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: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @11:24AM (1 child)
Mass outrage ensued at a comedy show when comedian Mark Jackleson raped a woman on stage in front of a live audience. As members of the audience were leaving in disgust, we asked them to vocalize their feelings about the matter. Here are their responses:
"I coul-can't believe it. Disgusting. I'm shaking."
"How could this happen!?"
"Never. I've never seen anything so horrible!"
"How, how could anyone do something like this?"
Many of the people leaving the building were in tears. We asked them to go into further detail about what disgusted them to this extent.
"Unbelievable. Only one. Only one!"
"That hack only raped one woman. One!? Are you kidding me!?"
"Just a single woman? Have the standards of comedy truly fallen this far!?"
"If that's what qualifies as a comedian, then I'm thousands of times better as a comedian than he is!"
Is there no future for comedy? Will history repeat itself? Additionally, many are asking, how can we stop the spread of feminism and protect men's rights?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @11:50AM
Men's rights? Don't make me laugh.
We are only useful as long as we are making money for someone else.
We are nothing but a spent battery. Chunk 'em to the riverbed. If they beg or crap in the sand, put 'em in the pokey.
And the pokey's already filled to the brim with 'em.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Friday February 23 2018, @11:44AM (28 children)
DRM.
I might not be able to read it. Even after paying. Then the onus is on me to maintain an "authorized" reader.
All the "E-Books" I have are .PDF files.
I will go kicking and screaming to avoid proprietary filetypes.
I have been bitten before. Finding "investments" in proprietary file formats to be a real pain in the ass. It almost always comes back to bite me. Usually in the form of a "sunk cost" in terms of my money and time.
It is a crippled format, and I expect to see a *significant* price cut... like at least 90%.
Well, how would you merchants like it if the public got their act together and buddied up with Congress to pass a "Digital Millenium Currency Act" using some sort of Bitcoin that we could reverse the transaction at any time we thought our "rights" had been abridged? You did not spend the money you got as we saw fit? Bang! Reverse the transaction!
Would YOU accept Digital Rights Currency?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday February 23 2018, @12:13PM (7 children)
That's a really interesting concept. One could put the burden back on the vendor to maintain their DRM servers ( or whatever).
I guess most people (including me) have been bitten by the "well, you bought a perpetual licence for the product, but we can't be bothered to support the DRM tech so tough, we are just gonna kill your licence". With some weasel words in the EULA to cover their ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @02:22PM (6 children)
No, not everyone. Every single one of my ebooks is DRM free and will work today, tomorrow, or in 2118 (provided of course that a program to display them is still able to be run on 2118's computers).
Now, why is this so for me? Because from day one I have refused to purchase any e-books that have any form of DRM attached. Instead I simply torrent copies of those that I decide I want. And the torrented copies (as always) are the superior product from a customer benefit perspective.
(Score: 4, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 23 2018, @03:16PM (5 children)
Similar story here, except that I do sometimes download DRMed ebooks, but then immediately strip the DRM off them. It's not difficult.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:08PM (1 child)
Well, in my case, if it has DRM to start with, unless the "download" is free of monetary charge, it remains where it is. Maybe I go look for a torrent, maybe I don't. But I won't give them a dime for a DRM'ed e-book, ever. Reason being if I do give them a dime for the DRM'ed copy, they interpret that purchase as "DRM's just fine, look, people bought it anyway".
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday February 24 2018, @11:00AM
Trouble is once you give them a dime, you have to provide your banking info.
The info to me is worth far more than a dime. Every time I provide account info, I am assuming a risk that it be used not in accordance with my wishes, then the onus falls on ME to straighten it out.
Paying anything incurs a risk to ME. Unless I can go to a brick and mortar store, pay in cash - I have no idea if the business I provide my financial credentials to will share it with others who will cause problems for me, so I try to minimize my own risk.
That means even asking for a dime is too much.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday February 23 2018, @11:57PM (2 children)
Not difficult, no. But it is illegal. If you're going to to be a criminal anyway, why pay for the book and support such customer-abusive tactics?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:09AM (1 child)
No, not a criminal - rebel.
I am paying for amazon prime yet I have not seen a single movie using the service. I pirate all my movies.
As per legality, blacks and jews were on the other side of it. Not much changed since than.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday February 25 2018, @04:06AM
Sorry, but it's the people making the laws that get to make that distinction. You only get to redefine the terms if you manage to actually win the relevant culture war. I'd say you've got good fighting odds, but the winners don't get to rewrite history until after the fact.
(Score: 5, Informative) by rigrig on Friday February 23 2018, @12:54PM (3 children)
All the e-books I have are (DRM-free) .epub files, which really makes a world of difference on a e-reader.
I even paid for some of them, because they were published by people smart enough to realise putting in DRM hurts their profits.
(Not only because it stops people like us (or anybody with a device which doesn't support their flavor of DRM) buying their inferior product when "liberated" versions are available, but also because supporting DRM for a bunch of customers with different devices can't be free.)
Also, I discovered quite a few nice books on Project Gutenburg [gutenberg.org], I doubt I would ever have picked up a physical copy of e.g. Dracula or Peter Pan.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 23 2018, @05:22PM
If you liked Peter Pan (which I think is really called something like the story of Wendy and Peter Pan) you might also enjoy Peter Pan in Kensington Garden. I found it in the rare book section of the public library in the 50's.
