This may be it. I think Amazon conditioned folks to have ebooks at $9.99 and then there was a tussle involving publishers and Apple and now we seem to have settled on a world where most new books are more than $10, but eventually settle to $9.99 or less. Those expectations make people think a $14.99 is drastically overpriced - in addition people think because you don’t have to print paper, the media should be much cheaper as well.
Personally, I haven’t read a physical book in years (perhaps since 2010), while I’ve read hundreds of ebooks. I just find my Kindles to be much more comfortable on the train (I may have made this decision after trying to read tome-like hardcover fantasy books while keeping one hand on a pole on the train).
I actually think that that’s more of a drawback to physical books than an advantage. There’s many a time when I’ve been searching through a book for a passage that I just know was towards the bottom of one of the left-hand pages, and when I eventually find it, it turns out that it was in the middle on the right. Better to deflate my false sense of certainty by not having those reference landmarks.
I can do the same thing with ebooks. In fact, I can loan the same one to several people at one time. (Not legally, of course, but legally schmegally.)
I don’t write in my books. Not even textbooks bought by me for classes, not even my school yearbooks.
That’s all on you. I have never in my life worn an analog watch, and wouldn’t wear one if someone gave me one for free. I despise them. (And that isn’t coming from someone too young to be before digital watches were common.)
To me a real e-ink e-reader (not a tablet or phone) is simply a different experience than a physical book, meaning it has its own mix of advantages and disadvantages, and it has dawned on me over time that some of its advantages are very compelling. You have to live with it for a while to really appreciate the advantages, plus I think many people think of an e-reader in terms of an app on a tablet or phone, and to me anyway, it’s not at all the same.
I love physical books; I have an extensive library, including some rare books that are on the same shelves but protected behind glass doors. I love the feel of books and the ambience of book collections. I get all that. But I still love my Kindle. The Paperwhite in particular, because it’s illuminated, and because it’s small and very light, makes reading in bed at night a whole new experience that you can’t get with a physical book. Some books by their nature are a pride and joy that are a pleasure to add to one’s bookshelf, but others are just books that you want to read once. Even if you might refer back to them later or reread a portion, it’s nice to have them all in one place and to be able to read them on a versatile tiny little self-illuminated device that goes anywhere and can be read anywhere. I think it’s great to have both options, physical books and a good e-reader.
I should add that I felt like much of the public seems to feel, per the OP, when I initially started reading ebooks on my tablet. I was like, meh, this works, but I’d rather have a real book. Then I got the Kindle and, quite frankly, put it away in a drawer for many months. I gradually started to use it and now it’s my preferred medium for everyday books.
All the better/worse arguments are besides the point. Given that different people will have different tastes, needs, and priorities, it is true that there are at least clear, definable differences in the experience of a paper book vs an e-book, which cannot be said about the the experience of listening to a song on CD vs, say, Spotify.
I was reading books on the 160x160 pixel display of Handspring Visors years before the Kindle existed. I replaced those with Sony Reader electronic ink readers, first the 300, then the 350. Used the 350 for around 6 years before the USB connector failed and I ended up reading on a phone (using Moon+.)
A big advantage for Kindle over paper for me is it’s relative lightness.
On my bookcase I have the paperback edition of “A Storm of Swords”, all 1200+ pages of it. It’s held together with a couple of rubber bands, because I took an exacto knife and sliced it into four equal sections.
At that time I had a nearly one hour commute, and that was when I did most of my reading. But a 1200 page book is simply too damn thick and heavy to reasonably carry around day after day on top of everything else I needed to tote with me.
Now, I was brought up to treat books with reverence. I’ve never dog-eared a book. I don’t lay them down splayed out. I don’t write notes in the margins (that is what index cards are for.) But I screwed up my nerve and chopped it into pieces. Much, much better to carry the three hundred page “Volume One” of the novel and actually read it, instead of leaving the monstrosity sitting ignored on my bedside table.
And nowadays simply having to hold up the weight of a book that size makes my hands ache rather quickly.
If the point of a book was the illustrations, I might still buy it on paper, but otherwise, e-books forever.
Steve Martin once told David Letterman, “I downloaded 1,200 books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.” (Audience laughs a few second later)
My SIL, who was raised Catholic and is still a believer, decided to read the whole Bible from cover to cover, just as a book, and she did the same thing to it, so she could more easily tuck sections into her purse.
I like physically holding books. I like to be able to mark / hold open to multiple pages and flip back and forth when looking things up or comparing things on different pages.
And that’s probably a big thing for me. Especially for reference books. You gotta play games to look at multiple pages at the same time in an eBook. I just have to put a marker or my fingers in a physical book and swiftly turn back and forth.
And I like owning physical books. I’ve got 4 tall and 2 short bookshelves on the wall behind me. I can scan across them, pick them up, finger them, look through them, put them back and generally just squee with delight at my wall o’ books.
Heck, I got a $50 B&N gift card for Christmas and the first thing I picked up was a huge book of astronomy porn.
You left out the most important benefit; the one that I have been dreaming about since I was seven years old: You can have any book you want instantly. I’ve wanted a Kindle for over 40 years, because what I wanted most was the ability to have any book I want to read right now. After spending so long waiting for books to come out in paperback, or searching bookstores or used bookstores to find the book I want, the idea that I can go to see the movie Molly’s Game, think that I would enjoy reading the book, and then be able to start reading the book on the train home, is worth more to me than any other benefit.
Of course with Amazon it doesn’t take very long to get the physical book anymore, but I still think it’s magic that I have not *a *book, but *all the books *right in my hand. And of course it helps that for me there is zero difference between a physical book and a digital one. I can no longer remember which books I read physically and which I read digitally. The experience is exactly the same to me.
But they smell WONDERFUL. That said, I’m more likely to buy ebooks or audiobooks as a general thing, just because I’ve run out of space. There are still always a handful of books that I need to buy as hardcopy either because I really want a hard copy, I want to be able to dog-ear it and write in it, or because that’s the only way it’s available.
Here’s another one you missed: I don’t have to physically carry big heavy boxes of books up and down flights of stairs every time I move house. I don’t have to find space to store hundreds of books in the limited space I have available for storage.
For a poor person who is unlikely to own a house, ebooks are so much better than dead tree books that it’s not even a question.
For me, the biggest problem with e-books is that if there is a helpful map or other graphic, it will be useless. And if the author (Neal Stephenson for example) has thoughtfully included a dramatis personae, it will be useless in the e-book form. You cannot just flip back and forth. On the other side, my wife and I are trying to shrink our living space to an apartment and one of the main obstacles is the several thousand books we own. Also e-books are great for traveling with.
I have to disagree with the premise of the OP. Physical book sales are doing well? I used to have four or five new bookstores within walking distance of my house, plus another dozen or so used bookstores. Now I have one of each. Who says physical books are still selling well? The linked article shows a rise of a few percentage points over the last few years. But sales must still be in the toilet compared to the pre-Kindle era.
Actually, if I recall what I read correctly, the reason for a small uptick in physical book sales is discounting by the major publishing houses. They have huge stores of physical books they need to sell, so they’ve jacked up the prices for e-books and discounted physical copies.
I don’t fetishize books or have the obsession some people claim to have with them, but a physical book is absolutely more desirable to me. I don’t mind Kindle, but a real book just seems easier to read.
