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>Paper books for me are a universally superior product, they require no battery, don't feature update popups, wifi conncetions, eInk artifacts on page turns, accidental touchscreen events, inflexibility preventing storage in an inside jacket pocket, ...

That's interesting, I seem to get the same benefit with less hassle. For me the portability of ebooks more than makes up for all of these issues. I think as it becomes less common to carry extra things that don't need to be carried and the ebook technology improves, ebooks with become a more ideal experience for more and more people

The side effect of that is that I'm always carrying my books. I wouldn't read nearly as much if I had to plan to read. (i.e. had to have my book with me.) I do most of my reading during unexpected waiting.

The price difference is even more absurd when you consider the second-hand/used market. I tend to buy and read books in ebook format for the ease of being able to copy-and-paste from them and port them around on my cellphone, but for the great books I want as keepers on my bookshelf (bookshelves are wonderful conversational topics), I buy them in hardback at 50% the cost ($0.99 plus $3.99 shipping usually) from Amazon's network of used bookstores. The other benefit of cheap used books is that I can lend them out without caring if I ever get them back since I can get a replacement copy with the click of a button.

I think you are greatly overestimating how much physical books cost to produce.

Paper, ink, cardboard, staples, and glue are all very cheap in large quantity. The actual material cost of a book is tiny compared to the book's selling price.

I don't know what manufacturing costs are, but based on what I've seen on "How It's Made" and similar shows it looks like it is highly automated, and so I suspect that for the big publishers it too is only a tiny part of the book's selling price.

The third cost that ebooks do not incur that physical books do is shipping. I'd not be at all surprised if this is actually higher than the material cost and the manufacturing cost for many books.

Putting this all together, if the publishers passed on all the savings from ebooks being "vastly cheaper to produce" I doubt that this would result in anywhere near a 50% lower price.

Here's a typical breakdown, from 2010: "Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about $3.25 to print, store and ship the book, including unsold copies returned to the publisher by booksellers."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.ht... (and the graphic: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01eboo... )

I also prefer physical books and use them for most of my (non-internet) reading. But there are a couple situations where I think e-books have an advantage.

1. No wait. Occasionally I've discovered a book and wanted to read it immediatly. My kindle lets me do that easily.

2. Reading before sleep. There is something nice about getting ready for bed, turning off the lights, and reading on a backlit e-book reader. It means that I can read until the exact point that I feel like I am drifting off to sleep without needing to get up and turn out the light. Obviously this is good for light fiction. You wouldn't want to read anything that demands attention this way.

Actually paper books are an inferior product for many reasons:

1) moderately large to large books are uncomfortable to hold after a while.

2) Fixed font size.

3) Take up physical space (i.e. you can have books and other kind of "publications" like magazines in a Kindle).

4) Unsearchable.

5) Every reader essentially has to "hack" something as simple as progress saving.

>"they require no battery": This doesn't really make paper books a superior product. The same argument could be said of landline phones but that doesn't make them better than cellphones.

>"accidental touchscreen events": Not all ereaders are touchscreen based, an in any case it's a poor, circumstantial reason.

Your other reasons amount to pretty much preference, none of them make paper books categorically superior to ereaders.

You have to have a dictionary or computer on-hand if you want to look up a word. Books don't light themselves.

As far as novels are concerned, ebooks only have two advantages to me:

(1) They save space. If I were a voracious reader devouring many novels, this might actually matter to me. But as it stands, I'm the sort of person to be into a single novel at a time, and I don't make it a point to read fast but rather to read more slowly and enjoy every word. At the same time, there's a strange pleasure in assembling little shelves of novels I've read and loved. A Kindle or iBooks library just feels sterile and corporate in comparison.

(2) They're searchable. For novels, this is not as much of an advantage as I thought it would be, though. The senses of touch and sight are surprisingly powerful at forming a mental index of a novel. Even small things like the passing memory of the relative difference in weight or thickness between the pages on the left and the pages on the right go into helping me remember where a particular passage was. Holding a physical novel in your hands, there's a sense of seeing the entire book all at once, almost like a limited form of omniscience. Seeing only a page or two at a time in an ebook in comparison is like tunnel vision.

There's another "feature" which hurts my sleep. At the end of one book in the series, my Kindle has a "click here to get the next book" link. This is really nice, as I don't have to wait for shipping or bike to the library, but it also means I don't go to sleep after the end of the book.

I also like the "airgap" benefits of books vs proprietary readers, nobody can log into a book and ninja edit for future political reasons or delete them for copyright reasons.

Personally, I'm not this paranoid. I buy the books on my kindle and copy them into Calibre and strip the DRM. I get all the benefits of having an permanent archive and being able to enjoy modern technology.

For now we can strip DRM, what if all near future readers have a TPM-like hardware key that can't be copied or sniffed that must be present to decrypt the text.

Probably the most terrifying "feature". I agree wholeheartedly. Its kinda scary how technology, if universally adopted, could be a past censors dream come true.

Was there a bookversion of "E.T." and, if so, were the police guns ninja-edited to walkie-talkies like the movie re-release?

I suspect the pricing of the book has less to do with any judgment about the features and relative superiority of the delivery substrate, and more to do with the economics of authoring a worthwhile text, which require a risky up-front investment of time few authors have any reasonable assurance they'll see a return on.

So most of the cost is probably going to paying the people who produce the book and repaying investors/publishers.

Spot on. I have been involved across multiple publishers. The cost of the book is normally set by whatever is needed to pay the editors and authors to produce a quality book. And the continuation of the publisher.

I like to read in the dark. As a passenger on road trips, or in a comfortable chair that doesn't necessarily have a reading lamp, or while waiting somewhere that doesn't have good illumination. Gooseneck lamps are AWFUL, particularly on paperbacks. I also can't set paperbacks to balance nicely on my lap without curving like crazy in most circumstances.

So I get 1) freed from having to secure and power a light source, and 2) the convenience of the hardback for the price of the paperback.

I was also quite bothered by the low res low contrast screen on the Kindle. The Paperwhite is worlds better, eliminating all of my gripes.

I feel the same way about paper books but now have most of my collection as ebooks. The reason? It's infinitely easier to move when you don't have a huge library to box up and carry around. I had amassed a very nice collection at one point in my life and sold all of it off when I had to move to another country. Now I just toss my Kindle in a backpack and my entire library comes with me.