(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Friday February 23 2018, @06:19PM
I watch the Humble Bundle for ebook offerings. They are epub and DRM free, and I typically agree with the price.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday February 24 2018, @11:03AM
Thanks.... I thought .epub was business-speak for "sucker-level" .pdf.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(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
(Score: 1) by Revek on Friday February 23 2018, @02:21PM
This I actually bought a book and the DRM on it prevented me from reading it. It needed some adobe product and I never did get it working on my tablet. I guess I could have sat at my computer at night before bed and read it but instead I just bought a hard copy of it.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday February 23 2018, @03:31PM (1 child)
Not all E-Books have baked in DRM. The "Good" publishers don't include DRM in the e-book you are purchasing. TOR is one of those "good" publishers that don't include DRM in their e-books. Most (all? / some?) of the e-book bundles from humble bundle are DRM free. DRM is a scourge and needs to be killed. DRM complicates things for your paying customers. While the people who pirate your goods typically have a better user experience. Why are companies surprised that people pirate things? Most people aren't actively looking for new ways to break the law. Would be nice, if companies / people took a hint from GoG.com. They have reasonable prices, DRM free, and include goodies with each game. Goodies like, Wallpapers, Soundtracks, etc. They treat their Paying Customers like they actually want to keep them as future customers.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday February 23 2018, @08:26PM
True, but figuring out which publishers are good and which are bad isn't a necessary step when you buy a paperback.
(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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @06:04PM (3 children)
Yes. That.
DRM is the crux of the problem. I would prefer e-books over bulky, heavy physical books. I just bought the textbook Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach (Peter Norvig and Stuart J. Russell) for $125 used good condition, because new it was $175. Now I would pay the same for an e-book -- except for DRM. The book itself is rather large, bulky and heavy.
How is it I can buy entire albums of mp3s for under $10 without DRM? They must trust me not to pirate (and I do not pirate). But I do copy those onto every device and computer I own so I can listen anywhere I happen to be. I would expect no less with an e-book. I expect to OWN that copy in the sense that I own a toaster. I don't need DRM permission for each piece of toast.
I can buy a DVD and rip it. Then, again like an mp3, put it on every device, phone, tablet if I want to watch it while travelling or waiting somewhere. Put it on my server so I can watch it on any TV in the house. I'm not getting anything I didn't get from having physical possession of the DVD other than convenience.
E-books are about convenience. In particular, the fact that I can fit WAY WAY more e-books into a pocket sized or laptop sized device than I could ever hope to carry in a book bag. Or from work, I suddenly realize that some obscure information I need is at home in a certain book, I can log in to my server at home, look at the book, or even copy it back to my office computer in order to search / read the e-book.
The utility of information appliances are AMAZING when you don't have DRM. (Nevermind the content but . . .) I have a single android app with in-app purchases. On that app I have: Five translations of the bible, Two concordances that have definitions of words from original languages, Five commentaries. And I could install more. The ability to search instantly on device is more useful than any turn-the-page book could ever be. This same utility is valuable no matter what the content happens to be. I sure wish I could have that much utility with technical e-books that are DRM free. (Yes, I know tech books probably lead the way on this, but still.)
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @08:36PM (1 child)
No. It's not trust. You can buy entire albums of mp3s for under $10 without DRM because of Apple.
To be clear, I dislike Apple, their walled gardens, their "you're holding wrong" culture, and the fake-cult that Apple devices are "easier" to use (they aren't... people just got used to iPhones first).
However, it was absolutely Apple (and maybe even Steve Jobs personally... I don't know the internal Apple politics) which broken the stranglehold of DRM-music. I still remember the step-by-step process, and how reluctant the music industry was at each one of those steps. Essentially, the industry got hoodwinked by offering large short-term payments in tradeoff of long-term loss of control.
I expect the other industries have watched and are not going to make the same decisions. Unfortunately.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @08:39PM
In my naive idealism I was hoping the other industries would see that DRM free mp3s has not caused the end of the world to come about, and would see the overall benefit and follow suit.
(Decades ago I loved Apple, then I was neutral, then for the last decade I have hated Apple.)
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cykros on Saturday February 24 2018, @06:02AM
DVD copying was a bad example; DVD's use encryption for a DRM scheme; it just happened to be cracked years ago to the point where people basically forget it exists anymore. Not sure about how court precedent may have gone with this, if there is any, but as far as I am aware, it is technically illegal to rip a DVD even for personal use due to it requiring a circumvention of DRM, which is itself a crime.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Friday February 23 2018, @06:22PM (1 child)
I used to buy a fair amount of ebooks. I buy them, or obtain out-of-copyright titles from freely available sources.
They then ALL go through Calibre with the DRM Removal extensions installed. Let em come get me.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Friday February 23 2018, @08:47PM
And that's the main reason e-books aren't taking off as much as movies or music are.
It's just too hard. If it would "just work", then many more people would go for it.
Of course, for e-books to "just work" means getting rid of DRM, because otherwise I have to authenticate my devices -- a barrier to entry.
(another big reason e-books aren't working as well as movies or music is that books aren't typically streamed.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday February 23 2018, @12:06PM
I'll take the profit off that 20% if he doesn't want it!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kiffer on Friday February 23 2018, @12:45PM (6 children)
Exactly the same as print, except it's electronic is EXACTLY what we want.
Give us that, but cheaper and faster.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday February 23 2018, @12:54PM (4 children)
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.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 5, Informative) by damnbunni on Friday February 23 2018, @01:16PM (2 children)
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
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.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:12AM
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.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday February 23 2018, @02:55PM
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.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @06:06PM
Yep.
The reason we want it electronic is that I can put many books on a tablet sized, pocket sized or laptop sized device. Instead of bookshelves of books, it all fits on your phone or tablet.
Sort of like having thousands of music mp3s on a single device, or on all of your own personal devices for your own personal use. Instead of a gigantic box of a thousand CDs, all the music fits in a phone.
It's not about piracy.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday February 23 2018, @01:04PM (29 children)
The eBook is a marvellous product. Sure, it's no different from the printed book in terms of content, but I can carry hundreds of the buggers around on a reader.
That said, two problems need to be resolved. DRM, as mentioned by others, so I won't go into that. The other feature missing - which no one ever seems to talk about - is organization.
Consider this: In our house, we have thousands of printed books on shelves. These are organized by category, and then alphabetically by author. Books by the same author are organized by series, and the books in a series are in the proper order. So if I feel like a bit of fantasy, I look at the books in the fantasy section, browse among the authors, and find a book that sounds appealing. The graphics on the spines and covers serve as reminders of the book, if I've read it before. If I haven't, then the blurb on the back cover gives me a quick idea what the book is about. When we buy a new book, it's quick and easy to find it a home in this scheme.
By comparison, organization on an eBook reader is horrible. It's painful to organize the books (to the extent it is even possible), it's painful to browse them. You can't see details on more than one book at a time, there are no visual hints, and the back-cover blurbs (afaik) don't exist. For books one has already read, it would make sense to take advantage of the medium and allow a private rating and a short comment - but this isn't possible.
Outside the readers, Calibre is the best program out there. It fixes a few problems, but ultimately you put the books on an eReader and lose most of those fixes. Within Calibre you can organize your books one-level deep; multi-level organization isn't possible. It's still a lot of work to get the books in correctly, because the meta-data on purchased books is almost always screwed up: If the author's name isn't spelled a new way, then the language is missing, or the series is screwed up.
Some UX designer needs to get a mighty inspiration. There's no reason that something like Calibre shouldn't be more usable than a wall of physical books. But we aren't there yet, and it's damned frustrating.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by damnbunni on Friday February 23 2018, @01:25PM (21 children)
Depends on the reader. Mine just presents the filesystem, and shows the book covers once you get down to files, so it would be pretty straightforward to have Science Fiction/Asimov, Isaac/Foundation Series/Foundation.mobi but it wouldn't show the book covers till I got into the Foundation folder. It does show the covers of the most recently read and most recently added books on the home screen, though.
Of course, sorting an existing collection like that would be a monumental pain in the ass, but if you did it as you built your collection it would be simple enough. But then I'd have to use a device search to find all books by Asimov, since he wrote in several genres. (.. were there any he didn't write in?) but that's an inherent problem in using a filesystem for organization.
Though now I'm wondering if I could create genre folders and symlink to the files? (My reader runs Android.) ... that would be a nerdtacular solution, and I will have to look into it.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday February 23 2018, @01:40PM (8 children)
Use Calibre to manage your ebooks and to transfer them and delete them from your device. It is a wonderful, free, multi platform and open source piece of software and will ID your books and pull the Metadata automatically from many sources.
You have to strip your DRM for books with it though.
https://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday February 23 2018, @03:15PM (5 children)
Um...I specifically and explicitly mention Calibre. It does solve some of the problems, but certainly not all of them. For one thing, I don't want to always be transferring books to and deleting books from my eReader. Why shouldn't I just be able to leave them there?
And while Calibre does pull metadata automatically, the data is screwed up. Is it "Isaac Asimov", "I. Asimov" or "Asimov, Isaac"? Series information is just as bad. Almost no books have their language set, even though it is a standard field; if you read in multiple languages, this is important. It's not really Calibre's fault, but the problem remains.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 23 2018, @03:34PM (1 child)
And while Calibre does pull metadata automatically, the data is screwed up. Is it "Isaac Asimov", "I. Asimov" or "Asimov, Isaac"? Series information is just as bad. Almost no books have their language set, even though it is a standard field; if you read in multiple languages, this is important. It's not really Calibre's fault, but the problem remains.
Can't you use Calibre or some other software to edit this metadata?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday February 23 2018, @07:34PM
You can. And I have. Unfortunately, with as many e-books (~12,000) as I have, it would be many, many man-hours to fix the metadata in all of the ones (~10-15%) whose metadata is incorrect.
It's a pain in the ass. But it's not Calibre's fault, nor is it any e-reader's fault. As usual, it's a GIGO [wikipedia.org] issue.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Tara Li on Friday February 23 2018, @03:37PM (1 child)
What I'm thinking is - someone needs to put something along the lines of Calibre *on* Android. Maybe not the full feature set - I don't know that I need format conversion on the device itself, or metadata editing - but then again, why *not*? The UI would need to be re-arranged, but over all, just keeping the database of metadata and being able to use that to find the books would be a not so minor miracle.
Wouldn't mind an reader/editor with an edit mode that stays out of the way unless I specifically invoke it - two fingers from the right, or something like that, or long-press to select "edit" from the context-popup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @07:38PM
That's a great idea! Please submit an article [soylentnews.org] on SN about it once you've got a working alpha of your fork [github.com].
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Friday February 23 2018, @05:44PM
yeah I guess I skipped that when I jumped to reply... But Calibre is still awesome. Sure, the metadata gets changed around a bit depending on the sources. So, just limit your sources to Amazon or prep it by pulling out the ISBN using the plugin first. That usually gets you the best metadata on edit. Personally, I will search on a name like "Asimov" and edit in bulk to fix problems in the format. I also have a canned search and replace to flip lastname comma firstname. It is still an awesome tool. It's not perfect but it is damn good and way better than just dropping your ebooks in a folder tree and hoping for the best.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday February 23 2018, @06:37PM
No, it will read your DRM books, as long as you have a drm reader installed somewhere on your machine.
And some sneaky guys wrote a set of plugins to calibre that uses this fact to assist in removing just about any DRM, and changing ebook formats so they will work on whatever reader you want to use.
It would be foolish to keep your ebooks in DRM formats, since these fall out of existence occasionally. Just be sure your ebooks are "yours" - using any definition of "yours" you would still believe in if you were trying to feed a family by writing books.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:58PM
I have Calibre. However, it won't help with the organization of ebooks on the reader itself. The best I can get it to do is sort them into folder by author.
For anything more, I have to manually manage the folders on the device.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 23 2018, @02:05PM (10 children)
You've hit on the problem I was going to mention: hierarchical organization. Most file systems are hierarchical. Don't use a file system to organize a book collection, use tags. I've had to learn that lesson the hard way more than once. Thought I'd store the family tree data in HTML, but there were all kinds of problems with that idea, not least the whole hierarchical organization it imposed. Yeah, you can work around the forced hierarchy of file systems with symlinks, but that's ugly. We have suitable tech for these sorts of organization problems: databases.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday February 23 2018, @03:40PM (9 children)
We have suitable tech for these sorts of organization problems: databases.
Which, incidentally, is exactly what a "filesystem" is.
The problem with your idea (which is presumably to use a relational database to store your ebooks) is that it likely isn't compatible with any e-reader software, and certainly not any hardware e-readers like Kindle (which probably do use a relational database internally, but they don't let you access it or modify anything). This is a pretty good idea for a programming project though: come up with an RDBMS schema for e-books and modify Calibre or something else to work with it as a new FOSS standard.
The main problem I see with it, though, is that an RDBMS doesn't seem like a terribly efficient way of storing and accessing multi-megabyte ebook files. RDBMSes aren't really meant for storing large blobs of data like that. You'd probably want to store the ebooks in the filesystem somehow, and then use the RDBMS to index them, but now you still have to worry about exactly how to store them in the filesystem: one giant flat directory, or what?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:13PM
With a real filesystem (read as: nothing from mickeysloth qualifies) you don't need symlinks either.
Just hard link the ebooks into the different locations. Then they physically exist at all those locations, but only one copy of the data exists on disk.
Now, does Android allow hard links to be created on its filesystems?
It is Linux based, so the tech is there, but did Google neuter this feature?
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Friday February 23 2018, @07:32PM (2 children)
This is not a new or unique challenge. It's been solved already by media players, and the relational index database is exactly what they've done AIUI....with the filesystem storage question being pretty much irrelevant. You can point them at a well organized media folder, you can point them at a folder full of random crap in random folders, you can even point them at your root filesystem...doesn't matter, they'll build a library from whatever they find.
Just look at iTunes for a common example. You insert a CD, iTunes can rip it, and it'll build it's own hierarchy on your filesystem to store those. Or you can load in a file that's already in your filesystem somewhere, iTunes doesn't care. It doesn't move that file into its existing hierarchy, it just stores the path. Want to sort by genre instead of artist? No problem, all of those fields are in the database, so it's quick and easy to sort by a different column. And once you hit play it checks where the file actually resides and plays it.
Or look at Plex...Plex can do the same thing with movies, TV shows, and music all at once. It'll show you a list with a title, cover image, and brief synopsis for each one. It'll sort by genre or watched status or artist or title. What's so hard about books? I'd think the biggest problem would be finding a data source -- there's no IMDB for books AFAIK. Then again, I do know there's something like IMDB for music, but I haven't needed to use it in well over a decade. I buy an mp3, and it's got all the information embedded in the file already. EPUB has the ability to include similar tags, although I have no idea if those are actually used in practice. But the capability is all there.
Maybe I'm missing something as I've never used ebooks...but I cannot comprehend how this is a problem. Is DRM keeping people locked into ebook software with no incentive to improve the features? Are the publishers just too technically inept to include metadata? Or is there some unique challenge with books that I'm just not getting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @07:52PM
> there's no IMDB for books
As noted above, the Library of Congress is the master catalog for books, https://www.loc.gov/ [loc.gov]
When we had a cataloging problem, we fixed it with them and that flowed to all the online book seller catalogs in a short time.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @05:10PM
Maybe I'm missing something as I've never used ebooks...but I cannot comprehend how this is a problem. Is DRM keeping people locked into ebook software with no incentive to improve the features? Are the publishers just too technically inept to include metadata?
