
The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead - user_235711
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/business/media/the-plot-twist-e-book-sales-slip-and-print-is-far-from-dead.html
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transfire
I think it has more to do with the eBook ownership model -- you don't really
own a book and you get tied down to a particular service to access the book.
So you can't lend a book to friend.And if a particular book becomes disputed
for copyright or censorship reasons it can just disappear. If you loose access
to a service for some reason you can loose all your books (and thus all your $
investment). On top of that the prices are too high. Why is an eBook as much
as a physical hardback? The hardback costs money to print and ship. Storing
and transferring an eBook is a fraction of that cost.

Finally eReaders/tablets are still not quite comfortable enough to replace
books. They need to be lighter, even a bit flexible and cheap.

There are the things that keep me from diving in. If someone came up with a
solution to these issues I think we'd see eBooks really take off.

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russnewcomer
As a Kindle fan, I'd say e-book sales slipping are easily attributable to the
fact that there is so much free content out there for e-readers that people
are reading the free stuff and not buying. I think a significant test would be
comparing library check-outs to ebooks to print sales. (Figuring out a test
that isn't skewed would be hard, but let's handwave that away). I wonder if
you'd see that 'e-book reading' people who used to check out lots of books
from the library have dropped off and are just reading free books from e-book
stores?

