Amazon Now Selling More EBooks Than Real Books In The UK | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Now Selling More EBooks Than Real Books In The UK

techcrunch.com

16 pointsplayhard7 comments

Perhaps it's time we stopped to referring to paper books as real books, then? I know this is just a headline designed to get attention, but thinking that ebooks aren't real books in some way (witness all the handwringing they bring out about the feel of paper etc.) is one (of the many things) that's killing publishers.

Personally, I don't think I'll buy many ebooks from Amazon or B&N in the next few years at least. Not after I've discovered that all your purchases can be permanently deleted from your account with two clicks each. For now I'll stick with paper books and maybe some newest releases only in ebook format and see where the trends are going. At least Valve don't do such things and their games will be with me as long as Valve exists.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/xor0j/i_asked_steam_...

Yes, I know about that and I've even considered going all RAGEQUITSTEAM!!!111 for a few hours :) . But really there are two ways of attack on your cloud "posessions":

1. Corporate abuse (just like Valve did recently and thousands others do every day) - you can't do anything about that. No really anything. The most individual can do is strike corporation where they don't expect, that only work once and for one individual. In all other cases it is pointless - there is just way too big weight difference. And no, the class action suite would only make big corp smile. Valve done this and nothing can be done about that.

2. Individual abuse (download hash table, find passwords, do whatever) - you can confront that, but only in equal conditions. Hacker uses his tools, knowledge etc and user uses tools provided by cloud (in man vs. man case clouds tend to try being all good and protect user). So when Amazon made this security hole they took some of user tools, namely account-content link. This was done not by some evil plan to force users to buy second copies, that would be absurd, but because Amazone didn't care enough - "they want delete feature? fine, enable it for everything and everyone".

I've primarily switched to ebooks as the convenience is simply compelling enough for me that I'm willing to accept the downsides. The result? I read many more books than I used to.

That said, there are two major concerns I have with ebooks as they currently are sold:

1) Many ebook stores only sell you a license to read, not ownership of the book.

2) I credit my love of books to seeing my father regularly read from his personal library. When I read on my iPad, my kids can't tell if I'm reading a book, doing email, or goofing off.

My hope is that the ebook market eventually moves to either a proper ownership model or a subscription model. We've seen similar transformations in music and movies. The current Kindle store license is more akin to "leasing" the book anyway. If the prices reflected that, I believe there would be even larger uptake. If there is to be a serious competitor to Amazon, I expect they'll take such an approach.

I'm reading Speaker for the Dead on a real, physical book at the moment, after buying and reading Ender's Game on Kindle. Why? Because Amazon won't sell me the Speaker ebook in my region - but they're happy to sell me books 1, 3 and 4. Well done guys.

At £111 for a Kindle, this doesn't surprise me very much.

I'm a teenager, but I'm surprised that my non-technical mother is using eBooks on our family BlackBerry PlayBook.

I guess the era of the eBook has come, if she is using it.

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