This is probably it.
You mention iTunes as being able to automatically organize music files, but what about Windows Media Player? Does it do a good job of this? I haven't used it in ages, but I'll bet it doesn't. Now imagine that MS has users locked in with DRMed music that they can only play with WMP. What's anyone going to do about organizing their MS-DRMed music?
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday February 26 2018, @04:50PM (4 children)
eh, why put the ebook into the database? Have your application store the path to your book repository ~/.myReader/ebooklib/ and then keep a relation database of tags, meta data, file names, and cover images to organize your collection.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @05:03PM (3 children)
I addressed exactly this point in my last sentence. Do you really want to keep potentially tens of thousands of ebooks in a single, flat directory? I really don't know.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday February 26 2018, @07:04PM (2 children)
Me personally, no. But I also don't subscribe to the iTunes method of sorting music.
Speaking of iTunes, the library is not flat--it is artist/album/filename.mp3. Your application can do the similiar author/filename.epub. Then let the database sort out the genre tags and such. Unfortunately, this then requires you to use the application for browsing tags. However, if you know the author, finding your selection is pretty quick.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @07:37PM (1 child)
Speaking of iTunes, the library is not flat--it is artist/album/filename.mp3
It is? Many years ago, I had a spouse who had an iPod, and on that thing the music files were all in a single directory IIRC, with some random alphanumeric filenames, and organized by database. There were special FOSS utilities to work with these devices since they never made iTunes for Linux.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday February 26 2018, @10:26PM
It's been a long while since I looked at it. I only installed iTunes once to setup an iPod and change the disk formatting from apple to windows (hfs to fat32? can't remember) as the linux drivers only support the windows format. I recall that iTunes had an option on how the hierarchy is structured, but it is very possible that the default structure was flat and I changed it. Again, this was a while ago, before iPhones and such.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by anotherblackhat on Friday February 23 2018, @03:10PM
And that is the problem.
Reader Alpha let's me do something, but reader Beta doesn't.
Meta information is a mishmash of incompatibility, when it even exists.
And as you pointed out, most readers don't even pay attention to the meta-data that does (sort of) exist universally - directories and filenames.
This is fundamentally because ebooks are being made by content companies interested in lock-in.
They don't want to build the next iPod for books, they want to be the next iTunes for books.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday February 23 2018, @03:05PM (1 child)
I would be happy with starting out with something simpler, "books I intend to read in the future" "books I have read and probably will never reread anyway" "favorite books I might reread" "books I'm currently reading"
What I do with my kindle now is download the entire todo list and remove from device after I've read it. The books stay in my account if I ever re-read them which for most books is very unlikely, because my todo (to-read?) list never really empties out.
Its annoyingly manual process and some automation would be really nice.
One of the many joys of DRM is it really kills 3rd party innovation, this kind of BS UI problem would not be tolerated in a text editor or a non-commercial mp3 player.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:43PM
B&N has bookshelves for their Nook ereaders, but it's an incredibly stupid implementation. You have to sort the books on the ereader, you can't do that via software. Which has been somewhat mooted by the fact that they discontinued the previous software and are now forcing everybody to use their new software that doesn't support all the older OSes that the previous one did. I'm not even sure if I can download a copy as they're pushing the Windows 10 bullshit pretty hard.
I see no reason why we can't have a similar interface to what the old Nomad Jukeboxes had, the ability to look up things by genre, title, search and manual tags.
Ultimately, this isn't just one thing, it's the greedy pricing, the DRM, the deliberate knee-capping of the format to preserve physical book sales, the lack of guarantee that a book bought from one store will work on some other store's player.
The basic format is OK, the people selling them are astonishingly short-sighted though.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 23 2018, @03:30PM (2 children)
Very true.
What's needed is basically Kodi for ebooks. With Kodi you just dump some files with vaguely-meaningful names into a folder, point Kodi at it and then Kodi does all the rest for you. It works out what film or TV series or song or album each file is, scrapes appropriate artwork and blurb and all kinds of metadata and tags from somewhere or other, then organises and presents it all in a way that is not just tidy and navigable, but beautiful. In the occasional case that it misidentifies something, you can correct it in about four clicks. When you actually look at what Kodi does, it's bloody amazing. Surely the same tech could be applied to an e-reader. There must be some big database of books somewhere that could support it (amazon springs to mind).
And yeah, Calibre is wonderful. My only gripe is that every time I open it it bitches about updates, and I have to spend 10 minutes updating it before I can do whatever I came to do.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Tara Li on Friday February 23 2018, @03:47PM
Books... are not so nice and neat. I do the metadata updating for my books that I import into Calibre, and watching what it offers up as options - and I give it a nice large list of book databases to access - means that too often, it would find *crap*.
And you do know that for the most part, you can skip updates on a regular basis - limit yourself to downing an update every month or two. The updates at this point tend towards the fairly minor, and mostly relating to fairly exotic aspects. Look over the change list on the website, and ask yourself - how many of these changes in the last 6 months really affect *me*?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @06:51PM
I think the database you want to use is Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/ [loc.gov]
There was a cataloging problem with one of our books (two books with similar name being confused) and LoC were very easy to work with (very professional also) to correct the mistake. In a month or so, the correction flowed into Amazon's online catalog automagically.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday February 23 2018, @05:30PM
Kindle:
My physical library was like yours, very well organized, and very large. It's now in boxes.
