[Winstonm]

I only buy paper.

[Mbodell]

dustinst22, on 2014-February-05, 16:56, said:

Essentially you can't read the book while it's being lent out. I think the maximum amazon allows is 14 days. Can only lend it one time, cant lend out magazines or newspapers.

Yeah, it is annoying that you can only lend it at most 1 time. Although I think the publisher also controls this, because there are some books that can't be lent at all.

[Aberlour10]

Antrax, on 2014-February-03, 22:54, said:

My e-books are a lot more secure than my physical books. If the SD card they're on breaks, I can always restore from the backup on my PC. If my house burns down with all my electronic equipment, I can restore purchases from the cloud.

Agree.

,But in general....Gutenbergs bible is more than 500y old, I am pretty sure, we will be able to read it in 1000 years on the original paper so good as nowdays. I doubt, it will be the case with all these current books published only as virtual editions.

[PassedOut]

I generally prefer paper for reading, but that is counterbalanced by other factors. We've accumulated a great number of books over the years and have been working to reduce the quantity of stuff we have. These days we only buy paper books that we really want to keep.

[onoway]

I was thinking about the comment someone had earlier about never understanding that the format should make any difference, as it was the content that mattered. Perhaps an analogy for me would be having a wonderful meal in nice surroundings with good friends or the exact same meal in a busy truck stop. Even if the food was precisely the same, the experience would be quite different.

Another thought is that there is a whole lot of trash paraded on the internet under the guise of accurate information and some of that is oozing into e-books.. for at least two years now people have been selling information on how to get your books on kindle by having someone else write them...one suggestion is to hire stay at home moms. So you can put out a book a week if you get organized, about anything at all, and you can use different names to do it under. A big selling point is that you don't have to know anything about what the book is about because you've hired people for pennies to research and write it.

Then you can buy membership in groups who will support each others' books ...e-books are frequently free for a brief period of time so everyon in that group gets it for nothing and so bounces it up the popularity ladder on Amazon. It's precisely the same idea as hiring a firm to post a whole bunch of "likes" on your website so as to get/keep it at the head of the pack.

Since e-books are basically almost free to publish the success of a book may be more the result of marketting than any intrinsic value. That's not to say that paper book publishers don't make mistakes and publish garbage and/or miss good stuff, but they were at least a filter of sorts. Presumably someone had to think that it would be worth the expense of publishing.

One man has made an extremely lucrative career out of teaching people not only how to market their books, but that they all have almost a duty to sell their life experiences as ebooks as a sort of social responsibility.

I can forsee a time when it will be difficult to get through the clutter to find the gold when ebooks have pretty much shut down the publishing houses, just as it's getting more difficult to get through the commercial and egotistical clutter on the internet in general. Now there's virtually no barrier to anyone publishing almost anything and that is definitely a mixed blessing.

[Antrax]

By the same logic, the death of paper news means we will no longer be able to know what's happening in the world because anyone can make stuff up on the internet.

[helene_t]

onoway, on 2014-February-06, 22:42, said:

I can forsee a time when it will be difficult to get through the clutter to find the gold when ebooks have pretty much shut down the publishing houses, just as it's getting more difficult to get through the commercial and egotistical clutter on the internet in general. Now there's virtually no barrier to anyone publishing almost anything and that is definitely a mixed blessing.

I think it will regulate itself. If junk books with nice covers become a significant part of the range you can buy on Amazon, people will stop buying books that haven't been reviewed by reputable reviewers, or by their friends. Amazon has an incentive to keep the marketplace free from junk. You will have to earn a reputation by for example writing wikipedia articles, free ebooks, or BBF posts, before anyone will buy your books. Of course there are millions of people out there that are gullible enough to buy a book written by mister nobody just on the basis of the cover. But you probably won't notice that book because it won't easily show up in searches.

