Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

I wish they gave more clarity to this stat * Overall digital sales up 6% to £1.7bn despite a continuation of the drop in eBook sales down 3%

I personally doubt that ebooks have 'lost their shine', I think this is more a matter of a journalist not being able to read into the numbers.

I haven't bought the report, but what little I know about the book market, I know that in 2016, adult colouring books became a BIG thing, really big! Are you going to buy those for kindle? No, so more money is spent on physical books and less on e-books.

If you're an ebook reader, you may also have noticed that Amazon has significantly raised prices on e-books in 2016. 25-50% on average it seems to me, and I often now see ebooks that cost the same as physical books. Now, I'm not going to buy a physical book because my ebook price has increased, but I do buy slightly fewer ebooks now.

Physical books have their place, but I don't see ebooks in serious decline in the near future.

> If you're an ebook reader, you may also have noticed that Amazon has significantly raised prices on e-books in 2016. 25-50% on average it seems to me, and I often now see ebooks that cost the same as physical books. Now, I'm not going to buy a physical book because my ebook price has increased, but I do buy slightly fewer ebooks now.

When I first bought my kindle, I could get tons of ebooks for a dollar or two less than paperback. Now the ebooks are often a dollar or two more than the paperback. Occasionally, I have run across books where the hardcover was cheaper than the ebook.

Fortunately, I can just use Overdrive[0] via my library to get books delivered to my kindle now.

[0]: https://www.overdrive.com/

I really don't get why ebooks are so pricy. If they were half the price of a book, I would actually consider buying them instead of borrowing them or only using Amazon Prime's free offerings.

Even when they are cheaper to purchase, ebooks often make more money for the publisher[1], as the author's share tends to be smaller. It's interesting to see that the costs to produce a hardcover book are only a very small part of its total price.

1: http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/06/a-publishers-perspectiv...

Partially because Amazon lost to the Publishers in 2014-15 - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/technology/amazon-hachett... ? All ebook prices jumped after that.

I am not sure why no one is correlating the price increase to the the drop in Ebook sales, especially since Amazon at that point pointed out exactly this as a consequence - since ebooks have to compete with other digital media.

I'm surprised no one is focusing on this as well. I believe that ebooks being overpriced is the main reason they aren't selling well. If ebooks were at least the same price as paperbacks instead of more expensive I would buy more of them. But right now it's cheaper to buy physical copies of books than ebooks.

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