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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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DaTrueDave on Friday February 23 2018, @02:12PM (4 children)
If the only e-books you have are PDF, you're doing yourself a disservice.
Get a decent e-reader and download some EPUB books. EPUB is an open format that is available without DRM (although DRM is an option).
After reading PDFs, your eyes will thank you!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @02:28PM (2 children)
If somebody doesn't know what this is all about is usually PDFs have a set layout, fonts and colors, with e.g. EPUBs you can change those to your heart's content.
And somebody already gave a shoutout to Project Gutenberg.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Saturday February 24 2018, @09:55AM (1 child)
The goal od PDF was to keep the format across devices, screen, printer etc (In fact, that was PostScript format, PDF came latter). But is the format so important? No usually, no. In a novel, format it more a matter of aesthetic. So eReader converted to a free-flow text with minor style sets (titles, bold, italic foot notes...) is a good option.
Nevertheless there are texts where the format is important. i.e. tabulated data, program code, images, and other. In such cases, the format is important. The author thinks i.e. "this must fit in a page", if you format it other way, it is not just an aesthetic problem, but a readability problem. Most of such documents in PDF are designed for an A4 page, trying to fit an A4 in nowadays eInk eReaders is difficult, you'll see too small letters, or you'll have to scroll up and down (or even left and right) which is not a nice reading experience in a eInk screen.
I'm still waiting for an eInk screen that is big enough to read an A4 page, or a portable one (I've read time ago about the research of flexible eInk screen that you can fold like a newspaper). Or a eInk that can scroll text quickly like a normal screen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @11:24PM
I believe Sony sells an A4 sized e-reader at around a thousand dollars.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Friday February 23 2018, @07:20PM
Even better, get something (and yes, it's FOSS) like Calibre [calibre-ebook.com] (or build it yourself [github.com]) and convert all your documents to e-reader friendly formats (EPUB included).
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr