Faber boss says future of book publishing is mobile | Hacker News Reader

Faber boss says future of book publishing is mobile

theguardian.com

16 pointsprostoalex9 comments

Books come in an enormous variety of shapes and sizes. E-book readers, tablets and smartphones, in contrast, come in very limited sizes.

You cannot always successfully transpose the content from a physical book to a smaller electronic device, at least not without re-designing the layout of the book.

Plain text books, such as fiction, are the most easily adaptable to smaller electonic displays. But many other books require a redesign to make them suitable for reading electronically. For example, the simple act of scanning a two-page spread with your eyes is difficult or impossible to do on mobile devices (and not very comfortable if done on a big monitor compared to holding a book or magazine in your hand).

So E-books will evolve, but physical books have a long shelf life ahead of them.

> Books come in an enormous variety of shapes and sizes. E-books, tablets and smartphones, in contrast, come in very limited sizes.

There's actually a fairly wide size range of devices that are ereaders or have ereader software.

Maybe books resiliency has more to do with the aberrant prices for ebooks? They are rarely cheaper than physical books and I often find them to be even more expensive!

Either way, I hope that phones do not become the preferred way to read books, I really like my e-reader, if only the technology seemed a little more modern (Its hardly changed in 5+ years) I think they would have no problem becoming more popular.

> They are rarely cheaper than physical books and I often find them to be even more expensive!

ebooks are easier to store, easier to back up, and easier to access where and when you want than paper books, and can support functions (search, etc.) that paper books don't. There's a good case that -- outside of the downsides of DRM for those books that are burden by it -- ebooks are just plain better than paper books in many ways. So its not really unreasonable that they'd be more expensive (books generally don't have direct substitutes, and the ebook and physical version of the same book don't come from competing entities, so the tendency for a perfectly competitive market to drive prices down to production costs is mitigated -- OTOH, the forces driving prices up to marginal utility are present just fine.)

I understand the upsides of ebooks, but this often happens with technical ebooks too. You know, ones containing equations and diagrams, which are atrocious as ebooks with few exceptions (one that comes to mind is Knuth's TAOCP -- it is decent as an ebook, but that took a lot of effort from a team at Stanford).

Actually, technical ebooks are the ones I find most valuable (I tend to prefer a 12" tablet as a reading device for them, though there are some that have decent PDF versions.)

What is your preferred 12" tablet?

I get the advantages of an ebook, but they are intrinsic to the medium, I'm guessing the cost to produce a book higher than the one to produce an ebook. (Especially if they use pandoc or something similar)

The price depends on where you're based. I'm in Australia, and it's typical to spend $30 or more (sometimes $50) on a paperback book at a local bookstore, even an online bookstore. Whereas I can find the same book on Kindle for $14, and even then Amazon complains "This price was set by the publisher". That made it a no-brainer to switch to digital for me.

I love my Kindle 3G Keyboard and I really hope e-readers stay around too. But I've noticed I've been using my Galaxy Tablet a lot more for reading lately, even with its lousy 160ppi resolution.

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