Why are physical book sales doing so well?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@SpoilerVirgin

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.

All the people I know that are ebook champions use them to read new, or newish, books in popular genres.

There remain millions of books that are not available as ebooks. Most of what was published from 1923 through the 1980s is not available unless they happen to be by a famous author. Books earlier than 1923 are out of the public domain and so often show up on Project Gutenberg or similar sites, but that availability is much less than 50%.

Obviously, the market is geared toward newer genre books (which include bestsellers of all types) because the readership is. And advantages of ebooks for instant availability and portability are equally obvious. But these discussions invariably seem to devolve into advocates believing that all readers are just like them and staring blankly when anybody says they have different tastes. Who they forget exist by the next post.

We’re talking about a potential English-speaking audience in the hundreds of millions. If even 10% of that audience isn’t geared to the latest popular books, we’re talking tens of millions. That’s a significant slice of the population. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

[DesertDog]

@PastTense

The pricing. The Kindle price for Fire and Fury is $14.99, while the hard cover is only $18.

Those are unusual prices for an unusual book, much more ephemeral than most. As I posted in the Are You Intending to Read Fire and Fury thread, at a huge used book sale here, last year’s political book winds up being donated by the boxful. They’re wanting to make as much money as they can before the next distraction comes along. Typically a hardcover book runs $25 now and I’ve never paid more than $8 for a Kindle book. Quite often, thanks to BookBub, and Baen, I almost always get my Kindle books for $0 to $3.

Having said that, as many have mentioned above, there is a different aesthetic about actually holding some weight in your hands and turning the pages when reading.

[pulykamell]

@RickJay

This is kind of a weirdly extreme take on it.

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.

Yeah, same here. It’s not like I’m a luddite or anything. I love technology, have completely gone digital/download for music and movies, but books, while I have read a few books and magazines on my iPad (and an old first-gen Kindle), I just can’t quite adjust to them. I miss the physicality. I mean, for convenience sake I subscribe to both Cooks Illustrated and Saveur as eMagazines, but I find myself much more unlikely to pick up or peruse an old issue vs. the hard copies I have. I know it’s easier for specific searches with digital media, but I do a lot of random flipping through magazines, and it’s just easier for me to go through a stack of a dozen magazines on my shelf to find something interesting than eMedia.

[iamthewalrus_3]

One thing I’ve noticed about the Kindle is that when I’m reading on it I suffer from the same distractibility that I do with other electronic gadgets. I’m currently reading at least a dozen books on my Kindle, making fairly slow progress through each of them, since I will often read a chapter, then switch, or even read a few pages.

In paper books, I’m only reading two or three at a time, and I finish them more quickly.

[enipla]

@Derleth

Not true. You need an external light source, which you don’t if you have a device with a lighted screen.

Maybe if you never read while you travel this isn’t a serious concern.

It’s nice when you want to read and your spouse wants to sleep.

[DPRK]

It should be possible to figure out which titles are selling like hotcakes as books versus which ones are selling as e-books and see if anything can be learned. The null result would be that physical book sales are growing at the same rate as the population of readers.

As for aesthetic and ergonomic considerations, a rule of thumb is that you want a minimum of 300 dpi on your e-book in order to read it comfortably. A decently printed book will be much finer than that, but this becomes a matter of refining the display technology. Production as a text-oriented e-book also eliminates any ornate typesetting, layout, and binding; on the other hand those are not necessary in the latest thriller.

It is important to be able to discover literature by walking into a bookshop or library (possibly a research library), pulling books which catch the eye off the shelves, and flipping through them. E-browsing seems far from being able to replicate the experience at present. I find that if I have a specific title in mind there is a decent chance of finding an electronic version, but not multiple books as fast as I can click, nor do I have the impression of being surrounded by thousands of books on topic despite the search engine’s suggestions. Better library portal designs would help here, not to mention solving the Byzantine legal problems which result in pages missing from Google book view and similar content databases.

