>>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?"
I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local branch even has a Makerspace with 3D printers, laser cutters, sewing machines, and other misc tools.
They are. Every single public resource is seen as a potential market opportunity being squandered away, or as competition other players do not want to see in play.
Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money.
If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want.
Sadly many people seem to think they are really showing the folks up there by retreating from any form of self-education once they are out of school. The opposite couldn't be more true.
The criticisms were telling though, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and many others claimed he had a rich mans agenda, seeking fame rather than improvement, paying for buildings and not books, maintaining segregation rather than open access, paying for bricks was "cheaper" than paying taxes, etc.
Not undercutting the role of libraries, just pointing out that philanthropy from the wealthy can be a mixed bag of indirect control and agenda pushing at times, wrapped up in tidy looking tax avoidance multi layered "charity" arrangements.
It's always fair to criticize, but it's also very plausible that Carnegie paid for buildings instead of books so that his charity would improve things for the longer term.
Also, as long as the outcomes are good, I personally don't care one iota whether a person is doing them for the wrong reasons.
Then he isn't rich, powerful and an unethical asshole.
People can be rich and try to do the right thing even if there seems to be no direct economic incentive to do so — and I applaud them if they do realize that money alone doesn't create a meaningful life. Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.
> Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.
I agree that tax rates should be higher, but I have absolutely no faith that politicians will do a better job stewarding money toward good causes than a billionaire who cares about them (and/or wants to brag about their philanthropy for clout)
Reducing waste is a great option! I'm not of the opinion that raising taxes is some objectively correct solution or anything, my personal viewpoint is just that taxing more across the board to invest in infrastructure and long-term economic strengths is the way to go.
>If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want.
This smells like a half-baked conspiracy theory. It's not like the overwhelming majority of people want to get smarter in their free time. I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the world, but in American and all (individual) European cultures, most people don't pursue self-education. I would not be surprised if this applies to most other cultures as well
You might say that's how a lot of people on this website got their knowledge, but this website is statistically insignificant compared to the world population. Plus, it's not like every single member here pursues self-education. I'm willing to wager most people come on here just to be entertained
I didn't say rich, powerful and unethical people actively need to work against public libraries. They just don't need to support them, which is enough, given the fact that they often land in or near places of political power.
Just don't increase the funding while inflation increases and you're basically cutting funding. And then when things eventually start to look like shit tear them down. And these are not even things a rich, powerful and unethical person needs to do willingly or on purpose. It is just a thing that happens, because it isn't high on the priority list. And it isn't high on the priority list because it doesn't make them direct money.
Now if you're a politician that profits from your constituents being not too critical why should you actively support a thing that has the potential to make them more critical? Not that you actively have to be against it, it just isn't that high on your list of priorities..
This is how incentives work. And while there are people who will support measures which won't directly profit them short term, it seems to me they are an endangered species, at least in the US.
Public libraries are largely funded/supported locally. In my town, that mostly means out of a vote at town meeting, volunteer organizations, and an annual book sale. There is occasionally local political drama but it's mostly around people who earn some nominal salary that wouldn't persuade a lot of people on this site to get out of bed in the morning.
> I'm willing to wager most people come on here just to be entertained
To add to the conspiracy, endless entertainment is another way that the rich and powerful want to keep the population complacent. Add some unsubtle propaganda about how great and diverse the US is, too.
That said, the propaganda isn't as straightforward as it used to be, and foreign propaganda is sprinkled in as well with e.g. China funding and adding their section to big blockbuster films.
>It's not surprising that this push comes amid the understanding that the less educated one is, the more likely they are to vote R [2].
