Ebook sales continue to fall as younger generations drive appetite for print

theguardian.com ^ | 14 March 2017 | Sian Cain

[Berlin_Freeper]

Readers committed to physical books can give a sigh of relief, as new figures reveal that ebook sales are falling while sales of paper books are growing – and the shift is being driven by younger generations.

[Berlin_Freeper]

http://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/free-ebook-websites/3734667.html

[naturalman1975]

I’ve never seen the conflict. I love real books - and have thousands.

But I also like the idea of being able to carry a thousand ebooks in my pocket for those times when I’m away from my library and I have a few free minutes.

And when I am travelling doubly so.

[mad_as_he$$]

Fascinating. Around here us older folks are dumping “printed” books for the ebook - ease of storage and use. And I don't have to dust the ebook.

[OttawaFreeper]

I like going to used book emporiums myself. About a couple of weeks ago, I went to one and found and bought a compilation of Solzhenitsyn’s short stories and poetry.

[wbarmy]

My wife and I take a lot of positions overseas, and carrying a load of books around is not very profitable.

But the feel of a book just beats the heck out of an E-reader. And I can remember where I saw something in a book, but never seem to get the knack of it while reading electronically.

[Berlin_Freeper]

http://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-ebook-reader-for-windows

[Berlin_Freeper]

I like saving money and physical storage space in my humble abode.

Ebook reader is easier to carry and hold too.

[VanDeKoik]

EBook readers never improved. No dual page versions, and no color!

I have an used nook, and it just seems weird to use.

I also have more real books than ever before.

[Malsua]

My wife and I both worked for different publishers in Manhattan. We collected thousands of books as the publishers encouraged people to read their product. We also buy a lot of books and we both read a ton of books. We have one room with 3 walls, floor to ceiling of books.

Neither one of us has read a paper book in years. Now it’s all on our Kindle Paperwhites. We don’t go anywhere we might have downtime without it.

[naturalman1975]

I’m annoyed at the moment that my Kobo Mini is starting to fail and as far as I can find out, they no longer make one that small.

It fits into my pocket very nicely. I don’t want a larger one.

[cba123]

Might be related to computers continuing to get smaller.

I think they are now too small for books. As laptops, or desktops, they competed with, and were better than books.

But now, everyone has a computer which fits in their pocket, it is just too small. That is my view anyway.

Not much of a reader though, so I could be wrong.

[mad_as_he$$]

I quit taking print books on the road if airline travel is involved. Just to much hassle at security. I will buy one at the airport book store if it is a long flight.

[wyowolf]

I used to have tons of books, they went to the library. Now I just use my kindle.. sooooo much easier to have whatever book I want to read at my fingertips...and with Lending Library at Amazon I get a free book each month on top of all the ones I already have...

[exDemMom]

I much prefer the feel of a real book.

Plus, when I read, I like to thumb ahead and read bits and pieces of what is coming up. While you can do that with an electronic reader, it’s a bit harder to come back to where you were originally reading. You can’t stick your finger between the pages to mark your spot.

Plus, if I want to refer back to something, I remember it by the position in the book—e.g. about a third of the way through, on the left page, in the middle of a long paragraph that continues on to the next page, etc. My very visual means of remembering where book passages are does not work with ebooks. Sure, ebooks have search functions, but that isn’t the same.

[Psalm 73]

I never got on the e-book bandwagon - I like turning physical pages the way I enjoy putting vinyl records on my turntable.

Some things are fine just the way they are.

[mewzilla]

Young’uns may have figured out that ebook purchasers don’t actually own the ebooks they buy, and you can resell dead tree editions you don’t want.

[mewzilla]

And younger folks tend not to have the visual impairments that make ereaders and ebooks a blessing for so many folks.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

There seems to be price fixing in the cost of ebooks. It is not uncommon to see something like the the hard cover version of a book priced at $12, while the ebook version is $10.50. Ridiculous.

And sharing or giving away an ebook is close to impossible (although technically there are schemes that allow this).

If you are willing to wait a few months, the price of a used best seller hard cover book will drop to about 1/4 of its original price in the secondary market on Amazon and other sites.

If you want free ebooks of the classics and various books in the public domain and so on, sites like archive.org or Gutenberg have thousands of free ebooks to choose from.

Frankly, I'm spoiled by the fact that when I was a young man, I could go into the drug store and buy a Dell Pocketbook for 25¢.

[TheNext]

LIMITED EBOOKS

Ebooks cannot be highlighted. Paper books allow freedom to highlight any way the reader wishes. Ebook highlighting is determined by a third party software programmer, so Ebooks are stunted by his limited intelligence.

It is a huge problem rendering Ebooks a waste of time. At 2 to 8 hours per books, Ebooks squander a huge chunk of one’s life. I read one, the last Ebook ever because I care about my time.

And I have heard it before, the highlight function is right there in the menu. No, that is a third party’s vision of organizing info, which is poorly thought out eg Amazon sucks.