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from the there's-nothing-like-the-smell-of-pixels-on-silicon dept.
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Nielsen survey finds UK ebook sales declined by 4% in 2016, the second consecutive year digital has shrunk
[...] The shift was attributed to the explosion in adult colouring books, as well as a year of high-profile fiction releases, including The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. "Readers take a pleasure in a physical book that does not translate well on to digital," the Publishers Association report read.
But Nielsen's survey of 2016 attributed the increase in print sales to children's fiction and to younger generations preferring physical books to e-readers. A 2013 survey by the youth research agency Voxburner found that 62% of 16- to 24-year-olds preferred print books to ebooks. The most popular reason given was: "I like to hold the product." While Nielsen found that 50% of all fiction sales were in ebook format, only 4% of children's fiction was digital.
Steve Bohme, research director at Nielsen Book Research UK, who presented the data on Monday ahead of this year's London book fair, said young people were using books as a break from their devices or social media. "We are seeing that books are a respite, particularly for young people who are so busy digitally," he said.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:41AM (18 children)
I've not seen a lot of evidence that today's young people can read.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:47AM
u wot m9
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:54AM (2 children)
That's something the decent people do it in private. Same as sex, only it last longer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Funny) by Soylentbob on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:55AM (1 child)
Same as sex, only it last longer.
Not necessarily. My eyes start to get real blurry after 3h of reading.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:26AM
Well, if I remember well (the mind is the second thing to go), the other side will get red and sore as well after 3 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by lx on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:54AM (13 children)
That's why they prefer dead trees.
Paper books are for display purposes only. Like vinyl records.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday March 16 2017, @11:09AM (1 child)
For buying books, it's the paradox of choice. I mostly find books in second-hand shops (though if I like the author, I'll then buy more new). Looking for something new on Amazon or something like Feedbooks is much harder because there's so much choice that I can't narrow it down to things that I might like. If I go into a charity shop with a couple of hundred books, I can look at all of them and pick one or two that I might enjoy.
Then there's lending. If I've enjoyed a book and I discuss it with someone else, I can lend them my copy to read. I think the Kindle supports this, but it's weird to lend something that's trivially copied and so feels forced. Lending a physical object feels a lot more natural. Perhaps in an ideal world, you'd simply pay a fixed-rate subscription for all books (as you can for technical books with Safari Books Online) and then I'd just give people the URL.
Finally, I prefer reading physical books, though that's a personal preference. My mother reads more on her Kindle than on paper these days (and she reads even faster than me and can easily consume a 600 page novel in an afternoon), though mostly because eBook readers have one killer feature for older people: a zoom function.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:54PM
And it's a whole lot easier to correct the typos in a paper book. How do you change "level" to "lever" in an ebook?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday March 16 2017, @01:19PM (10 children)
Oh those millennials, they're so horrible! They don't want to carry proprietary devices that can only display DRM-laden e-books that they don't even fucking own, can't even fucking lend to a friend, can't even fucking resell, can't even fucking swap, can't even fucking donate to a library! It's the end of civilization!
Just like how those limp-dick millennials don't want to throw away hundreds (thousands?) of dollars per year for cartridge razors with their ineffective gel goo strip thingie and have the audacity to just get a fucking safety razor, a $10 bowl and brush, 100 razor blades for $10, and shaving cream that's decent quality.
And oh, the tragedy of vinyl! Millennials want more fidelity than is possible than with the 3 or 4 bits left over for actually encoding information on the CD after applying like what +50 dB gain in the mastering stage all for the loudness wars, and oh noes, even inferior technology like vinyl has more effective fidelity than CDs that are mastered like SHIT.
And holy shit the death sentence. Millennials are SAVING THEMSELVES FOR MARRIAGE INSTEAD OF HAVING CHILDREN THEY CAN'T AFFORD! YOU FUCKING PIECES OF FUCKING SHIT. GO TO HELL.
This doesn't apply as much to the razor situation and I'm still not sure what's up with less sex, but YOU GOD DAMNED BOOMERS ENSURED THAT EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD WOULD BE SHIT. So we're going with that's out there that you haven't turned to shit yet that's just simply objectively better.
E-Books could be fucking fantastic. E-Books are the most wondering fucking technology to ever be invented. GET YOUR FUCKING DRM OFF THEM.
CDs are also amazing technology. All that potential fidelity encoded into bits that can be copied and preserved for a lifetime. GET YOUR FUCKING LOUDNESS WAR OFF THEM.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday March 16 2017, @01:31PM (3 children)
Let me give you another fucking comment to mod down.
My favorite music is stuff like Yes (mostly their 70s work), Boston, Starcastle, Rush, Emerson Lake & Palmer, &c &c. You know what's just SO FUCKING AMAZING I can do with all the CDs I bought?