I'm pretty happy with our Kindles. DRM is an issue, as is the questionable long-term permanence of our purchases... but we simply don't read paper books any more, and we are truly voracious readers. At an unhealthy age 60, my feeling is the Kindle will probably outlast me, so I can't bring myself to get to excited about the permanence issue.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday February 23 2018, @07:29PM
I agree. I'm not as meticulous about organization as you are (my couple hundred dead-tree books aren't organized well at all), but I'd really love it if Calibre was better (it sucks) at organization, searching and finding what I'm looking for among the ~12,000 ebooks I own.
Fortunately, Calibre (as I mentioned in a previous comment) is FOSS [github.com]. Perhaps someone might enhance those features.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Friday February 23 2018, @01:37PM (3 children)
Do audiobooks count as e-books? Due to Audible i started "reading" more literature than I ever did in my entire life. 1000 page tomes? Got it.
I have read some e-book versions of books which had not yet been "ported" to audio and found that the writers flaws are immensely visible without a narrator that fills up the gaps of bad writing with good acting.
A good example was Dungeon Calamity, funny book and cheap thrill when narrated. In e-book format (cue unscrollable pages amazon bullshit) and it was a terrible experience. Moreover I actually could not read it while doing chores which is a huge advantage of aubiobook.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Friday February 23 2018, @03:37PM (2 children)
I would recommend Librivox to you as well. It's got tons of public domain audio books. In some cases they won't be as good of quality as a professionally narrated book, but generally they have pretty good quality. https://librivox.org/ [librivox.org] Project Gutenberg is an awesome source for free e-books as well. http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:13PM (1 child)
I appreciate the sentiment of LibriVox, but finding a good reading on there is just an awful time. Between multi-reader projects, inconsistent normalization, poor editing, distracting hiss/pops/clipping and just general poor reading voices, it is usually worth my time to buy an mp3 cd off Amazon. Also the website kinda sucks. I feel like it is more a fun thing to do as a online community or hobby, but not really a useful resource unless you are desperate or extremely bored.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 26 2018, @03:02PM
I definitely agree with the "website kinda sucks" statement. As I had mentioned, the quality of the audio isn't always good. I've listened to several audio books from Librivox and have enjoyed them quite a bit. You're definitely going to get a better listening experience from a professionally read Audio Book. I just don't have the want / need to purchase an audio book when a perfectly usable free alternative exists. Plus, some of the Librivox audio books are very well done. Some really great audio books to listen to: https://librivox.org/narrative-of-the-life-of-david-crockett-of-the-state-of-tennessee-by-david-crockett/ [librivox.org] and https://librivox.org/the-autobigraphy-of-benjamin-franklin-ed-by-frank-woodworth-pine/ [librivox.org] They're not necessarily shining examples of literary works or of well read audio books, but they both are very interesting stories. I grew up with the Disneyfied version of Davy Crockett. Listening the audio book of his autobiography gave a bit of a new light on who he was. While I still respect him and his accomplishments, he was very much what one might call a "redneck". The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin also is a very interesting read. Benjamin Franklin started his career in writing and printing newspapers and you can definitely tell that he knows how to write a story.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @02:28PM (4 children)
From tfa,
> We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital.
Oddly enough I just had a long conference call with my publisher which kind of mirrored this.
When ebooks first came out they were pushing me to allow an e-version of our text book in parallel with traditional hardbound -- same price either way, USD $99 (not terribly overpriced for a 900+ page book, with a strong sewn binding). I resisted because they used crappy DRM (didn't want pissed off customers coming to me, the author) and also because they offered the same royalty % for ebook and for paper.
The book contract pre-dates ebooks (1993), so there is room in there for interpretation in a couple of different ways. I figure that either the price comes down and my royalty/book stays about the same, or they give me a larger royalty to offset their cost reductions (printing & stocking) -- but recognizes that their marketing costs remain the same.
Now, the publisher has a new guy who is liaison with suppliers (printing/binding companies), and he is also looking after other titles that are available in e-versions. He said that he has an IT background, seemed fairly tech savvy. He advised against an ebook for our textbook -- too easy to pirate and not enough sales to make up the difference. Complete reversal from the previous staff members.
He did say that he was looking into newer/better forms of ebook, but didn't give a lot of details--maybe in a few months he will be back with a new plan.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday February 23 2018, @03:01PM (2 children)
Bifurcation of the market into "storehouses of written communication" vs "required expensive product tying accessories for an expensive college education". For the latter, ebooks are no benefit. For the former ebooks are cool.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Friday February 23 2018, @08:48PM (1 child)
Disagree. For the latter, it's a lot easier for me to "find" a PDF lying around for a book available as an e-book :)
Not that I've ever done that, of course. 🤞
(Score: 2) by tekk on Friday February 23 2018, @08:55PM
Whoa, unicode works right, I thought the emoji block was banned..
Anyway, to whatever the textbook equivalent of the MPAA is: I actually don't think I ever pirated an ebook in my uni career. My uni had free textbooks so there wasn't much need to.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @06:07PM
If you buy a bound book, why shouldn't you get the e-book for a small additional fee?