I saw the article, and it does indeed show this, however, I'm not sold that education is the only criterion when it comes to how someone votes... or does anything else, for that matter
It's far too simple of a cause-and-effect type of deal for this to be the only factor, or even, for this to be a factor at all, perhaps. The world is a bit more complex than chucking everything up to how someone does something based solely on their administered level of institutional education
I've been just a tiny bit more skeptical of all of these cause-and-effect type stories ever since I read Nassim Taleb
> however, I'm not sold that education is the only criterion when it comes to how someone votes... or does anything else, for that matter
It isn't, however if your education or world view is superficial, you're more susceptible to right-wing talking points, like a broad spectrum "fear of ones that are different to you". But when you're more educated, more worldly, less blinkered you won't be as afraid of the other and less susceptible to a politician that They are after your jobs and benefits, and more aware that the politicians and rich people are trying to keep you down for their own gains.
Sure, and superficially what you're saying does make sense... except that it's using deductive reasoning. There are plenty of cases where people with academic credentials vote for the same people you say dumb people do. Dumb people, of course, are people who have no academic credentials, because they're only for very smart people
I recommend giving Who Voted for Hitler? by Richard F. Hamilton a read. The world is infinitely much more complex than our story-making minds would have us believe
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. You speak the truth.
We're experiencing this very same thing now in Alabama. Or one could simply look at Florida. Things aren't getting better here. The current GOP leadership is trying their best to be as regressive as possible.
I feel like I am doing my son an incredible disservice by raising him in Alabama, but my wife refuses to leave while her mother is still living here.
Show him some alternatives. I grew up in a backward place too.
The single most valuable thing I learned is what is really possible to do. I got to see that because I ended up helping people of means who took me aside and showed me a look outside the place I was living.
For many, and this is true of my peer group, just knowing what is possible really mattered.
Of course I left town, found work and married someone I thought highly of and got to work building a better life.
I plan on showing him alternatives so he doesn't have to learn about them they way that I did.
I moved out of my mother's home when I was 16 and I managed to graduate high school. But I left town two days after graduation and I've only been back three times in 24 years.
Had I not left Alabama, and the US, I would have likely ended up just as bigoted and close minded as most of my family. The ten years I spent outside of the US allowed me to learn a completely different perspective and finally made me realize that my mother and my other family were wrong about so many things.
My boy just turned five a few weeks ago and he's already travelled more than I did by the time I turned 21.
Mind sharing where you moved and how that prevented you from going to the road, from as you say: "just as bigoted and close minded as most of my family.", to whatever you became afterward? Do you think had you moved to another place in the US, a similar change would not have occurred, or did it have to be outside the US?
I moved to the Caribbean for 10 years. Then on to SF and later PDX. I also spent about 6 months in both NYC and Chicago in between SF and PDX. Living in the Caribbean introduced me to so many different cultures.
I ran a bar before I became a carpenter. My neighbors around my bar included people from India, Senegal, all over Europe, and Japan. I become close friends with a much older couple from Senegal and also an Indian family. They welcomed me into their homes and fed me and taught me about their music and food and such.
I likely would not have had those experiences if I remained on the mainland.
"Education", as you have used it, is a measure of collegiate accomplishment, not of merited learned-ness.
It correlates more with socio-economic class.
The same argument can easily be made about Democrats and their inability to repair trivial household items, or empathize with those outside of their privileged groups.
You just pick a characteristic and then label it "good" measure of [x]. Ironically the same thought process is too blame for "telling too many people to goto college"
The lack of self-agency, accountability, and ability to empathize on the left is astounding.
While there are a few fringe pockets where GOP influence isn't helping anyone, by and large, the "conspiracy theorists" and MAGA folks are attacking major news outlets, scientific journals, etc. strictly because they have been corrupted and influenced by highly partisan partnerships from the left, to bend narratives or outright lie about controversial issues and current events in their favor.
When citizen journalists on X (and other places) are putting corporate media to shame because they're willing to faithfully report what the corporates aren't, that's a clear sign there's something amiss. Breaking free of this one-sided media conglomerate is essential for critical thinking, because journalists have no place in thinking for people, which is unfortunately true on all sides, in practice.
