
Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/books/paper-printers-holiday-sales-books-publishers.html
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Eridrus
The pro-ebook comments here are surprising.

I love ebooks, but they have some real drawbacks: you can't lend them, you
can't switch platforms easily, their layouts are usually pretty limited, and
they often screw up diagrams, etc.

I wish we could solve the problems associated with ebooks, rather than having
weird tribal wars about them.

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Youden
I don't know about anyone else but I always remove DRM from my eBooks, which
is trivially easy and solves two of your problems.

Not sure if it's permitted to link to it here but it's pretty easy to find the
tool that does this.

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zozbot123
This is missing the point. Can I expect to _always_ be able to remove DRM from
any ebooks I might want to buy in the future, no matter what the platform
vendor does? Obviously not - that's _not_ a "trivially easy" operation in any
real sense. "Just remove the DRM" is _always_ a band-aid and a last-resort,
not a real solution.

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mchannon
As we have seen Apple (and to a lesser extent its direct competitors) bury its
old-fashioned record label competitors, I think the print media industry is
due for a similar (if smaller) revolution.

There's probably nobody more frustrated by these sudden book shortages than
the books' authors themselves. Being out of stock during the sweet spot of
this year too often means the book sale will never be made.

I'm working on a microbindery, which involves ultracheap one-off book runs in
tiny distributed shops around the country, the operative idea being that
instead of waiting six weeks for the next containerload of today's
bestseller/tomorrow's pulp, whatever's out of stock can simply be knocked out
in three hours and either picked up or mailed a short distance.

Making a book (a real book) takes more than your $39 Deskjet, but it's not
hard, or all that capital- or even labor-intensive.

A single command line argument could convert a PDF to a perfect-bound novel or
textbook, indistinguishable from the factories that produce books by the
containerload but in massive MOQ's and haphazard sales and proof processes.

Even if it costs $15 instead of $12 to print bestseller copy number n+1,
that's still plenty of money left on the table if you're at the mercy of a
massive 20th-century pulp mill in a different time zone, who can't be bothered
with your last minute business.

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marvindanig
PDF is a file. Books are anything but. That’s a lazy alternative that did not
succeed in 30 years. Why would that happen now?

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mchannon
PDF came out 25 years ago.

Replace "PDF"/"Books" with "PNG"/"Photographs", or "MP3"/"Recordings", and
you'll see how well that argument went over. One should make the argument via
YouTube to double the irony.

A group of hipster book snobs jealously guarding their century-old first
editions are welcome to their hobby, but the mass media will blow right past
them as soon as the economics are favorable. What's remarkable is how much
more sophisticated 35mm film and vinyl are versus the old staid book.

Why now? Consumers are getting fussier (I want what's hot now, not in 8
weeks), and production equipment is getting way cheaper. Laser printing costs
(even quasi-consumer-level) have plummeted to the point where equipment
manufacturers have to resort to gimmickry to keep their margins positive.
While all the paper textbooks you've read to date probably originated roll-to-
roll, I see laser (and the flexibility it offers) finally breaking into that
market.

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marvindanig
Youtube did the job right for sure, I agree with you there but not with a
similar jest for PDF/books equivalence. Youtube killed cassettes, CDs and all
other offline forms of video: on plastic and also over a format file saved on
a disk. PDF is like those .wmp Windows Media Player video files that no one
has the time or interest to download and then read on.

Sure it works among techies because a good alternative has not existed but the
real market of book doesn't consume PDFs or ePubs. They don't understand
those, and don't appear to care because it is bad un-relatable experience to
begin with.

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dmazin
The most interesting tidbit from this article: paper sales are up, ebooks are
down.

“Publishers’ revenues from hardcover sales rose 3.5 percent in the first 10
months of this year, while revenue from digital books fell 3 percent in the
same period, according to the Association of American Publishers.”

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stinkytaco
Ebooks leveled off at around 30-35% of sales a few years ago and are in slight
decline. I work in libraries with ebooks and though our trend is still upward,
that's more about unmet demand and the curve has leveled in the past two
years. I think the market for ebooks will slowly grow as the technology
improves, but it's a long way from overtaking the physical book.

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marvindanig
dead-tree books? good. i hope those printers die permanently. those dead-tree
books are a lose-lose deal either way for America. we’re stuck on expensive
old tech at the cost of trees, arable land and residential space when there is
no longer the need to do so.

