Amazon: eBooks outselling paperbacks in 2011

[Nakor]

Check it out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard ... back-sales

[Jazzmyn]

That's so sad. Personally i prefer to read an actual book.

[Nakor]

I don't know; I don't see it as sad. The important thing is the story (or if non-fiction, whatever the content happens to be) itself. Digital delivery, among other things, means a whole lot of trees are saved, and a lot of gas isn't spent on shipping and so forth. It also means I don't have to buy any more bookshelves (or choose to give up books I already have for space), and can carry my entire collection anywhere I go. It's also really opened things up for people who want to self-publish instead of giving publishers a big cut of their cheque (several self-published novels have done very well on Amazon, and decently elsewhere), and even if an author goes through a publisher, due to lower expenses in distribution, the author can earn a larger percent of the sale than is true for physical books. Even libraries are going for it; pretty much any library card from British Columbia grants access to BC Library to Go, an online eBook library.

eBooks certainly have their problems (not the least of which is that the publication industry has failed to learn from the mistakes of the music industry, and are both forcing DRM on everything and making it illegal for distributors to discount sales), but I think that on the whole this is progress for the better.

[Jazzmyn]

I guess I'm just old fashioned about books. lol I like to actually read the book not an electrontic version of it. I can see the benefits of e-books for some people, but don't see me switching over anytime soon.

[Frong]

I guess I'm just old fashioned about books. lol I like to actually read the book not an electrontic version of it. I can see the benefits of e-books for some people, but don't see me switching over anytime soon.

Tree-killer.

I personally prefer to read things off of a screen, as evidenced by how many internet articles and how much manga I read online. The act of reading off of a physical page kind of puts me to sleep, actually.

[Lagoon Bug]

I'm all for keeping both formats. Electronic and paper. An advantage that paper books will always have is that they don't require batteries or charging. If I have hundreds of books stored on a Nook or Kindle and it gets lost, they're all gone. If the device is damaged and the stored books are gone because of it, it's an electronic issue that paper books are not affected by.

On the other hand, multiple paper books weigh more and take up more space. If they can make the digital versions affordable and make it easy to back them up on computers and SD cards, I'm all for that. Right now though, I won't get a Kindle or Nook. I keep hearing good and bad things about them and I don't want to bother reading through all of that.

I hope we'll see more cheaper electronic book and PDF readers out soon. Rather than buy some 200 dollar iPod, I'm more inclined to buy a 30 dollar MP3 player from Target. I hope to have the same choice in electronic book readers soon. I hope there will be a movement to convert books to PDF files and make them available on the internet the same way you can download music for free. Just like companies make MP3 players knowing that people will put not-so-legally obtained music on them, I hope they'll do the same for books. The hard part is getting people to convert books and ebooks to PDF format, since that would be the easiest way to go for cheaper electronic book readers. But I'm sure it can be done and I hope it will be.

[Nakor]

100% with you there Lagoon Bug. The price on eBook readers is still way too high. The Kindle's price drop was a nice surprise though, so maybe it's a sign of things to come. (The Sony is quite a bit nicer, but I think it's still around $250.)

PDF files though actually make a pretty poor choice for most books. They're great for texts and a lot of non-fiction -- basically anything with charts, graphs, tables, and so forth that needs to be displayed exactly in the format it was published in. But for most other books, a newer format called ePub is preferred. It's smaller, allows easy reflowing of text, still keeps all basic text formatting, allows images to resize to eBook reader screen sizes, page numbers on books are preserved and so forth. They also load a lot faster on eBook readers, which tend not to have (or need) terribly strong processors. Basically, it's designed specifically for eBooks. Just random info I thought I'd share lol.

There's also always Project Gutenberg, which any avid reader ought to check out; basically a huge collection of as many classical or otherwise out of copyright books they could get their hands on all hosted up for free. You don't need an eBook reader to read them either, provided you don't mind reading on a monitor (can be a bit killer on the eyes over long periods) or printing them out (old books are looooooong).

[Lagoon Bug]

I didn't know about the ePub format. And yeah, PDF files can get pretty heavy like that. I didn't think of that. I remember on an old computer when the web browser would freeze for a while just to load a PDF file.

[Nakor]

The ones at the university still do. XD