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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: 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