The Association of American Publishers says that ebooks out sold paperbacks in February.
E-book sales totaled $90.3 million in February, up 202% compared to the same month a year earlier, according to a study from the Association of American Publishers. That put e-books at No. 1 “among all categories of trade publishing” that month — the first time e-books have beaten out traditional publishing formats.
It’s not just at Amazon, it’s everywhere.
Dead tree books are dead. (For better or worse.)
I prefer ebooks for fiction and non-fiction. I think art books, coffee table books, etc. will still be printed for a long time but dead tree books will disappear from the shelves faster than you think.
Just waiting on the Kindle price drop in a couple of weeks, then I’ll slowly crawl onto the Bandwagon. Had to live through the end of Vacuum Tubes, 8 Tracks, Vinyl, Cassettes, CDs and DVDs, I suppose I can live through this.
For decades and more, I’ve bought 4-5 hard-back books each month and a few paperbacks to boot. Last August I bought an AluraTek Libre. (Hey! It was cheap!) I haven’t bought a dead-tree book since. I’ve upgraded the AluraTek to an Android tablet. At last count I have over 1,100 books on it.
The worst part of ebooks is DRM. DRM means you don’t own the book, you’re only renting it. You can’t move it, at least not for long, and up the supplier, say like Borders, goes toes up, you’re SOL.
I remove the DRM immediately that is on a book. Baen is the only major publisher I know that does not DRM their ebooks. I think soon, more publishers will join that movement. It won’t be any too soon.
Wow, only 90 million? Doesn’t anyone read? This explains why I’m only one of two people in a town of 8,000 that reads e-books.
I’m looking forward to the day that art books look better on a screen than printed. We’re already at the point where a CRT monitor has better color. (Though LCDs were a step backward in image quality.) It’d be nice to display 16-bits per pixel, since my digital cameras and film scanner are all capable of producing this precision. You can’t get that kind of tone in a mass-produced book unless you go old-school analog.