
Faber boss says future of book publishing is mobile - prostoalex
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/04/faber-stephen-page-book-publishing-mobile
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chestnut-tree
Books come in an enormous variety of shapes and sizes. E-book readers, tablets
and smartphones, in contrast, come in very limited sizes.

You cannot always successfully transpose the content from a physical book to a
smaller electronic device, at least not without re-designing the layout of the
book.

Plain text books, such as fiction, are the most easily adaptable to smaller
electonic displays. But many other books require a redesign to make them
suitable for reading electronically. For example, the simple act of scanning a
two-page spread with your eyes is difficult or impossible to do on mobile
devices (and not very comfortable if done on a big monitor compared to holding
a book or magazine in your hand).

So E-books will evolve, but physical books have a long shelf life ahead of
them.

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dragonwriter
> Books come in an enormous variety of shapes and sizes. E-books, tablets and
> smartphones, in contrast, come in very limited sizes.

There's actually a fairly wide size range of devices that are ereaders or have
ereader software.

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superskierpat
Maybe books resiliency has more to do with the aberrant prices for ebooks?
They are rarely cheaper than physical books and I often find them to be even
more expensive!

Either way, I hope that phones do not become the preferred way to read books,
I really like my e-reader, if only the technology seemed a little more modern
(Its hardly changed in 5+ years) I think they would have no problem becoming
more popular.

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dragonwriter
> They are rarely cheaper than physical books and I often find them to be even
> more expensive!

ebooks are easier to store, easier to back up, and easier to access where and
when you want than paper books, and can support functions (search, etc.) that
paper books don't. There's a good case that -- outside of the downsides of DRM
for those books that are burden by it -- ebooks are just plain _better_ than
paper books in many ways. So its not really unreasonable that they'd be more
expensive (books generally _don 't_ have direct substitutes, and the ebook and
physical version of the same book don't come from competing entities, so the
tendency for a perfectly competitive market to drive prices down to production
costs is mitigated -- OTOH, the forces driving prices _up_ to marginal utility
are present just fine.)

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copperx
I understand the upsides of ebooks, but this often happens with technical
ebooks too. You know, ones containing equations and diagrams, which are
atrocious as ebooks with few exceptions (one that comes to mind is Knuth's
TAOCP -- it is decent as an ebook, but that took a lot of effort from a team
at Stanford).

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dragonwriter
Actually, technical ebooks are the ones I find most valuable (I tend to prefer
a 12" tablet as a reading device for them, though there are some that have
decent PDF versions.)

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reustle
What is your preferred 12" tablet?

