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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:37PM (1 child)
It's not just that, you've got asshats like the ones running the Nook division at Barnes & Nobel changing the format without giving notice or allowing people to keep their purchases as they were. The result being, that anybody using the previous software is forced to upgrade and if they can't, then tough.
Ebooks aren't stupid, the people selling them are. Color pictures, links to other sections in the text or the web, and not having to have a huge physical library to house books that we might wan to reread periodically are reasons for the format to exist. The publisher is just upset because most people don't buy into that book experience bullshit. Physical books are mostly for certain kinds of reference or for keeping as an archive in case something destroys all the electronic devices on earth.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Saturday February 24 2018, @06:00AM
This is actually a place I think there is room for improvement with ebooks, but it may boil down to a client fix rather than a format fix. It's basically the same thing that decided the codex vs. scroll competition; the ability to grab a section of pages and quickly and easily flip back and forth between the two, or even look at both simultaneously. Bookmarks almost can handle this, but the UX is pretty lacking when you put it into practice with any applications I've used. If ebooks could handle this more fluidly, the (or my, anyway) insistence on physical books for reference would likely dwindle, especially when you couple in the ability to do in-text searching for terms and in-line note-taking.