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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: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:07PM (2 children)
Someone should roll up a Free e-paper screen and include project Gutenberg "preloaded," I'd pay for that.
Amazon kindle Gutenberg book market is weird.
Most of PG is available for free download. The quality level can be quite low but technically it is there, its a free text.
A boatload of semi-scammers runs PG thru spellcheck and fixes the atrocious formatting and maybe adds a table of contents and maybe some art you probably don't want to see anyway, and sells the same PG text for 0.99 up to maybe 2.99. Most of the missspellings will be gone but 0CR mistak3s will still be in the text as will be the occasional truly weird formatting issue.
Above $3 or so you start seeing penguin press class of text where its been translated into English less than a century ago and is almost typo free and has been completely professionally formatted.
Around $20 there's a sparsely populated class of very well edited ebooks. So this is Plutarch translated into 2000's American English and utterly typo free. Flawless.
Finally you hit textbook class of price where its $20 to $100 ebook solely because its being sold as a textbook. I wonder how well those sell.
I find it interesting that ebooks are free but "bug free" modern and high quality level ebooks are still like $5 to $20. Even if the means of distribution is free and the author gets nothing, the market still supports professional editing and typesetting/formatting for a couple bucks. I never would have guessed that the last revenue to be squeezed out of the book business would be editing.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday May 03 2017, @03:51PM (1 child)
The quality level can be quite low
I've cleaned up half a dozen or so and put them on my web site. But Gutenberg has over 50,000 titles. Good luck reading all of them!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 03 2017, @06:39PM
I should be fair and point out the source quality isn't necessarily bad but I have done ETL stuff at work and I can identify bad conversions when I see them so given a nice ASCII or UTF-8 file from PG and run it thru ten poor conversions to UCS-16 and whatever windows used to use and word and whatnot and you can end up with some pretty strange formatting. Especially if someone tried to fix accent marks for example, three or four conversions ago.
I have seen some PG stuff where the quality itself was low. Obviously the original importation was via OCR because zeros and ohs are randomly swapped.