[enipla]

@Hari_Seldon

For me, the biggest problem with e-books is that if there is a helpful map or other graphic, it will be useless.<snip>

I read quite a bit of history and biography, and as a GIS programmer/cartographer I have extra interest in maps. But I don’t have a problem with them on e-books. Double tap and zoom around.

Now, it’s true it may be a little hard to find if you want to refer back to it later, but you could just bookmark it.

[ftg]

@Tim_R.Mortiss

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.

Sales for a lot of things are up but the number of stores selling them are declining. (Look at sporting goods stores, for example.)

Online sales hurt many types of brick and mortar stores. Esp. those that rely on the high markup over wholesale price to survive. Bookstores can’t compete with online discounters.

[Jophiel]

Also, if it’s big best sellers leading the pack then people may be buying them from Walmart, Target or even grocery stores rather than stopping by book stores.

[Voyager]

@Hari_Seldon

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 review technical books, and a few came as pdfs. I loaded them onto my Kindle, but the diagrams were useless in that small area. On my PC at least I could look at the entire diagram and read the text too.
I much prefer to review real books, since I do make notes while reading and summarize each chapter. Putting comments in the pdf is a pain, so I wrote comments in a Word file as I finished a chapter. But real books are much better.

I read “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” as an e-book. The advantage was not having to lug that gigantic book around, the disadvantage is that there were footnotes, which were a pain to get to and also easy to miss on my Kindle.

[actualliberalnotoneofthose]

Just wild speculation here but I don’t think being a “reader” is as common as readers think it is. There’s a pretty high profile person in the US right now who’s possibly never read a book and I encounter people all the time who don’t read anything. Then remove people who only read books in school and being a reader for pleasure is a niche thing. I mean, it’s a large niche for sure, but compared to people who consume some sort of music or visual entertainment it’s a different thing. I think for whatever reasons, people who enjoyed reading physical books in the past are very likely to prefer physical books now. Plus, there’s probably a significant niche of people who buy books to display on their bookshelves or always buy a certain author or series regardless of their actual interest in picking it up.

Personally, I have a very hard time reading on a screen. Sometimes I read long form “magazine” articles online and that’s about pushing it. When I was enrolled in an online graduate program I bought several ebooks of texts because I was broke and the price differences were huge (but still expensive). Sometimes the hard copy was around $200 and the ebook was $80-120. That negatively affected my reading and performance because trying to read a several hundred page text book on a screen was not fun for me.

[Yorkshire_Pudding]

@RealityChuck

Another factor: bookstores (which are also doing well outside of the chains). They are much better for browsing, since you can see more books at a glance. If you’re not looking for a specific book or author, Amazon is a terrible way to find things. Whereas a shelf in a bookstore can have dozens of books you never found online.

Physical books also have the advantage of being easier to go back to check something previously.

I do love a good browse, right enough.

But looking back through a digital document has the advantage of search functions, character summaries, tiles of miniaturised pages allowing rapid scanning, etc, etc. A physical book just has leafing through pages…which you can do with a Kindle anyway.

[Der_Trihs]

People tend to value things they physically own over digital versions, apparently.

Despite the many advantages conferred by digital goods, comparable versions of physical goods are valued more. When a physical good such as a paper book, a printed photograph, or a DVD is digitized, it loses some of its value to buyers. Our experiments suggest that the key driver of this value loss is not the resale value of the good, or how much it costs to make, or how long it can be used, or whether it’s unique or popular. We find that the key difference is that digital goods do not facilitate the same feeling of ownership that physical goods do.

The very feature that imbues digital goods with their unique abilities—their immateriality—is also what impairs our ability to develop a sense of ownership for them. Because we cannot touch, and hold, and control digital goods in the way that we interact with physical goods, we feel an impaired sense of ownership for digital goods. They never quite feel like they are ours, and when we feel that we own a thing, we psychologically inflate its value. As a result, digital goods don’t enjoy this premium we extend to things that we own.

[Junior_Spaceman]

@Der_Trihs

People tend to value things they physically own over digital versions, apparently.

