Amazon announced yesterday that for the past three months, E-books outsold Hardcover books.
It’s all down hill from here. Sooner than you think, dead tree books will be a niche market for collectors and art books. Electronic book readers are already free for all general purpose computing platforms and dedicated readers are nosediving in price.
I bet by next year we’ll start seeing subsidized readers available for free from the major book retailers.
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Boo. If I’m reading I want an actual book in my hand, even if it costs me more.
I just can’t get into the whole e-book thing.
Ebook readers are great for pleasure reading, the Kindle DX is amazingly comfortable and easy to read. The free conversion programs are make the portable platforms even better by taking almost any format and transferring it to a searchable native format. The downside to e-readers are technical and educational reading. Flipping back and forth between multiple pages/ sections is a pain, some times near impossible. Yes you can annotate w/o ‘destroying’ the book, but easily returning to that data is hard. The inability of any of the portable e-readers to put books in folders also adds to the issue. If you have 100 books in your e-library, you have to hunt through all of them. They can be listed by author, title, date, etc, but you have to page through all of them if you want to flip through two disparate books. Great for pleasure, not for education.
Dat’s crap, man. I hate technology sometimes. Irrational, I know, but here we are…
What aboverall numbers? Key statement from story, “But publishers said it is still too early to gauge for the entire industry whether the growth of e-books is cannibalizing sales of paperback books, a huge and crucial market.”
I doubt that e-books are cutting into dead tree books that much as of yet.
Dammit.