Worse, corporate media sources use their powerful positions not just as a beacon of authority, but as a way to enforce false narratives through their close partnerships with their preferred political partners, who are working to manipulate those narratives in their favor for political gain, like winning elections at nearly any cost. Additionally, shaming and declaring citizen & independent journalists as "misinformants" for questioning mainstream narratives that have been identified as patently false/twisted, either by lying or by omission, evidenced by whistleblowers calling out these issues in interviews with independent sources, knowing their stories won't be edited for political purposes.
Similarly on X, now that it isn't captured by a political side that openly believes censorship is acceptable to elevate their own preferred narratives, information can flow freely and users on X can think for themselves (scary, I know... imagine if YOU could think freely and post your own convictions! How will humanity survive?). Since the previous "community guidelines" enforcers at Twitter have been fired, faithful counter-reporting is no longer being policed (the "now" true Hunter Biden report comes to mind conveniently after the 2020 election was over). Now Conservatives can have an equal and prominent voice there, given that Twitter/X has always been a premier source of real-time news and reporting.
If something cannot be questioned, speculating on the motives around it is essential. The 20th century saw too many tyrants dictating the flow of information for us to conveniently forget its devastating impacts on their respective societies. Not a single politician, media outlet, scientist, or "expert" is above being questioned, for any reason whatsoever. It is the only path to healthy, inclusive dialogue.
Ah yes, just last week me and my fellow billionaires at our secret biannual conference in Geneva were discussing how we can prevent people from reading books at the library. See, people reading is a threat to our power, one which we take very seriously. It is not going to be easy, especially seeing how many of us have donated millions of dollars to libraries and a few even have wings of libraries named after us, but the threat is too severe now, drastic measures must be taken.
Now seeing how people are on to our plot, the urgency is clear. I am proposing that over the next few decades we work secretly behind the scenes to gradually reduce funding for various local libraries which have seen visitors decline since the rise of the Internet.
> Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money.
If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want.
This is conspiracy level thinking. Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
The assault on public institutions like libraries comes from 2 places:
1) Stop wasting my tax dollars on stuff I don't use or care about.
Or
2) I bet there is an untapped commercial market that can be built, and people will love my solution more than public libraries.
> > [Rich & powerful assholes often maintain their status by unethical means.]
> This is conspiracy level thinking.
The prevalence of assholes is a documented thing (latest numbers I've heard was over 6% of clinical narcissists, reportedly a very conservative lower bound), and who would ever be surprised that high-status people like being high-status?
I don't know about libraries specifically, but the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious.
I am of course not denying the existence of nice rich people. Though I'm afraid they tend to be selected out of ludicrous wealth. In fact, I fully expect to find many more assholes among super-rich people than I would among the general population. (But I'm not sure either: the strife we find among some of the poorest people also tend to generate assholes…)
I think "that" = "the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious."
>Though I'm afraid they tend to be selected out of ludicrous wealth.
The irony is that one of the most ludicrously wealthy people in history was also probably the single largest contributor to public libraries. Whether or not he was simply an outlier, I think that’s an important thing to point out.
Further, some data suggests that as much as 5% of the general population are narcissists. So collectively, your point seems to be that rich people are pretty much like the rest of us, just with more money.
I said "tend to". A tendency does not make an absolute and complete genocide. I also said "I'm afraid", which is supposed to convey some level of uncertainty. Carnegie's donation doesn't invalidate my point, even if he wasn't an outlier.
> The irony is that one of the most ludicrously wealthy people in history was also probably the single largest contributor to public libraries.
Where you see irony, I see expected statistics: the largest contributor to pretty much anything has to be ludicrously rich. Because the only way to give that much, is to own even more.
And I will add that one incentive for rich people to donate is their public image. And in many cases their "donations" are largely neutered by tax cuts or by increasing the return on some of their other investments (basically their donations causing other of their investments to increase their returns). Donations by rich people aren't always genuinely generous.