The e-book doesn't give you any more content. It merely is an additional fee for a huge amount of convenience.
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday February 23 2018, @02:30PM
The online literature market is big enough for me to know about following a courtesy +1 to an acquaintance's post and a quick look-through the linked article. But those figures won't fall under "book sales" since they're purely ad-driven or serializations where, technically, books aren't being sold.
My guess is that tablet and mobile screens weren't cheap and good enough to compete against eInks up until very recently where their price point was only relevant to North American publishers that could monetize on book sales and offer the eReaders at a loss (like Amazon's kindle) much like how Apple bought a temporary grace period for the music industry with the iPod. Now that high-resolution OLED displays coupled with decent-enough-for-browsing performance SoCs are available even in cheapest tablets and phones (seems to be the case according to gearbest.com), they're finally losing market to web publishers and paying for holding back the tech for all those years.
Overall, been there, done that.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday February 23 2018, @03:21PM (4 children)
Just a minor tip that may help some people. Calibre cannot remove Amazon's latest DRM, at least, not yet. However, the older Kindle does not support the new DRM, and Amazon thankfully doesn't want to piss off all of the customers who have older Kindles.
So if you have an older Kindle, keep it. Or get one. When you download your books to the older Kindle, they will be converted to the older DRM, which Calibre can break.
@Amazon: It's not about piracy. It's about the fact that I want my library of books on my server, not on yours. And Calibre does a better job of organizing and managing them than your crappy website, even though Calibre itself could be a lot better.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:47PM (3 children)
It's not about that, it's about wanting to prevent people from taking those books and loading them onto a different brand of device which would make it easier to switch.
It's astonishing to me that we can't have decent antitrust enforcement as Apple pulled this same crap to destroy the MP3 player market. Granted, it likely would have died a few years later when smartphones became common and could do a decent job of playing music, but still, Apple shouldn't have been allowed to so blatantly break the law without consequences. Now, Amazon is pulling the same crap and nobody seems to think it's strange that a store is using a proprietary format to lock people into their ecosystem while simultaneously making it easy to move other companies products to theirs.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:19PM (1 child)
Very true.
But then Amazon also has been known to remotely delete your books for you, to make you a better citizen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html [nytimes.com]
And it is this last one that should be a big eye opener to anyone to avoid DRM at all costs. Once you have it (the book), it should be yours until you decide you want to delete it for good.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 23 2018, @08:04PM
They lost in court:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/172953/amazon_kindle_1984_lawsuit.html [pcworld.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 23 2018, @06:34PM
Which is exactly why I don't buy ebooks from Amazon.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday February 23 2018, @03:56PM (8 children)
Yeah, of course a big publisher doesn't understand eBooks. They want to charge the same price per-unit and provide the same royalties even though the manufacturing and distribution costs became basically 0. All of this "enhanced" crap is their way of trying to justify the extra cost and has nothing to do with what customers want.
Ultimately, eBooks are a threat to the publisher itself. Because if the manufacturing and distribution costs are basically 0, there's nothing stopping a self-published author from reaching a global audience. And that's terrifying.
If the publisher can't figure out how to sell authors on signing old-style book contracts for eBooks where they don't make sense, they only have one thing left: marketing. And they should be rightly scared of losing their marketing edge in the age of social media. Authors, by themselves or with a single friend with social media experience, can self-publish and run a successful large-scale marketing campaign all by themselves. No publisher necessary.
That's what Nourry thinks is "stupid".
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by slinches on Friday February 23 2018, @04:58PM
Agree. The problem for me is cost. First, they want to charge the same price for something that has lower distribution costs, then I have to pay for a separate reader, and third I can't easily resell the files (DRM and compatibility issues). So until they drop ebook prices below that of used paperbacks, I'll continue to buy physical copies and resell them when I'm done.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Friday February 23 2018, @07:40PM (4 children)
Distributors are always this way. I have to disagree with the idea that ebooks shouldn't come loaded with enhancements though. Lots of linking to other reading, pop up dictionaries so you can remember what floyds algorithm is or the difference between a zensunni and a zenshiaate, or maybe a map to Mordor, or could you just read this word outloud so I don't sound stupid? My current e-reader lets me annotate my books and my annotations show up on every device I have. I haven't seen it yet but I'd welcome some well-done FMV and animations like the books in Myst or harry potter.
And of course search, searching not only text but tags, keywords, character introductions, concept introductions. Building good search into books makes them so much more useful. We've known this for a long time and so we include a table of contents, glossary, and an index, which I'm sure brought quite a bit extra expense in the 1800s but they still did it.
But distributors never fucking change, remember right before MP3s made a splash, cds were more expensive than ever despite the economies of scale, despite the cost of cassettes being extremely low even though they're no doubt more expensive to manufacture. Sure they cried about napster, about cd-rw, about electronic distribution in general. But they did very little to make CDs more appealing. In fact in Sony's case the XCD drm fiasco had me asking myself why the fuck I even bother trying to buy them when I could just as easily get them for free and never try to toothpaste another scratch for the rest of my life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Friday February 23 2018, @09:39PM (3 children)
I recall a band I listen to actually switched label over that CD DRM thing, because their label did not ask or even inform them about the scheme. For the unaware readers, here's more information than even I had known [ritholtz.com], including the bizarre fact that apparently Sony did this just to make it annoying to put the music on your iPod specifically to poke Apple, not to make it difficult to pirate.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Thursday March 01 2018, @06:22PM (2 children)
Their XCD bullshit wrecked havoc with some industrial control systems. You pop it in, push play for some jams while you're doing work and now you've created an expensive outage.
