Americans still opt for print books over digital or audio versions
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
Reading on a E-device is a bother, I have to sift through all the "sponsored" books and whatever other crap the ebook reader company decides to add, and be at the whims of whatever they decide they want to do with "your" device that day.
Cell-phones are a bother, they are just devices optimized for stealing your attention, money, information, or all the above.
Pretty much everything tech related anymore is a bother.
I would love to see someone come out with services for music, movies, books that are just APIs you subscribe to and can use any client you want. Think of the novelty of having an interface where you could ignore movies you never want to see, only show the music genres you care about, and not have advertisements for romance novels on your e-reader.
Given the choice between 'tainted digital experience' and 'plain analogue experience', I can't blame consumers for choosing the latter, but the 'plain digital experience' does exist. It's just not sold.
I wonder how long it's going to take before the analogue experience becomes tainted. It's, sadly, not unthinkable to put ads in books. I guess there's little point from the perspective of the relevant people if they can't make those ads personalised, but maybe if the enshittification goes far enough, it could happen.
The other day I commented about my DRM‐free ebook sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684550
In my opinion, it’s important to support those publishers and stores that do choose to sell unencumbered media, so that they have some justification to keep doing it.
Mostly correct, but some publishers have seen the light.
Asimov's magazine used to be on kindle subscriptions, then on some dubious application no one had heard of, but now they offer drm-free epubs, for example.
This is the reason I buy physical media, rip it to my home server and use Plex. No suggested bullshit. No ads at all.
How do you do that with paid services? What does your setup look like? Because I can't figure out how to do that using commercial products.
The ads at the beginning of a show can be skipped pretty easily.
I can mentally ignore sponsored content, but you are right that it is an ad that. I almost never browse though, and just use the search function.
Apple tv+, Amazon prime with the extra $5 per month or whatever, and peacock’s higher tier paid through Apple don’t have ads breaks in the middle of the media for me. Neither did Max when I had it a couple years ago.
Other shows or seasons that are rented with a lifetime license from apple (what they call “buying”) don’t have ad breaks either.
This exists, but it's not a VC-backed product or public company because the money to be made comes from all the "bother" you identified.
Sounds like you just chose the wrong device. My Boox does none of this. I just put the epub file in the device and read it.
So; I cordon off time every day to read and not touch my devices. Even though I subscribe to streaming music, I prefer to read while listening to vinyl. I have absolutely NO PROBLEM with anyone choosing to read ebooks or do audiobooks; they're just not my preferred way to do it.
It won't happen because the one thing more important than money is control.
In the 1990s, the recording industry choose to leave money on the table rather than allow digital music to risk their gatekeeping power. It took years for Apple to bully the MPAA into allowing digital distribution.
I do wish we had DRM-free purchases like we have with MP3s. But this is a big step up over streaming services. The Movies Anywhere integration is handy as well.
That's our new norm too. We still subscribe to a number of streaming services - but we count on piracy to get the experience that we pay for.
My fellow, you are on Hacker News. Think like a hacker, not a consumer.
Plenty of savvy e-book customers here don't have the experience you just described. Look up how to put KOReader ( https://koreader.rocks ) on your current device, and learn how to get your books without DRM. Your e-reading experience will be so much better.
>Watching TV/Movies through any device is a bother, I have to sift through all the advertisements/brand placements for that device to find anything, and most of the time it's the same 20 movies repeated over and over in every section.
Pirate streaming sites[1] are more convenient, have fewer ads, and offer more selection than commercial streaming; they are much less reliable than the following options, however. Torrents have no ads, highest quality, and the largest selection, but you have to download each file manually. Good for preservation, less convenient. Stremio[2]+Torrentio[3]+Debrid[4] allow no ads, highest quality, a large selection, and streaming. This is my preferred option—this is the Spotify of movies and TV.
>Reading on a E-device is a bother, I have to sift through all the "sponsored" books and whatever other crap the ebook reader company decides to add, and be at the whims of whatever they decide they want to do with "your" device that day.
Kindle jailbreak[5] + KoReader[6] + Z-library[7] extension allow you to seamlessly download any book you'd like, directly on your Kindle. No ads, no Amazon connections, and your subsidized device[8].
>Cell-phones are a bother, they are just devices optimized for stealing your attention, money, information, or all the above.