What evidence would it take to change your mind? Because it seems like you'll rationalize any outcome to fit your mental model.
If the wealthy don't fund something, it's because they're narcissists. If they do, it's because of statistics. At the same time, you ignore the statistics about narcissism.
> If the wealthy don't fund something, it's because they're narcissists. If they do, it's because of statistics.
I said no such strawman, and it's not my main point anyway.
My main point is: the idea that rich & powerful people will generally do what it takes to stay rich & powerful is not conspiracy thinking, it's common sense. The idea that a sizeable proportion of them will resort to unethical (even lethal) means to do so is not conspiracy thinking, it's common sense.
That's it, and I don't think Mr Carnegie here provides any significant evidence to the contrary. I mean, the same guy reportedly had strikers shot and killed, didn't he? It's hard to believe such a guy donated large amounts of money out of the goodness of his heart.
You did say they want to remain high status, likely due to their over indexing in narcissism. Even if that’s not your main point, the logical leap that we seem to disagree on is that promoting illiteracy is the means to that end. Carnegie does provide evidence against that, as does all the libraries and educational buildings that are named for wealthy donors.
There’s a philosophical argument that all altruism is actually selfish in nature, so I don’t think your premise holds that the wealthy are unique in this regard. What you seem to be saying is that they are complicated just the same as everyone else, just with more resources. If your only point is that wealthy people are status-minded, I don't disagree. I disagree that they are uniquely status-minded. As William Storr's work attests, we are all status-driven apes, whether wealthy or not.
You also didn’t answer the question about what it would take to change your mind, which is usually indicative of a dogmatic, rather than reasoned, position.
>The prevalence of assholes is a documented thing...latest numbers I've heard was over 6% of clinical narcissists...who would ever be surprised that high-status people like being high-status?...the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold...it's just obvious."
Feel free to clarify, but to me, this reads as, "Rich people, being narcissists, will try to maintain their high status by keeping the education level of the general populace low."
It also reads as a narrative talking point without good evidence to support it. I.e., "I can't prove it, I just know it's true."
Wrong reading. I never intended to make a generalisation out of 6% or even triple that amount. I just wanted to establish that rich assholes are a thing.
You seem to imply they are a higher rate of rich
assholes, no? The most cited research on this (Piff et al.) is highly flawed IMO and hasn’t been able to be replicated.
Or is your point that people are assholes in general? If the latter, I’m failing to see how that gets connected to rich people actively suppressing education, especially when, as you say, they are the most likely to donate money to those causes.
> You seem to imply they are a higher rate of rich assholes, no?
It seems likely. But that's a detail, because I believe the more important effect is the contempt higher-class people can have towards lower-class people. Some of it may even come from cognitive dissonance. See, barring a few exceptions, one does not get rich just by working. One also has to exploit other people, to spoil them of a fraction of their added value. The richer you are the truer this gets, and then you have to find some way to look at yourself in the mirror despite that.
> actively suppressing education
I don't recall saying that. My exact words were: "I don't know about libraries specifically, but the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious."
> especially when, as you say, they are the most likely to donate money to those causes.
I didn't say that either. My exact words were: "the largest contributor to pretty much anything has to be ludicrously rich. Because the only way to give that much, is to own even more."
You certainly did say those things. They are quoted from your posts, but abbreviated to be less verbose and wandering. I used ellipses to show where words were cut, and I think you understand this so you seem to just be difficult/obtuse out of a desire to argue.
To be generous, you said they are the "largest contributors" which I agree is different than being "most likely." But the research does show they are more likely, possibly because they are in a position to do so. I think that's what connects to your point.
Just as a counterpoint to your late-stage capitalism-esque viewpoint, wealthy are also shown to over index in conscientiousness in some studies. This is a personality trait that relates to persistence which is an alternate explanation for goal-attainment (ie wealth).
