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 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.