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posted by martyb on Friday February 23 2018, @11:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the roar-of-the-dinosaur-publisher dept.

Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of Lagardère Publishing (the parent company of Hachette Book Group), gave an interview to Scroll.in in which he claims, "the eBook is a stupid product."

In the US and UK, the ebook market is about 20% of the total book market, everywhere else it is 5%-7% because in these places the prices never went down to such a level that the ebook market would get significant traction. I think the plateau, or rather slight decline, that we're seeing in the US and UK is not going to reverse. It's the limit of the ebook format. The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it's electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience. We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We've tried. We've tried enhanced or enriched ebooks – didn't work. We've tried apps, websites with our content – we have one or two successes among a hundred failures. I'm talking about the entire industry. We've not done very well.

For an in-depth explanation of Arnaud Nourry's comments, we go to The Digital Reader:

Hachette's sales are low because Hachette keeps their ebook prices high. If you check the Author Earnings report, you will see that ebooks make up a significant part of the market. And it's not just a tiny group of readers who like ebooks; almost all of romance has gone digital, as well as around half of the SF market.

This guy understands so little about ebooks that it is almost frightening.

[...] They've tried enhanced ebooks, ebook apps, and even ebooks on websites, all because Nourry doesn't understand ebooks as a product. And soon they will be trying video games.

Let me say that again so it sinks in.

The CEO of a major multi-national book publishing conglomerate does not understand his company's products or his company's markets.

This point is so mind-boggling because it is really not that hard to find out why consumers like ebooks: just go ask them.

Consumers like ebooks because we can change the font size. We like ebooks because we can carry a hundred ebooks on a smartphone. We also like being able to search the text, add notes that can later be accessed from a web browser, and easily share those notes with other readers.

Here's an editorial rebuttal from The Guardian:

[...] The built-in, one-tap dictionary is a boon for Will Self fans. And as an author, I'm fascinated by the facility that shows you phrases other readers have highlighted; what is it about this sentence that resonated with dozens of humans? It's an illicit glimpse into the one place even a writer's imagination can never really go: readers' minds. And Kindle's Whispersync facility lets the reader fluidly alternate between reading a book and listening to it. What are these if not enhancements to the reading experience?

And then there's the simplest, most important enhancement of all: on any e-reader, you can enlarge the text. That in itself is a quiet revolution. Page-sniffers who dismiss ebooks out of hand are being unconsciously ableist. For decades the partially sighted were limited to the large print section of their local library, limited to only the usual, bestselling, suspects.

[...] Finally, Nourry claims there is no digital experience. Isn't that the point? If it's got graphics, noise or animation, it's no longer a book – it's a computer game or a movie. Just as I write disconnected from the internet and in silence, I don't want my books to do other stuff. The beauty of the book, in a world of digital noise, is the purity of the reading experience – and there's nothing stupid about that.


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  • (Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday February 23 2018, @12:54PM (4 children)

    by AndyTheAbsurd (3958) on Friday February 23 2018, @12:54PM (#642343) Journal

    You've hit the nail on the head.

    The problem isn't that it's just an electronic copy of the same text. It's that it's just an electronic copy of the same text at the same price that I would pay for the dead-tree version in a brick-and-mortar store. At that price point, the only major advantage* to the electronic version is not need to store physical media. And the disadvantages - needing to keep my reader charged, not being able to loan the book to friends easily, the potential for the DRM server that lets me access the book being turned off, etc. - outweigh the advantages.

    At this point, my only "e-book" reading is actually magazines, where storing the physical editions is not something that I actually want to do.

    * I'm counting a few other advantages - like not having to worry about water damage and having the book backed up in "the cloud", AKA someone else's computer, as minor. They may be major advantages to other people's use cases.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by damnbunni on Friday February 23 2018, @01:16PM (2 children)

    by damnbunni (704) on Friday February 23 2018, @01:16PM (#642348) Journal

    Major advantages for me are that ebooks are easier to carry and physically easier to read. I have a reader with actual buttons for page-turn, and can hold it in one hand and click with my thumb to go to the next page, or leave it flat on a desk and not have to worry about the book trying to close itself.