I don't know how many places this happened across the country but I'm sure the total loss of productivity would have completely sunk the entire sony enterprise if it had to personally endure the turd they shit out on the rest of the corporate world. Remember this incident any time you consider actually paying money to sony when you have the option not to.
"The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."
If you're going to hack people to preserve a revenue stream you might as well stop selling music and diversify into identity theft, extortion, DDoS for sale. If you're going there why not have 10 revenue streams?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday March 01 2018, @09:39PM (1 child)
Do you have a source for that quotation?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Thursday March 01 2018, @10:20PM
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/23/we_will_block_napster/ [theregister.co.uk]
Sony Pictures Entertainment US senior VP Steve Heckler, Keynote address, Americas Conference on Information Systems (2000)
Only slightly related but also interesting. The company that developed the Sony BMG rootkit has pivoted over to the legal marijuana industry so be careful who you buy bongs and nugs from. I can just picture one of those pricks at a pot trade show, everyone totally unaware of the bad vibes in the room.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:40AM
Yes they are idiots for charging the same for dead-tree and e-book versions, but the difference is not as big as you think,
Production and shipping on a paperback is a max of $2, more likely under $1.
For a large format 1000 page hardcover textbook with a print run of 5000 copies, the cost per unit would be under $20. If you have time to get it printed in and shipped from asia, probably under $10.
Not sure about the cost of retail handling, but since shops near me can apparently make a profit on a 69 cent bottle of water that is heavier and and more awkward then it can't be too high.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:08PM
The other thing that is often provided by publishers is editing. If you think that doesn't matter, then you don't know any real authors. There is a reason most author intros thank their editors, and it is because a good editor will vastly improve an authors work. Everything from spelling and grammar errors up to pacing, with instructions to cut this, expand that, drop this crap altogether, and pointing out inconsistancies in motivations, anachronisms in timelines, characters not knowing or knowing things when the rest of the story says they should or shouldn't.
A good author can write a good book. A good author/editor combo can turn it into an excellent book.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @06:45PM
"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 this gives a false impression of the history of ebooks in other markets like North America. Originally ebooks were a dime a dozen. They cost a fraction of cost of real books and people were adopting them quite fast.
Then companies like Apple stepped in and colluded with book publishers to raise the price of ebooks until they cost the same as the dead tree versions. And that's when the people who were excited for ebooks got off the bandwagon and ebooks began to die. - if you had to pay the same price for a DMRed file as you did for a physical book you could lend/sell/giveaway at your leisure, everyone pretty much agreed getting the physical book made more sense.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/apple-450-million-settlement-e-book-price-fixing-supreme-court [theguardian.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @09:50PM (4 children)
This isn't 1818 its 2018. Time to move on. Most books do NOT need to be on dead trees. Its a waste of resources. Just the 'special books' need to be on (good) paper. And even those need an eBook option.
Now, we can talk all day about how bad DRM is, but the concept of an eBook is a great thing.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 24 2018, @11:51AM (3 children)
There is one good thing about paper books: They can take quite a bit of abuse without getting unusable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @05:13PM (2 children)
There's other good things too:
1) You can resell them after the semester is over, and recoup some of your expenditure
2) They aren't locked into any particular device, and don't disappear if the vendor goes belly-up
3) You can read them in all lighting conditions without needing to buy a particular kind of device that isn't very popular and costs a lot because everyone wants to watch videos on their ebook reader
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 26 2018, @06:57PM (1 child)
(1) and (2) are DRM problems, not inherent ebook problems. Note that the post I replied to referred to the concept, not the current implementation.
Also note that even in the current real world, you can get free and DRM-free ebooks from the Gutenberg project; although admittedly not textbooks. Those free ebooks you can give to others (selling would be ripping them off, though, since you got them for free), and you can read them on any ebook reader, as well as on tablets, phones and desktop/laptop computers running about any current operating system.
(3) I don't see that. You can get a good ebook reader for about the cost a typical textbook, and certainly for less than two textbooks. No, you can't watch videos on those, but then, you cannot watch video on paper books either.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @07:43PM
1 and 2 are DRM problems, yes, but all the major ebook platforms use DRM so it's part-and-parcel. Gutenberg books are nice, but those are mainly really old classics and other stuff so old that copyright doesn't apply. That's not much help if you're looking for something modern (whether for entertainment, or because you want to read an up-to-date biology textbook).
3 is important because most ebook readers use backlit LCD screens. eInk screens do still exist, but they're much less common and more expensive, and the LCD screen readers (tablet computers really) are the ones being pushed the most and selling the most. Of course, you can (for now) still buy a screen with eInk and ignore what other people are buying, but now you have a device that cannot display color images! So much for looking at color illustrations in a scientific text, or reading a full-color magazine (such as one showing artwork or photography). I can read a paper copy of National Geographic just fine outside in the sunlight, but there's simply no way to do this with an e-reader.