Ok, so the first thing to understand is that not every album was remastered and re-released in order they were originally published. I can line them up in the order they were originally published and play different tracks from them sequentially, especially my Yes collection that has a lot of bonus tracks that were placed on multiple album remasters.
So, I line up all the times I get say Eastern Number (forget if that's the one I used when I did this) by order of the album's original date, 1971, 1971 again, 1972, 1974, etc. Loudness is completely random, even though it's the exact same fucking studio session from way back before Eastern Number evolved into Awaken for Going for the One.
Instead, I line up all the instances of that track in the order the remasters were done. What do you fucking know? It just gets louder and louder and louder and louder!
I haven't analyzed Fly From Here (very recent album essentially by the Buggles, same style as Drama, the last time the Buggles were playing as Yes) but I think at least that one was somewhat mastered correctly since the CD was the original release.
Oh, and to circle around back to topic, EBOOK TYPESETTING LOOKS LIKE SHIT! I'm sorry, it does. I have a reader that even uses Tex's algorithm for typesetting paragraphs, and it STILL LOOKS LIKE SHIT. That's not even to count all the times that a letter here or there got fucked up because the E-Books are made by FUCKING OCR of the dead tree version!
You baby boomers have managed to create a world where everything could be so much better but is instead perverted by your greed.
I hope social security is repealed in the next few years. Come on, Trump! Trump! Trump! Do something I want for a change! Repeal social security and let baby boomers who were TOO STUPID TO SAVE FOR THEIR OWN DAMNED RETIREMENT starve homeless in a gutter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @02:01PM
Wooo. Time for you to cut back on the morning coffee intake, I think.
However, I do share you contempt for the Boomers.
And Yes is fucking awesome, though after I had a major part of my CD collection stolen years ago, I never really recovered. And my turntable has been broken for decades, so I mostly listen to music via streaming now.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @02:19PM
I forgot to add that I think you give Millennials way too much credit though. I seriously doubt that listening to vinyl or going with "non-standard" razors has anything to do with practicality and everything to do with being "nonconformists". They're much more fads than anything else. Why did Pabst Blue Ribbon become a Millennial "thing"? It wasn't because of its taste. Or 19th century facial hairstyles. Most Boomers didn't give two shits about the stuff they were protesting because it was a social event. You go protest something because everyone else is doing it, it was keeping you from being drafted, you can pat yourself on the back for your great moral crusade, and you can try to get laid by hippie chicks who aren't wearing their bras anymore. In the late 70s you get people of a certain age deciding to be "nonconformists" by "rebelling" against prog rock by forming and listening to punk bands, where you had to shock the societal norms with hairstyles, piercings, and gelatin-based desserts with baby dolls embedded in them. However, you weren't considered a cool nonconformist unless you conformed to that subculture. Just like now where you have middleclass suburban youth wishing and pretending they were from "the hood", you had middleclass youth wishing and pretending they were from poor neighborhoods of London.
Just like any other generation at a certain age, it is very much style over substance to break from the current social norms, and a lot of that style gets (often times deservingly) mocked by the older generations who can recognize the facile nature of it all. The fact that some of it has positive benefits is mostly a side-effect.
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Friday March 17 2017, @09:33PM
You know, I was right with you until the 'let them die in a gutter' bit. That seems a bit harsh.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 16 2017, @02:16PM (3 children)
"just get a fucking safety razor,"
That's a large part of what's wrong with society today. Real men don't shave. If a real man does shave, he uses a straight razor. Safety razor? That was the start of all those damned safety labels on everything that enable total idiots to reach breeding age. If you have an idiot son, or a son whom you suspect of being an idiot, just get him a straight razor. If he doesn't kill himself, he'll at least mark himself so that women readily recognize that he's an idiot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:14PM (1 child)
Found one!! Did you use your razor to cut the leather for your bootstraps? Be more of a douche please, we need some competition for EF.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:22PM
Poor baby - have you been triggered?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday March 17 2017, @01:19AM
Real men don't shave. If a real man does shave, he uses a straight razor.
Girlymen use a straight razor. Real men use a blowtorch and a paint scraper.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday March 16 2017, @02:31PM
hah, nice rant. I've actually been using a safety razor for two years now. Still running on the same box of blades. At this rate, should be good for another three years or more. 12$ stretched over 5 years is amazing. The up-front cost of the razor is a bit higher though. Especially if you want something nice. Most of the pushback on this "millennial fad" stuff seems confused to me.
Blades: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001QY8QXM/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&th=1 [amazon.com]
Razor set: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KQSUGFK/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 [amazon.com]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 16 2017, @02:53PM
I don't know which comment to reply to with this highly relevant thing that popped up in the TorrentFreak feed, so I'll put it here:
eBook Pirates Are Relatively Old and Wealthy, Study Finds [torrentfreak.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]