E-book sales top paperbacks for first time | Hacker News Reader

E-book sales top paperbacks for first time

money.cnn.com

27 pointscwan18 comments

This is great news - because, hopefully, it means that more publishers will realize that there is a lot of money to be made releasing their books in EBook format. I find it strange that so many of the books that I want to purchase haven't been released in Kindle format. Even books that are obvious candidates, such as "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." It's an award winning Novel (2007 Nebula, 2008 Hugo), Science Fiction, and has been out for more than four years. And yet, still not available in electronic format.

As more and more people pick up e-readers, I'm hoping that publishing electronically will cease to be an option.

Are these numbers really good? I don't doubt them in this story, but I must ask because recently we've all been regaled with "ZOMG EBOOK SALES PASS BOOK SALES" stories and a few of those have been accused of cooking sales numbers.

I've mostly moved over to ebooks myself, but I still have two big concerns about it.

1. How will I share books with my spouse? Is having the same account across multiple (duplicate) devices going to be the norm/permitted?

2. How will I share books with my young kids? Will it require buying an expensive destructible device?

remove the drm using calibre, it takes a minute and allows you to read books from amazon using ibooks.

I wasn't aware of that. I like iBooks a lot better than the kindle app for the iPad. Need to try that. Thanks.

1. My wife and I have our Amazon account linked to several devices: my Kindle, her iPad, an iPod Touch, my Blackberry, and my computer.

If Amazon is being that permissive NOW, then I assume things won't get more restrictive.

2. How young? If they're old enough to read a chapter book, then they're probably old enough to treat a Kindle gently. My son (who is three) is quite gentle with my iPod touch, because he knows if he isn't: no more "Bug's Life".

3. You can't read ebooks in the bath (yet)

You can't?

Sure you can; I used mine in the tub (a Sony Reader) all the time with no I'll effects. If you're paranoid though just throw the reader into a ziploc bag to protect it.

Kindle has a loan feature that lets you loan the book to anyone for 14 days or so.

Once ever. For some books.

I'm still waiting for the UK government to remove VAT from eBooks like paper books.

It's no wonder publishers want to price ebooks at least as much as paperbooks or even hardcovers. They knew this day would come, and if ebooks followed the typical disruptive innovation path of being cheaper than the old type of product (real books in this case), then publishers would be in trouble (at least if they wouldn't adapt to the new reality).

This way they not only transition to the ebook paradigm without many problems, but they even get to have higher profits, since the costs of producing and distributing ebooks are much lower.

In fairness, I've not even found this to be the case with my UK Kindle. It's very rare that, when an e-book copy is available in the first place, it costs more than the paperback on Amazon.

There'll be no more cheap second books to purchase if e-books go mainstream. For example, secondhand Dale Carnegie for $2.00 is a steal.

Can someone post a link to the report? I looked on http://www.publishers.org , but could not find it. Thank you.

Next time you invent a technology that lasts 500 years call me.

J.G.

I've re-invented the wheel a few times...

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