Posted on 12/25/2011 4:21:16 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic
LAST year, Christmas was the biggest single day for e-book sales by HarperCollins. And indications are that this year’s Christmas Day total will be even higher, given the extremely strong sales of e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. Amazon announced on Dec. 15 that it had sold one million of its Kindles in each of the three previous weeks.
But we can also guess that the number of visitors to the e-book sections of public libraries’ Web sites is about to set a record, too.
And that is a source of great worry for publishers. In their eyes, borrowing an e-book from a library has been too easy. Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.
Borrowing a printed book from the library imposes an inconvenience upon its patrons. “You have to walk or drive to the library, then walk or drive back to return it,” says Maja Thomas, a senior vice president of the Hachettte Book Group, in charge of its digital division.
And print copies don’t last forever; eventually, the ones that are much in demand will have to be replaced. “Selling one copy that could be lent out an infinite number of times with no friction is not a sustainable business model for us,” Ms. Thomas says. Hachette stopped making its e-books available to libraries in 2009.
E-lending is not without some friction. Software ensures that only one patron can read an e-book copy at a time, and people who see a long waiting list for a certain title may decide to buy it instead.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Borrowing vs owning is another downside. An extremely well-educated friend of mine is in the process of buying a lovely home. The home comes equiped with miles of built in book cases, and I was teasing him. I told him that I expected to see those shelves lined with his leather bound collection of first editions.
He shocked me to my core when he announced that he was going to "throw away" all his books. "You can get anything you want on line," he jpronounced.
I wanted to answer, "But you can't get it forever." Content and urls change all the time. You might find it today, but it might be gone next month.
2011 was my first year for selling my novels on Kindle, and they are selling as many as my print editions. The “electric ink” on a kindle is very easy on the eyes. What I miss is being able to underline, highlight and make margin notes! My favorite (paper) books are pretty marked up with my “improvements.”
For the elderly, ebooks are a godsend. For the (relatively) poor elderly, borrowing ebooks and audiobooks is also a godsend. My heirs will just sell or discard the hard copy I value. It’s quite pointless to purchase unless you wish to support the author or need to have the volume on hand for reference. For music, I order CD’s to support the musicians. In the long run, it’s a matter of personal preference or exigency.
But e-books have tremendous advantages:
(1) You can search by word, so that if you want to look something up and that word is the only thing you can remember, the section is easy to find. With a physical book, in contrast, you have to hope the index contains that word.
(2) You can add notes and highlights without physically marring the text, which I always thought felt a little like vandalism.
(3) You can click on any word and the dictionary definition pops up. (And the selection of words in the dictionary is good - not OED good, but better than a lot of physical dictionaries).
(4) An e-reader is much lighter and easy to carry around than a physical book. I can read on the treadmill now much more easily than before, and read anything in my collection.
Doesn't Kindle allow you to do this? I have Nook and the Apple reading app on Ipad and both allow you to highlilght, underline and take notes. What ticks me is that none of them allow you to copy and paste passages.
I don’t have a Kindle, but I find electronic devices (phones, Garmins, etc) must be handled with care, read in a certain light/angle, etc. It’s easy to turn them off when you don’t want to, skip to the wrong section, etc. I’m sure that there are applications where Kindles will be very handy, but I prefer books for the long run.
My friend who claims that he will throw away all his books is a psychologist, and he borrows books from my husband from time to time.
I don’t believe him for a minute, but I have to admit that I’ve never seen a real book, or magazine, in his whole house. His current home office is crammed with patient folders which he shreds from time to time. But, if he has any real books, they are out of view. I really don’t know what he is going to do with these miles of cherry shelves in his new family room, office, study, gun room, etc. I hope he doesn’t rip them out. They are lovely.
I support publishers and authors in imposing limits on ebook sales to libraries. I am not sure what model works but publishers and authors should be able to set terms that work for them. Libraries do not have a right to infringe on private property. I think that publishers and authors should expand the licensing arragements providing access for a specified length of time for a reduced rental rate instead of unlimited time.
This is a personal preference. I bought a Kindle last year and loaded up a number of ebooks. I found it easier because I could change from scifi to fiction to non-fiction with the touch of a few buttons. During my flights to the Far East and back my only concern was if the battery would last (it did).
“Electric ink” doesn’t have the glare or angle issues you cited. It also uses almost zero energy-my basic B&W kindle runs for weeks on a charge. But I sure do miss writing on real pages, and you can’t skip around very easily, the way you can with paper books.
That said, I’m about to go on a road trip tomorrow. I’m packing two hard books and my kindle. This morning, I just downloaded about a dozen free classics.
Price zero, delivered in seconds. Moby Dick, Typee, The Art of War, Treasure Island and lots more. Cost, zero. Space and weight, zero. That’s pretty nice, you must admit.
I see the same thing happening with books. I have bookshelves all over the house lined with books. Now it is easier to download a book to my Kindle from my chair than to walk upstairs and search for it.
I feel my paper library is much more valuable (to me) due to my extensive marginalia. When I reread a favorite text, I can skim my highlights, and glean the cream in a quarter of the time of the original reading. My books are extensively "vandalized," and the better the book, the more vandalism.
That's why I'm still a Luddite when it comes to e-books
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I do own some books purchased as electronic documents, but they are all PDFs without such petty restrictions. They have my name at the bottom of each page, as a deterrent to piracy. I could bypass that easily enough, reformat the content as HTML, and post it on the internet. But that would be wrong.
I insist on the ability to back up my documents and to read them on whatever capable hardware I happen to have, now and in the future.
Yes, I loaded up on some of those “public domain” books myself. Lots of good reading, enough to last me a lifetime!
Plus ordering books can get you bugs, I’ve learned this from Alibris, two books I got recently were infected. Put them in the freezer for a week. My wife got me a Kindle of course she had to get one too.
I’m sorry, but my reading experience for a Kindle is equal to that of a book for any non-illustrated type book.
Add to that, its easier to get books and easier to store them. For values of “book” a Kindle beats a dead tree books. The only areas that a Kindle falls behind on is illustrated books and the Kindle Fire may be able to fill that niche.
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