Death of Printed Books May Have Been Exaggerated 465
New submitter razor88x writes "Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book's dominant form. 'We may be discovering,' he writes, 'that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.'"
Re:An e-book is not a book. (Score:4, Funny)
The freedom to wander where I may want without caring about energy sockets or battery chargers.
Or the confort to be able to find some classic comic of my childhood on a used books store, buy it and be confident that no motherfscker of a copyright holder will be able to "delete" the thing from my hands.
All of what you said...
but more on the Freedom thing... Winston Smith loves ebooks not just for the copyright issue but for the ability to rewrite history. That makes them doubleplusungood in my book.
Re:DRM-free largely stops at 1922 (Score:4, Funny)
it's a USB Mass Storage device you can drag-and-drop DRM-free ebooks (in .mobi and a few other formats) perfectly fine.
But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free? I can see pre-1923 works, Baen Books, works of Cory Doctorow and a few other authors who have embraced Creative Commons, and what else?
Lawful doesn't matter much to me. I care more about ethical. I enjoy ebooks and convenience but I like to support authors and local bookstores, so I read most of my books via Kindle after downloading them for free, but I only download them after I buy a physical copy of the book in a store.
Posting AC for obvious reasons...
Re:DRM-free largely stops at 1922 (Score:4, Funny)
Posting AC for obvious reasons...
No, no you're not. :)
[John]
Re:DRM-free largely stops at 1922 (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a big fan of rickets myself, though some of my friends are keen on weaver's lung and sending children up chimneys.
But one thing we all agree on - shooting darkies and stealing their country is teh awesomeness.