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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
New data suggest that the reading public is ditching e-books and returning to the old fashioned printed word.
Sales of consumer e-books plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children's books surged 16%.
The same trend is on display in the U.S., where e-book sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%.
"The print format is appealing to many and publishers are finding that some genres lend themselves more to print than others and are using them to drive sales of print books," said Phil Stokes, head of PwC's entertainment and media division in the U.K.
Stokes said that children's book have always been more popular in print, for example, and that many people prefer recipe books in hardback format.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/27/media/ebooks-sales-real-books/index.html
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:02PM (32 children)
I'm not surprised. Hardcover books are a superior product compared to digital e-books. They are convenient, there is the tactile sensation of holding it, it can't be altered and most of all they are mine/yours instead of being at the whims of your e-book reader.
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:18PM (21 children)
Plus you don't feel at all bad about slamming a print book down as hard as you can on a big, hairy spider.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:24PM (5 children)
You should feel bad for killing spiders which are helpful predators of pests.
(Score: 2, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:34PM (4 children)
I never feel bad for anything. That's a sign of a life not lived in accordance with your own moral code.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:42PM (3 children)
Never feed bad, you say. Delusion of godhood, probably on drugs too
Must be nice never to make mistakes, never to do anything by accident, never rush to do something without fully understanding it first. I should audit your commit history on github to call you out for hypocrisy, assuming you haven't rebased everything to whitewash all your bugs.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 03 2017, @12:56AM (2 children)
You should really learn to recognize the fine rhetorical art of shit talking.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @02:28AM (1 child)
There is a time and place for shit talking. You throw it in whenever you feel like which is improper use. Don't fault others for your poor social skills.
A discussion about spiders being more beneficial alive than dead is not exactly a shit-talking or trolling scenario.
(Score: 4, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 03 2017, @11:07AM
Dude, I can talk shit while ordering a pizza. I am that good.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday May 03 2017, @12:04AM (11 children)
Ok, Garfield :)
But, seriously, what did the spider do? I used to kill them, till I realized that they kill the insects I *really* don't like.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @12:34AM (6 children)
He is a creature ruled by emotion but believes he is rational. He lacks empathy, or so the troll says, so anything he doesn't like can be murdered without a second thought.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 03 2017, @12:47AM (2 children)
If Garfield is such a psychopath, then why didn't he murder Odie or rape Arlene?
(Score: 4, Informative) by tekk on Wednesday May 03 2017, @01:09AM
Because he never felt like it? Even a psychopath can understand that by raping Arlene or killing Odie he's probably not getting any more Lasagna out of John.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 03 2017, @01:05PM
The entire lifetime of that comic is a psychologically thriller, like those "Friday the 13th" horror movies where the audience knows all the actors are gonna get killed. Actually its kinda like a bullfight, everyone kinda knows the bull is getting it in the end, the drama is in what happens. Is today the day Odie gets it? No? Oh god the suspense damnit garfield just get it over with I can stand waiting so anxious
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 03 2017, @12:51AM (2 children)
I don't lack empathy, slappy, I just don't let it rule my rational mind like libtards do.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @02:33AM (1 child)
Now look here dicky, you've shown yourself to lack empathy and have said exactly that on more than one occasion. You can't hide like Derp Donald forever and simply deny your own words when they become inconvenient. You're like all the mild racists who simply can't consciously accept their bigotry so they deny deny deny. I'm sure you have empathy on occasion, probably reserved for "your kind of people". And to be clear, I'm not accusing you of being a racist, so lets skip that whole unnecessary tangent.
You are on the spectrum of sociopath asshole, the sooner you come to realize this the sooner you can work on changing the parts of yourself that you deny exist.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 03 2017, @11:06AM
I've shown myself to lack empathy only to those who are empathy's bitch. You lot are getting pounded in the ass so hard, so regularly by empathy that you've utterly lost any perspective on what a well-adjusted human being should look like.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 03 2017, @12:50AM (1 child)
Spiders are the bugs I really don't like though. Plus no bugs belong in the house. The rest can go on about their merry business outside as far as I'm concerned but spiders gotta die.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:04PM
As I read that a spider about the size of a dime came crawling across the side of the wall where I'm sitting about 7 inches from my face.
He crawled up a little ways across some tacked up papers and disappeared in a second of distraction when I looked back. No idea where he is now....
You just have to let it go. Like how scientists calculated that spiders could actually eat all of the humans on this planet and still be hungry. But they don't. They let us live. So live and let live...
