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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 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.