Or instead of moving between archival format, the other options is to copy it to hard drive and keep moving to bigger and bigger drives, and have online copies and not offline.
If that all sounds too ridiculous and no sane individual would ever do that: you're right and we hang out on /r/DataHoarders.
They might not be our individual personal copies, but they’re there, actually accessible.
To your point, I am strongly for enforcing DRM clearing after the copyright expires or the entity owning them goes under (it should be required by law IMO). I also think collectively we have a fighting chance to preserve copies as long as they’re free of DRM.
I don't know if they're from 1969 - but I do own a few punch cards...
The point is that it's actually fairly hard to beat acid-free paper for archival storage.
Tablets are better in some ways than e-readers but much worse in others. There's no killer does-everything-pretty-well e-reader solution yet. They rock for casual, lighter reading, though, which is probably a fairly high percentage of all book reading that happens.
True - and this, for me, is another benefit of eBooks; I can and do read the same eBook on multiple different devices depending on my current mix of needs or priorities.
1. I can pick it up from any device I have at any time,
2. I can pick up any book depending on my mood at that point in time (I usually read one fiction, one non-fiction and one craft related simultaneously)
3. I can highlight and keep notes with the book that's in a form I can just copy-paste later. More than a few times I have now bought the e-book even though I own the physical book.
For me these things make the cost worth it. That said I lament the things you mention above. I want to be able to "own" the book and be able to transfer or resell after I'm done. I also want guarantee that I can keep reading the book forever. Either that or a more Spotify model (Amazon Kindle Unlimited has limited selection so far) that I can just rent x number of books and month and don't have to own it. I'd be fine with that. It's the in between model where I have to pay more than paperback but can't resell it or even give it to a friend that bothers me - if anything as a matter of principle.
There's a lot of benefits to ebooks as well.
Sell the eBook for about the same price as a paperback but let the buyer exchange the eBook for a physical book for a fee that depends on the requested quality. Paperbacks would be something like $1 (fair since you already paid for the same price as the paperback), but a hardcover could be $10 or so.
AFAIK, first-sale doctrine is accepted in both US and EU. There are ECJ judicates confirming legality of reselling used software. So i am pretty sure i can sell, trade or donate my e-books.
There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library.
With a digital book (or any other digital good) I lose all of that. Since I'm getting so much less, why should I pay the same price?
The digitization makes it impossible for businesses to control the distribution of their products, unless they go full DRM and effectively prevent people from owning the things they buy – but in that case, there should be no surprise that people don't want to pay quite as much.