I sometimes miss the old days when the only way to publish something was to convince a publisher that your book would be popular enough to recover the enormous costs of a first print. But not really. The internet era is a more pluralistic, democratic society. Every dyslexic can publish a novel, every ignorant can publish a college textbook, every sociopath can publish a revolutionary new psychotherapy. The upside is that everybody is free to ignore it. And there are companies out there that make a living from making it easier for you to ignore books that are likely to disappoint you.

By the way, I have sometimes bought paper books that I found really really bad. If they had been e-books I could probably have avoided them by reading the free sample pages first.

[barmar]

onoway, on 2014-February-06, 22:42, said:

Another thought is that there is a whole lot of trash paraded on the internet under the guise of accurate information and some of that is oozing into e-books.. for at least two years now people have been selling information on how to get your books on kindle by having someone else write them...one suggestion is to hire stay at home moms. So you can put out a book a week if you get organized, about anything at all, and you can use different names to do it under. A big selling point is that you don't have to know anything about what the book is about because you've hired people for pennies to research and write it.

I didn't think we were talking about books that were published only electronically because they couldn't find a "real" publisher. I thought it was about when you have a choice of purchasing a book on paper or electronically, which would you buy?

I don't really like the analogy with the fine meal versus truck stop. If you go out to eat with friends, the social experience is the primary goal, not just getting nourishment into your stomach, so the ambiance matters. But I get the idea that some people consider reading to be more than just getting the words into their eyes. I can't relate to it, but to each his own.

[onoway]

Antrax, on 2014-February-06, 23:28, said:

By the same logic, the death of paper news means we will no longer be able to know what's happening in the world because anyone can make stuff up on the internet.

Not the same thing at all imo as almost all the news we get now from mainstream media is already biased and selectively presented. So the more clutter the better as then by sorting through it becomes possible to figure out what's probably actually going on.

It becomes an unproductive way to spend time if you have to do that for everything, though.

[el mister]

Only paper for me. I basically agree with Franzen when he said that kindles are not for serious readers. Obviously he's trolling with how he made his point, but I think the sentiment is correct. If you're heavily immersed in a novel, be it a ball-breaking piece of high brow lit or a star wars series, then having the book in your hands as a singular, discrete entity affects how you interpret it.

[y66]

In last 6 months: 12 Kindle, 8 paper. Of the paper books, 2 are not available on kindle, 1 contains artwork, 1 is a cookbook and the 4 others I bought thinking other people I know might want to read them too.

Hard to beat a Kindle for readability (sharp text, high contrast), portability and minimizing stuff hassles.

I still prefer to borrow paper books from the library. Not sure what's going on there.

[blackshoe]

I just finished (in hardback) John Ringo's To Sail a Darkling Sea. As do many authors, he's put various quotations at the beginnings of his chapters, including this one: "They got the Library of Alexandria. They're not getting mine." This was, apparently, written on a bumper sticker, flanked by silhouettes of a rifle and a pistol.

[barmar]

That's not fair. I want to look down on him because he's a gun nut, but applaud him because he's for literacy. Did he have any other bumper stickers to break the tie? Does he brake for tribbles?

[Antrax]

onoway, on 2014-February-07, 14:16, said:

Not the same thing at all imo

I read your argument as "lowering the bar on writing a book will flood the market with books, making it very difficult to find the good ones". How is Internet journalism different? It is because you never like newspapers to begin with? Then replace whatever you want with the internet, because the entry bar on pretty much everything has been lowered. The result was higher quality to go with the flood of trash. Rating sites flourish and everything works out in the end.

[blackshoe]

barmar, on 2014-February-08, 22:49, said:

That's not fair. I want to look down on him because he's a gun nut, but applaud him because he's for literacy. Did he have any other bumper stickers to break the tie? Does he brake for tribbles?

Heh. I didn't say the bumper sticker was on Ringo's car. Or maybe by "him" you mean whoever was driving the car. As for other bumper stickers, I can't say, because Ringo didn't, and I haven't seen the car. Or truck, as the case may be.

"Gun nut": one of those crazy fools who think the United States Constitution actually means what it says.