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Yahoo's current topic: The future of (e)books
Yahoo!News blog has a regular topic (I'm guessing it lasts a week or so, but I really have no idea), which is currently about The Future of Books. They'd like comments; the post went up on Wednesday, and there are a few more than 180 comments at the moment. As is normal for these things, there are plenty of "smell of books/feel of leather" comments, but also a high number of comments from people with ebook devices. I can't see a way to show more than 10 comments at a time, which is annoying. From the article:
I've been reading ebooks for about four years; I can barely tolerate reading paper books anymore. (You need *two hands!* And they curve in the middle! And the way they fit in the hand keeps changing! And they don't make the text bigger at night when my eyes are tired!) I'm a strong ebook proponent, with a sharp awareness of their limitations.
Several types of books don't convert well to digital formats: art books, reference books, cookbooks (it's hard to put notes in the margins of an ebook), children's books, especially those with tactile elements. The tech, both software and hardware, needs serious improvements before ebooks can replace pbooks for academic purposes. The books that work best are novels, where format is secondary to content, and those are most of what's taking off.
I expect ebooks to gradually replace paperbacks for a lot of leisure reading, the way that TV gradually replaced radio for dramatic stories, but slowly, because publishers are dragging their feet on accepting several aspects of book-reading culture.
Until publishers figure out how to allow used ebooks, it'll remain a niche market for techno-geeks and those wealthy enough to accept 1 purchase = 1 reader, which is not how books have traditionally been used. And until they price ebooks comparably with paperbacks, not hardcovers, the market will grow slowly. And both of these issues contribute to piracy, which will fade as soon as they address the real problems: making ebooks affordable and convenient from legit sources.
Baen.com is one of the few publishers whose sales have grown consistently over the last decade--while they've had a free library of hundreds of ebooks, and offer their ebooks DRM-free in several formats. Their business model won't work for everyone, but other publishers should be looking at which aspects of their model could be adapted to their own markets.
Is the ability to carry a bookcase’s worth of literature in a thin electronic tablet jeopardizing the future of paper books?What I posted:
Stanford University's library director, Michael Keller, seems to think so. The shelves of Stanford University's new engineering library will hold just an eighth of the books the old library stored, NPR reports, and Keller expects that eventually shelves will hold no books. Librarians now encourage engineering students to access periodicals from a laptop or mobile phone, for instance.
I've been reading ebooks for about four years; I can barely tolerate reading paper books anymore. (You need *two hands!* And they curve in the middle! And the way they fit in the hand keeps changing! And they don't make the text bigger at night when my eyes are tired!) I'm a strong ebook proponent, with a sharp awareness of their limitations.
Several types of books don't convert well to digital formats: art books, reference books, cookbooks (it's hard to put notes in the margins of an ebook), children's books, especially those with tactile elements. The tech, both software and hardware, needs serious improvements before ebooks can replace pbooks for academic purposes. The books that work best are novels, where format is secondary to content, and those are most of what's taking off.
I expect ebooks to gradually replace paperbacks for a lot of leisure reading, the way that TV gradually replaced radio for dramatic stories, but slowly, because publishers are dragging their feet on accepting several aspects of book-reading culture.
Until publishers figure out how to allow used ebooks, it'll remain a niche market for techno-geeks and those wealthy enough to accept 1 purchase = 1 reader, which is not how books have traditionally been used. And until they price ebooks comparably with paperbacks, not hardcovers, the market will grow slowly. And both of these issues contribute to piracy, which will fade as soon as they address the real problems: making ebooks affordable and convenient from legit sources.
Baen.com is one of the few publishers whose sales have grown consistently over the last decade--while they've had a free library of hundreds of ebooks, and offer their ebooks DRM-free in several formats. Their business model won't work for everyone, but other publishers should be looking at which aspects of their model could be adapted to their own markets.