    I don't like it for reference works, but for novels or biographies or other 'start at the beginning and read to the end' things, I really prefer ebooks to paper at this point. Especially since I can backlight the page if I want to. (Or not, if the room is brightly lit or I'm outside.)

    The vast majority of my ebooks are DRM-free - even the purchased ones. I read a lot of Baen authors, and Baen sells no-DRM ebooks direct from their site. In every format except PDF, because PDF sucks for reading on screens.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 23 2018, @06:29PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday February 23 2018, @06:29PM (#642527) Journal

      I don't like it for reference works, but for novels or biographies or other 'start at the beginning and read to the end' things

      Exactly.

      The readers are clumsy for page flipping back and forth to tables and charts. Desktop readers are somewhat better, web readers with multiple tabs open are better yet, but somehow three fingers in a book or postit notes hanging from key pages still works best for reference manuals and such.

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    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:12AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:12AM (#642854) Journal

      PDF sucks to read on screen because that is exactly NOT what it was designed for. It was meant to be a Portable/Printable Data Format, that would look the same on any screen and when printed on paper. It was basically meant for the print industry, and early versions (less than Acrobat 4) did a brilliant job compared to anything else at the time.

      Then adobe got greedy and wanted to own the online world too. They started adding 'online' and 'interactive' shit, stopped embedding fonts unless you had expensive licences, optimised for 'online viewing' and basically went to shit. On behalf of the print industry I would like to say "Fuck Them Sideways with a Rusty Spanner".

      Back on topic, I have a Kobo Aura One about one tenth filled with 400 epubs on it. It's awesome.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday February 23 2018, @02:55PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 23 2018, @02:55PM (#642381)

    My Mother in Law cranks the font size up to match her vision quality somewhat dynamically day to day based on location light levels etc.

    Delivery is instant. Done with book 2 of a series, enjoyed it and want to read the next? Here's book 3 in about two minutes.

    Text book style references are dying, why would I grep a ebook when google will search a better explanation from a web page quicker than the ebook reader, but sometimes its convenient to be able to search a book.

    With respect to lack of creativity I'm VERY glad of that as I am old enough to remember when mixing try-hard motivation at work with early desktop publishing technology meant every meaningless memo required 27 different fonts in 17 different colors making professional communication look like a cross between a ransom note and a kids art project. Thanks but no thanks, please don't "innovate" my ebooks please please please.

    Maybe I'm overly lazy, but I've read some big books and physically holding them up and messing with them and carrying them is pretty annoying compared to my weightless kindle. My son whines about having to hold a heavy school-provided ipad while reading school assigned literature ebooks. Well, kid, in the old days we carried dead wood books and they sometimes weighed like 5 pounds each and were huge like ten times as thick as a laptop and sometimes you had to carry three or four to a college class, uphill in the snow both ways...

    Now if you want a weird rant, how about EVERY freaking marketing photo for ebook readers involves water. WTF you weirdos can't read unless you're near 50000+ gallons of water, you think the incendiary words on the pages are literally going to light the thing up as you read, or is this some kind of stealth commentary on lithium ion batteries bursting into flame (I'm not saying you need to carry a fire extinguisher with your ebook reader, but you do see every marketing photo involves the models less than a yard from the ocean in case of fire...) Another oddity is the narrow target market, little kids, female swimsuit models, and twiggy soyboys. Ironically everyone I know who owns a ebook reader is NOT one of the categories marketed toward. Teens, cat ladies, middle-aged-ish men, fat women, elderly people, pretty much everyone who isn't in the marketing photos, which is kinda weird, it would be like marketing female hygiene products where all the spokesmodels are men. Amazon marketing people are kinda weird in general, of course, if you've seen their other ads.