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Comment by officemonkey | Hacker News Reader

> So why have eBooks failed so miserably, when other media such as movies and music now sell and rent so well online?

Repeat after me: the average person doesn't read. The market for ebooks is a fraction of the market for movies and music.

OTOH, there is a viable market because there are such things as "avid readers" (people who read more than one book a month.) Those are the people ereaders are made for.

I predict that ebooks will be like jazz records: they not terribly popular, but they'll still be made because there's a devoted audience.

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Tangential, but even movies and music are smaller than the games industry.

The entire, global music industry, for 2016, was worth $16 Billion. The global movie box office total for 2016 was just over $38.6 Billion US dollars. [...] Meanwhile PC games alone earned $34 Billion (including sales, DLC, subscriptions and in-game transactions). Console games pulled in $30 Billion (including hardware, games and services). and Mobile games topped $40 Billion (sales and in-game transactions).

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Video-Game-industry-bigger-than... (Which isn't sourced, but the numbers seem consistent with this https://www.vanillaplus.com/2018/07/05/40093-video-games-mar...)

I don't know what the numbers are for ebooks; this link says 1 billion US dollars revenue in the US market.

I think lumping console/PC games with mobile games is a mistake. There are some exceptions, but they usually work completely differently.

But they weren't lumped together. They are distinct line items in their post. Not sure what the concern is anyways, their claim is clearly supported by the numbers: games are much bigger than music and movies. You can ignore the mobile games figure and it's still true.

Appreciate the tangent. I knew the video game market was doing well, I didn't know it was doing this well.

This is surprising to me, I wold have assumed movies would still be bringing in more revenue.

Streaming revenue is about the same as box office revenue, so the disparity isn't as big. But still, that's a lot of gaming revenue.

Comparing box office revenue to "sales, DLC, subscriptions, and in game transactions" is extremely disingenuous.

You should compare it to box office, streaming subscriptions, licensing/syndication revenue, concessions...

The overall market for books is roughly the same as that for music and movies. Quick googling says $27 billion for books, $16 billion for music, $41 billion for movies in the US. Not digging in to those numbers but if we assume they're roughly in the correct ballpark then it's all similar market sizes.

Is that including stuff like textbooks?

It does. It includes all publishers and academic journals. I would wager a huge portion of that 27 billion is textbooks in k-12 & university, and journals; though, I haven't been able to find the raw data.

[0] https://www.bookstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BOOKSTA... (page 1, bottom)

Well NO ONE I personally know buys or keeps physical books any more except for children's books if they have kindergarten or primary school kids. Everyone's book collection is on the Kindle including middle school and high school kids. Living in a tropical/sub-tropical humid climate, the tendency of physical book collections to deteriorate or grow mould is a major liability especially if you have small kids.

I do, but only as a present.

I order physical books by calling my bookstore, so I can pick it up there. To me, random access time in print is superior to ebooks. I wish it was possible to flash an entire bookshelf full of epaper tomes in seconds so I can reap the best of both worlds.

My wife and I have a collection of several hundred physical books, and while the size of our collection is unusual among our friends, nearly all of them have a collection of some size, even if it’s just in the 10-20 book range. Pretty much everyone I know has at least one category of books they prefer printed, often textbooks and cookbooks, even if they generally use ebooks. We’re in Austin, currently, so we don’t have the mold problem you mention, but I grew up in coastal Mississippi and New Orleans and never had that problem unless the books were stored out in a shed or something. Several of our physical books are ~200 years old, and while I understand that an ebook will conceivably live for that long, I am suspicious that it would remain useful, given changing devices, formats, publishers, etc.

Anecdotally I see a strong clustering. I have friends with a ton of books, and their other friends also heavily liking books and physical goods (CDs, cards etc.) in general.

My other friends tend to have basically nothing in terms of physical books, music, movies.

I’d wager it depends on how people see physical goods in general: is it an asset or a liability ? And the “minimalist” switch might become more and more attractive when people prefer to rent instead of going into debt.

I buy physical books whenever they're cheaper than the Kindle version. Publishers don't want to compete with remaindered or used physical books.

Um, I much prefer physical books.

One day, if your eyesight gets worse, you may start to love ebooks just for the ability to set the font larger.

This is the number one reason I don't buy physical books, I hate having to read super small fonts on crappy quality paper.

On the other side of that coin, sometimes when I buy a physical book I seek out a really good one because I want to own a good one. Paper that feels nice with printing done well (and in some cases smells nice - ever smell a No-starch Press book? I can pick them out of my bookcases blindfold, by the scent).

Expensive binding that will last; covers that are a pleasure just to hold. Nobody like to read super small fonts on crappy quality paper, but there's a real pleasure in seeking out and buying a really good quality book.

I've even done this with books that I've read in cheap paperbook format and enjoyed so much that I want to own one (or in some cases, more than one; usually when my search reveals something unusual - for example, when I went looking for a copy of Marisha Pessl‎'s "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" I found a hardback ARC print that came with some extra bit n' pieces - a little pack that must have been sent to a reviewer by the publisher). Sometimes the good printings sold out years before and I have to track down one second hand in perfect or near perfect condition.