It’s not as though this is an irrational feeling, though. I have books on my shelf that are well over a century old, while there’s no guarantee that the systems, programs and ‘cloud’ that is where we keep digital media will even exist in a coupe of decades.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Junior_Spaceman

It’s not as though this is an irrational feeling, though. I have books on my shelf that are well over a century old, while there’s no guarantee that the systems, programs and ‘cloud’ that is where we keep digital media will even exist in a coupe of decades.

From the linked article:

We think that the difference in ownership that people feel for digital and physical goods may be due to a weaker sense of control over digital objects. People feel ownership for a good to the extent that they can touch, hold, and control it. Indeed, we found that people with little need to feel in control over their environment reported no preference for physical relative to digital goods, whereas people with strong need to feel in control reported a substantial preference for physical relative to digital goods.

There’s no guarantee that those books on your shelves will continue to be there in a couple of decades—they could be lost to fire, or flood, or theft. But you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have more control over whether they will.

[Arizona_Mike]

Certain features of physical books - charts, maps, large scale artwork - don’t transfer well to the digital format.

[Darren_Garrison]

@DesertDog

Having said that, as many have mentioned above, there is a different aesthetic about actually holding some weight in your hands and turning the pages when reading.

I used a 220 gram Sony PRS-300 for a year before buying the 155-gram Sony PRS-350 when it came out. Instantly, the feather-lite 300 that I had loved for a year felt like a brick in my hands and it was now intolerable. So there is a different aesthetic about “holding some weight in your hands”–I despise it.

(I considered the 350 to be nearly perfect, and used it for 5 years before the USB port broke. Now, I read on a cell phone, but I hope someday to get a good used 350.)

[StarvingButStrong]

@Thudlow_Boink

From the linked article:There’s no guarantee that those books on your shelves will continue to be there in a couple of decades—they could be lost to fire, or flood, or theft. But you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have more control over whether they will.

That makes sense – but, really, I think you’re exaggerating the likelihood of losing books to fire/flood/theft (really? theft? unless you have the equivalent of a Guttenberg Bible…) compared to the near certainty that file format/hardware changes will occur.

All of us have lived through Betamax/VHS/laserdiscs/DVDs/BlueRay and others.

OTOH, we’ve also seen clever programmers turning out programs so we can continue to play our ‘ancient’ Atari games on the latest computers.

So. There must be hundreds of millions of copies of books in .mobi format out there already. If Kindles vanished from the Earth tomorrow, I’m sure some book-loving programmer will write a convertor so we can turn our orphanned book files into .NewEFormat or whatever the new systems will use.
Also, speaking just for myself, well, I have seven bookcases in just the room I’m sitting in right now.

One shelf of one of them holds my ‘favorites’, the only books I have ever read two or more times. The rest of that bookcase holds books I haven’t read yet. They looked interesting enough to buy, but somehow never made it to the top of pile that lives eternally on my bedside table and eventually got shuffled over to the bookcase as other ‘ooh, looks good’ books arrived. Now those are my ‘security’ books: if I ever get trapped in the house for an extended time by snow or flood or whatever, and the power goes out and my kindle runs out of juice, well, I’m still supplied with both BOOKS I LOVE and NEW TO ME reading matter.

Which leaves the other six bookcases. Which might as well be that wallpaper you can buy that looks like walls of built-in bookcases.

Actually, that would be better: it wouldn’t need to be dusted periodically.

[Darren_Garrison]

@StarvingButStrong

So. There must be hundreds of millions of copies of books in .mobi format out there already. If Kindles vanished from the Earth tomorrow, I’m sure some book-loving programmer will write a convertor so we can turn our orphanned book files into .NewEFormat or whatever the new systems will use.

The “universal” format for ebooks (which Amazon ignores because they want to lock people in to their system) is the EPUB. The EPUB is a .ZIP file of HTML pages with the .ZIP extension switched to .EPUB. I think that ZIP and HTML will continue to stick around for a while.

[AndyLee]

@Thudlow_Boink

But there’s a noticeable difference between the experience of reading a physical book and reading an ebook.

I used to think this until I got a Kindle e-Ink reader. That to me blows away any book, and I read everything I can that way. I’m lucky my library has a huge selection.