Rework sales: Paper ain't dead yet | Hacker News Reader

Rework sales: Paper ain't dead yet

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8 pointsrockarage6 comments

I suspect that "Rework" suffers from the same fate that many hot business books suffer from: a lot of people buy it more to display it on their shelves than to actually read it. They imagine they gain some degree of intellectual credibility every time someone walks into their offices and sees it on the desk, or above the computer in a stack of brightly colored and catchily titled books by Kawasaki, Godin, Gladwell, et al.

I've actually read "Rework," and I quite enjoyed it. So I am not speaking ill of its content or its value whatsoever. But we should be honest -- and, sadly, uncharitable -- about what percentage of books sold we believe are actually being read. Especially in this genre. Remember: an eBook can't sit on a shelf in an office somewhere, impressing someone's boss.

On the flip-side, there are some actionable and interesting marketing implications presented by this case and others like it. That is to say: your eBook buyers are (probably) more likely to be your actual readers. Perhaps it's time publishers started segmenting their audiences accordingly, and focusing efforts accordingly.

or Remember: it's easier to share a Hardcover book when an ebook has restriction.

This. Business books like Rework are about sharing ideas from the authors. People who read it want to share it with other people they know, too, which is why a paper version is great - it's continuously share-able.

I agree that ebooks should be sharable, and that sharability lends a nice advantage to paper. At the same time, I'm not necessarily convinced that sharability is a decisive factor in most people's decisions to buy paper over ebooks. Who knows; it might well be. Just seems like a bit of a stretch to suggest that most people are still choosing paper because they want to share it. (Whereas I have seen countless hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people who buy paper books to hoard or display, presumably unread).

My inner optimist would like to agree with you, but my inner cynic has a less charitable view of most buyers in this genre.

Buying and owning a physical book or kind-of-renting a DRM-laden, platform-bound ebook that can disappear from my possession of become unusable at any moment and I can't lend, give away or resell after I've read it.

Paper ain't dead because there's no serious alternative.

Its high paper sales are probably due to the fact the paper version of the book is so well put together. Quality

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