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: 1) by Goghit on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:58AM
What killed my use of ereaders was my Kobo dying 2 weeks out of its one year warranty. I looked at my bookshelf full of books from the 19th century and decided paying $100+ a year to read my new books was unacceptable, so I threw the Kobo in the garbage, broke the DRM on my purchased books, and never looked back.
I still use pdfs a lot for technical work, usually printing just the pages I need before working on a machine. It's a bitch getting grease and hydraulic fluid off a tablet.