:)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:39PM
I, too, save spiders, but you should know - some of them do bite people, and most of them have a nasty brew of infectious bacteria on their fangs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:11PM
spiders are my ecofriendly pest control system. southern house spiders are all over my house. i only kill them if they come out and run around. if they don't break the house spider rules they stay. i had Serena the Shower Spider for a while. I almost made a sign so guests wouldn't kill her. flies and other foolish flying insects get snared in webs fairly quickly. any roaches in the walls get eaten. they are not aggressive towards humans at all. i have had one on my hand before and even though i freaked out, it didn't even try to bite me. i've had them land on me in other scenarios too. no problem, but they broke the rules. the penalty is death.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday May 03 2017, @10:43AM (1 child)
Plus you don't feel at all bad about slamming a print book down as hard as you can on a big, hairy spider.
And, having woken it up and maybe even annoyed it, how much help is your book going to be?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 03 2017, @11:00AM
Ah, well you see this is not an issue in the US like it would be in OZ. Here our spiders mostly come hand-sized or smaller and a good hardback book is generally enough to at least thoroughly stun them while you run screaming like a little girl.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:36PM
That's why I wear flip-flops.
And, as others have said: save the spiders, but flip flops are great on carpenter ants and roaches.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:55PM (2 children)
+1. It's not "real books are back", it's "the e-book reader gadget market has reached everyone it was ever going to reach".
(Score: 3, Touché) by VLM on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:11PM (1 child)
There was a hipster greenwashing movement a couple years back to get rid of your paper books and buy everything again in ebook format.
Apparently boomers have this phenomenon where theres some Beetles album that boomers have bought on vinyl then 8trak then cassette then cd then minidisk then m4a then mp3 then streamed. I guess the closest analogy is I bought a LOTR set from some used book reseller decades ago and got rid of it and bought the ebook versions some what more recently. It turns out the silmarillion is as unreadable in ebook format as paper format. Was worth a try I guess.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @05:04PM
| It turns out the silmarillion is as unreadable in ebook format as paper format. Was worth a try I guess.
I have only attempted the paper(back) version, but cannot imagine how an e-reader would help.
I do, however, strongly agree with your assertion.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday May 03 2017, @01:43AM (2 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday May 03 2017, @04:31AM
Agreed. Full-text search can be useful. On the other hand, physical books have consistent layout, which means I can often find a familiar passage because I remember "it's about 3/4 through, and there's a diagram of a cactus in the upper right corner, and a heading with the passage on the opposite page."
That visual/tactile memory is often still useful to me for reference books I use regularly (and sometimes easier to locate if I can't remember the right words to look for, or I'm trying to find a diagram or figure or whatever). For occasional use, full-text search is probably better.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:23PM
You sound like my 89 year old mother when she first got a tablet. She's back to real books, mostly because it's too easy to spend a lot of money on e-books without realizing it.
Most books I read I simply check out from the public library. Often after I've read a particularly good one (like The Martian) I'll buy the hardcover. Hell, you can even check out e-books now, you don't even have to physically go to the library for many titles.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:17PM (1 child)
Not just hardcovers, paperbacks, too. It's ridiculous that they charge as much for an e-book as a paperback. The e-book has practically zero shipping and warehousing costs. When I finish a paperback I can give it away--not so with an e-book.
I give my e-books away, since I'm not writing for the money. But even if I charged, they would be a hell of a lot cheaper than printed books. E-book prices are retardedly high!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:32PM
The message: you're not paying for paper, or warehousing, or shipping - those costs were optimized nearly a century ago to trivial levels. What you're paying for is profit and a tiny bit of royalty to the author and his agent(s).
It's like McDonald's ice tea - any size you want for $1. It costs more to take your money and hand you the tea than the tea and cup combined, far more.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:28PM
Depends on how you use them. A library of e-books is much more convenient than a library of paper books.
One for one, sure, the printed book _can_ be better, though, when I've lost my reader glasses, I can adjust my e-book print to a size I can read, paperbacks not so much. I ditched my collection of hundreds of disused paper books about 10 years ago because their bulk was more costly than their value to me. I've never had to face the decision to "let go" of an e-book. I actually have an electronic copy of my PC from 1996, stored in the copy of my PC from 1999, which is stored in the copy of my PC from 2004, etc. If I ever really want to reuse that clip-art icon I used 20 years ago, it's there, archived away and reachable.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Wednesday May 03 2017, @04:34PM
Subjective opinion is subjective. Hard copies and electronic copies both have their benefits and detriments. Neither one is strictly superior to the other over all. I prefer ebooks since I can move an entire library's worth and not throw out my back or take up all the space in my home, I don't need a bookmark, no damage to it by taking notes, infinite copies for backup, etc. But hopping on a bus/plane/whatever real books are nice to have. Try searching for all instances of a word or phrase in a real book and you're going to have a bad time, in ebook only takes milliseconds. I have no problem with people preferring real books due to tactile sense and smell. Vinyl's "nuances" however...