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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: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:25PM (3 children)
I really do wonder how e-Books would've panned out if they had kept them DRM-free. As others have mentioned, I'm not at all keen on the idea of not being able to re-read my book a few years later just because $VENDOR has shut down and closed their authentication servers.
I do also love being able to share a good book with friends. I get why publishers hate me for being a dirty Commie doing this, but to be honest, given the printing press has been around for hundreds of years, I kinda think that factors such as libraries and sharing have already been factored into book prices.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday May 03 2017, @01:28PM (2 children)
I suspect it is less of the DRM, and more of the pricing scheme. We can make a comparison to movies. Movies are available for purchase in DVD form without DRM. However the convenience and price of streaming services have largely defeated physical media, and have reduced piracy too.
I use my ebook reader extensively, but I never use the official Kobo bookstore because the price is the same as the dead-tree version. Many of my books are from Humble Bundles and public domain.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 03 2017, @09:18PM (1 child)
Do you have any examples of DRM-free releases? Content Scrambling system [cmu.edu]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday May 03 2017, @11:12PM
Okay, perhaps a poor example, I consider DVD open now as the DRM has been defeated and personal archival is a trivial process.