GrapheneOS[9] comes with zero Google services or telemetry by default, and without stock bloatware or notification spam, combined with robust permissions, it goes a long way toward making your phone feel like a tool. I recommend Olauncher[10] for a distraction-free home screen.
>Pretty much everything tech related anymore is a bother.
I feel you. All of this takes effort and knowledge that people shouldn't have to acquire just to have a decent experience with their own devices. But these options exist, they are getting better, and the more people adopt them, the less leverage companies have to keep enshittifying.
[1] https://github.com/fmhy/FMHY/wiki/Streaming
[2] https://github.com/Stremio
[3] https://github.com/TheBeastLT/torrentio-scraper
[4] https://github.com/Viren070/guides
[5] https://github.com/KindleModding/kindlemodding.github.io
[6] https://github.com/koreader/koreader
[7] https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin
They have been optimizing for enshittification and they became really good at it. I have no idea how to get rid of these business practices. Users just leaving those abusive platforms clearly doesn't work.
I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.
Some kind of physical “totem” that came with an ebook would be an interesting idea, like a bookmark or a postcard-sized note.
Even though print books are by far the minority of my reading, I still purchase print copies of books I enjoy, for discoverability. I’ve loved reading since childhood because I grew up in a house filled to bursting with my parents’ books. Nobody told me to read Tolkien, or Heinlein, or Verne, or Jack London, or Greek mythology—I simply took those books off the shelf and read them. And when we visited friends and family, I would read books from their shelves too. None of my young relatives have access to my ebook or audiobook history, and I’m not going to hammer my own interests into their heads… but I’m lucky enough to have lots of space, so I keep my bookshelves overflowing.
Yes except where rich people fund political book-banning groups to do that.
ref: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/books/book-bans-libraries...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gavin-news...
Keeping unliked books out of school libraries by banning them - that is about banning them. I feel propaganda isn't the best label for what is an accurate portrayal.
source: parent of 5 FL school kids
1. The typesetting, as you point out. Books are carefully typeset for the size of the pages they are printed on. Screens are going to be completely the wrong size/shape for most things,
2. Seek speed. Seeking to a point in an ebook is excruciating. A real book is by far the best format for quickly seeking to a place or seeking backwards and forwards between multiple pages. I can also open two books at once and seek between them using only my eyes.
I also love sharing paper books with friends. It’s a little experience that ebooks don’t give you.
The one advantage of physical books is the reading experience itself, but even that is debatable. A Kindle lets you adjust brightness, change fonts—there are fonts that help dyslexic people, for example—and it's lighter than books. Did I mention dark mode?
That said, I can come up with far more than a few counterexamples for why ebooks are good, besides combustability:
- Paper books are dense. This adds difficulty to moving and maintaining large collections.
- Paper books take up space. Bookstores and libraries must necessarily remove books to make space for new ones. With ebooks, there's basically no need to remove old ones.
- Paper books are dense and take up space, so when travelling, the reader must carefully select one or two to carry. With ebooks, I can carry my entire ebook library in my pocket.
- Paper books require more effort to duplicate. My e-library is replicated across many devices, including two different offsites. If I spill sauce on a paper book, I need to buy another copy (assuming it's still available).
- Paper books have accessibility issues. As I get older and my vision deteriorates, I will need specialized optical hardware to read small print. On my e-reader, I can just turn up the font size.
In spite of all this, I would never say that ebooks are objectively superior; both are good. I just take issue with all of the people who assume that physical books are so obviously inherently superior, without ever saying why. (See your own post for example.)
There are downsides to both formats, but with paper there's no company keeping track of the date/time I open the books on my selves, or how often I open them, or how long I spend on each page, or how long I take to read the whole thing. I also don't have to worry about the books on my shelves being remotely and silently censored or edited. I don't have to worry about ads being inserted into them and I can freely read them and sell/loan them to others long after they've been banned.
I can still remember where I was when I read a certain book or even a chapter in case of a physical book. With my kindle it's a blur to me.
I also like to see my bookmark gradually make its way down the book over time.
I guess people are reading books on their phones and tablets?
As for whether I leave the books in their DRM'd state or not? No comment :)
And then there's the whole experience of going into a bookstore and just looking around. It's wonderful. One of the last things our society has yet to fuck up.
The less screen time I spend, the better I feel.
I mean space to store all those physical books, of course.