I can appreciate all those things about great books. However, all of that is secondary to actually being able to read it for me. If my eyesight gets bad enough, I'll probably switch to audio books.

That does sound rough. I suspect if I ever reach the point that I cannot read my own books, I'll not do well mentally...

There's always the physical assistance of a stupidly bright light and a well shaped magnifier :)

Thank you. We care a lot about the physical form of our books. I appreciate quality and I'm pleased to see that you do, too.

I'm thinking of ways to make our books even a bit nicer. Not sure yet what that will mean but I'm still thinking on it.

Well, so far you've got the scent right, the feel of the paper is good, the colouring is good, the binding is good, and whoever is in charge of typography is doing well - the layout of code and the font changes and how specific lines are reference and so is all good. I've not yet been stung by counterfeit printings either.

Now that I think about it, is the distinctive scent actually coming from the binding? I've had a dig through my shelves and my copy of "Programming Linux Games" from 2001 does still carry that scent, even though it doesn't state "RepKover" on the back. I see that it does carry the Linux Journal Press tag on it as well as No-Starch. I'd forgotten about that, but now I look, those early titles certainly were Linux heavy.

I’m sitting here reading HN on an iPhone. The font is less than half the size of a typical book.

I have to wear readers for ebooks (and all screens) no matter how large I set the font because I don't want the text blurry.

Most of the time, text on paper is better. The exception being very small text on glossy paper (Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower).

Whereas I genuinely think that everyone I know buys, owns and keep physical books. Some have only a few, some have hundreds and thousands, but all of them do.

I do live in a country comprised entirely of Oceanic and Subpolar Oceanic climate, though.

There's selection bias here; people tend to know people like themselves and people like each other. Be it people like themselves because they work together, or live near each other, or have similar hobbies, or are from the same family, or some other non-random selection bias, but however it happens, people tend to know people like themselves and people like each other. I have thousands of physical books and probably acquire a few dozen more each year; I tend to like people who like physical books, and presumably you do not.

>There's selection bias here; people tend to know people like themselves and people like each other.

And, presumably, someone who is young, mobile, and lives in a small urban apartment (and knows mostly people in the same boat) will tend to default to lugging and storing less stuff than older folks who have a roomy house. I know if I were starting out today I'd almost certainly have less of a physical footprint than I did in college and immediately afterwards.

Ha. You could almost be talking about me, as was. Moved in to this apartment 15 years ago, not long out of university. Been through a half-dozen jobs since then, ranging from less than ten minutes' walk away to literally in a foreign country (not remote working either - moved there while still paying rent on this one), and I'm starting to think that I'm going to end up buying a house purely to be able to build a proper library room for the books.

I don’t think you can assume that what you see necessarily reflects the industry. Independent book stores are doing well in the small market where I am (New Zealand).

This must be unique to your "tropical/subtropical humid climate" because surveys consistently show the vast majority of books bought by high school kids are print, not electronic.

In addition to data, I'd also like to offer some counter-anecdotes: I have a large collection of printed books to which I'm still regularly adding, I know many other people who do also, and I can only think of a couple of people who've told me they've stopped buying printed books and do all of their reading on the Kindle.

Not everywhere has climate-controlled homes. In most of the tropical places I've been, air conditioning is a luxury.

This describes zero people I know. Is this now common?

Furthermore, eBooks just aren't a very good format for many types of books. Fiction that's 99% flowing text--and some non-fiction? Sure. But even though I buy $1 and $2 eBook cookbooks when there's some special going, it's mostly a lousy format for that sort of thing--much less "coffee table" books in general.

eBooks have ended up being a sort of niche as you say. Not a wholesale revolution of the publishing industry. Probably not that much of a bigger deal than print on demand at the end of the day.

TBH, a lot of the same forces that helped create eBooks have actually limited how many books a lot of people read. I'm pretty sure I read as many words as I ever did but I read fewer books.

What is your evidence for the average person not reading? Trying to find some numbers I came across the following pew research poll that showed nearly 3/4th of their survey participants reading a book in one format or another in the last 12 months.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/25/one-in-five...

Average 4 books a year.

Compare that to tv and movies, by count or hours.

>Average 4 books a year.

Where does it say that? Couldn't find that on Pew Research source.

These are interesting stats

> reading a book in one format or another in the last 12 months

That study is a binary "read at least one book at all or read 0", doesn't indicate how many books the people who made it through one book finished. I would not call someone who reads one book a year an avid reader.

In our reading club even the most ardent readers of only physical books converted to using iPads/Kindle. I hear the same from my other social circles as well. So it would be very hard at this point for the publishers to try to kill off ebooks. They should have done it at least 5-7 years if they ever had a chance.

At some point in history people would have killed for an ability to access almost any book without any problem. When we finally got to tne point, people rather watch films or scroll endlessly on Instagram.

Your argument applies to physical books, as well.

Hmmm, just like Text Adventure games.

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