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marvindanig
printer of dead-tree books died? that's good news! i sincerely hope we get rid
of rotten pulp industry completely. it leads to expensive books unnecessarily,
bad legislation and terrible copyright laws and keeps modern America on its
knees with its outdated technology.

imo, web should be able to handle distribution and consumption both.

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mackatsol
Our brains are wired to treat processing information from a physical
unchanging object very differently than from a slab of glass with ephemeral
content on it. Words on a printed page do stick in your head better than
content flowing past on a screen. I am so looking forward to the day we have
some form of electronic book though! A series of e-paper pages that will make
my brain feel like it's holding a 'real' book will be that day I switch. p.s.
I want an electronic paper map I can fold up and stuff in a pocket, that
requires little energy and still allows me to do all the pinch/zoom and tap
tricks I can do on a tablet.

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lambda
> Our brains are wired

Any time this phrase appears in an argument it's a good indication that I can
ignore the argument.

Our brains are not "wired." They are pretty malleable and adaptable, and while
a lot of that happens during childhood, they do remain fairly malleable
throughout life.

While there are neural structures that are specialized for certain tasks
genetically, it is incredibly unlikely that the form of the book has had any
significant evolutionary effect that would lead to some genetic predisposition
for a book compared to some other form of conveying written information. Books
have only existed for a couple thousand years, but originally were quite
expensive to produce and only available to the wealthy; mass market production
of books has only happened for a couple hundred years.

There are probably reasons why many people prefer physical books to e-books,
but to make a claim that it's based on some kind of "wired" preference in our
brains rather than practical factors like battery life, compatibility issues,
screen refresh rates, or any of a number of other simple, practical
explanations is a bit extreme, and would need to be backed up with some kind
of evidence.

I personally don't consume much in e-book form, but the reasons are because of
DRM, ecosystem lock-in, poor formatting in e-books, and the like. I actually
consume a lot more content electronically than I do in dead-tree form, but it
happens to be web pages and DRM-free PDFs.

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tzs
> While there are neural structures that are specialized for certain tasks
> genetically, it is incredibly unlikely that the form of the book has had any
> significant evolutionary effect that would lead to some genetic
> predisposition for a book compared to some other form of conveying written
> information

It's the other way around. The book isn't better because we evolved for the
book. The book is better because it evolved for us.

The key difference between books and e-books is that books are 3D objects
giving us a sense of location for the information contained therein that
varies in a consistent, logical manner as we progress through the information.
This allows us to use our spatial memory, which yes, we are hard-wired to
have, to help remember the information in the book. We evolved for this kind
of memorization and are good at it.

Here's an interesting article on this:
[https://www.fastcompany.com/3009366/you-wont-remember-
this-a...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3009366/you-wont-remember-this-article-
or-anything-else-you-read-online-unless-you-pr)

Some papers:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088303551...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512001127)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002253717...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002253717180066X)

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144929830891447...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01449298308914479)

~~~
lambda
> It's the other way around. The book isn't better because we evolved for the
> book. The book is better because it evolved for us.

But computer interfaces are evolving for us as well.

I'm not arguing that they are currently better; just that there isn't much
about the form of the book that we are "hard wired" to prefer, but rather some
inadequacies in both human interface as well as some other practical issues of
e-book distribution.

The first paper you link is the only one that I would say really supports your
point, but it only compares one way of reading on a screen (a PDF) against
paper for a short document, and it doesn't probe very deeply into why reading
comprehension was worse on the screen than paper. Is it the spatial location,
is it the fact that you can spread out pages and see more at once on paper, is
it the reduced eye strain from reflective vs. backlit presentation?

These are all things that could be relatively easily compared; provide paper
with a scrolling interface rather than letting you turn the pages by hand,
provide a paginated interface for the screen, use an e-ink display rather than
LCD for the e-book case.

The second is about spatial memory of information on paper, but doesn't
compare with a computer screen, and you can have a memorable spatial
arrangement on a computer as well.

The third one compares paper to screen for proofreadig, but is from the 1983
and using white on black text on an Apple II. I think the differences in
screen technology and UI design, along with the subjects having to learn a
special purpose UI for copyediting on the screen, make that not all that
relevant simply for the comparison of reading a book.

So anyhow, while there is some research on a screen being not as good as
paper, it doesn't look like it goes into very much depth as to the reason for
the difference, and whether it's based on spatial memory, deficiencies in UI
on the computer, eye strain due to backlighting, or some combination.

