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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: 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?