> Just as a counterpoint to your late-stage capitalism-esque viewpoint, wealthy are also shown to over index in conscientiousness in some studies.
I fail to see how this is a counter point. Sure, conscientiousness, and I would add work ethics certainly explain some inequality. But even if they explained most of it (exploiting people does require work, and I'd expect the more conscientious capitalists are better at it), they would still come far, far short of morally justifying the level of inequality we observe today.
No billionaire ever deserved to be that wealthy.
Now we can discuss incentives, and I can accept that a good system may need to allow some people to accumulate undeserved wealth. Still, I will note that the mere existence of billionaires is a threat to democracy. (Or a blocker: our representative governments aren't very democratic to begin with, and we have studies showing that when billionaires and the people disagree over a piece of legislation the billionaires win most of the time.)
My current opinion on this is that putting a hard cap on individual wealth is a good thing. Furthermore, I think this hard cap should be well under $1B, almost certainly below $100M.
Well, that's probably because you are constantly arguing different points that aren't necessarily germane to the discussion. Remember, this was about your point that wealthy people build their wealth by suppressing education in the general populace. So this is a counter-point in that it is possible to build wealth by conscientious behavior instead. There is some research on the latter, but really only conjecture and false narratives on the former.
Wealth inequality and the state of democracy are digressions from that point. I don't think I made any statements about what level of wealth inequality is healthy for the stability of a society, let alone a moral argument for it, nor did I make any claims about democracy. Again, this just comes across as you having an axe to grind, and you'll shoehorn in talking points without addressing the central claim.
I think you've lost the thread. Here's the comment you were originally responding to in the context of our back-and-forth:
>Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
To which you replied:
>"the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious."
To which I replied:
>"The irony is that one of the largest contributions to the public library system was one of the richest guys ever."
It was all about the conspiracy that the wealthy actively suppress education until you went off the rails on a completely different rant.
> This is conspiracy level thinking. Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
Of course not. They're scheming about how to monetize education, knowledge, and research.
> 1) Stop wasting my tax dollars on stuff I don't use or care about. Or 2) I bet there is an untapped commercial market that can be built, and people will love my solution more than public libraries.
(2) Gets a lot easier if you first advocate for (1) to make the public libraries worse.
> Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
They dont sit around scheming, they work, walk around doing it in action.
Company executives keep adding ingredients to processed food to make them addictive knowing it’ll hurt health outcomes and lead to more death.
Company executives continue to sell medicine that they sell for $20 or $10 in Europe or India, but charge americans $5000 or higher for the same medicine in the same package.
They shut down any research paper that outs them, by suppressing the findings, like Facebook or Junk food companies do whenever a research is conducted on their products.
We should celebrate our pioneers and innovators, but we shouldn’t ignore it blindly when MBA execs and Beancounters actively sabotage and hurt their own customers and the masses. Businesses are awesome, but it shouldnt be used to give a no questions asked green flag to anyone who runs businesses.
There are people actively lobbying for policies that lead to more american deaths, bankruptcies, families breaking into shambles, and the government watching from the sidelines and even sometimes helping to make it all happen.
Yes, there are people who do want to subdue the masses and keep them dumb, just as long as it helps them buy 1 more yacht or few more 0s in their bank balance.
I say it as a free market capitalist who is ardently anti-communist.
> Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
There are corporate divisions doing A/B tests, etc. to find out what works for the lowest common denominator, and how to profit more from someone's ignorance. Many people here are directly involved in making it happen.
OverDrive (and Libby) were acquired by KKR, the behemoth PE firm responsible for bankrupting Toys R Us. KKR also acquired one of the Big Five publishing houses last year. I'm worried about public library funds being squeezed by an extractive PE playbook.
I wonder what kind of negotiating power a regional library has in that situation. Do state library agencies have more leverage than regional libraries? Do large states like California have more leverage in negotiating digital licenses than smaller states? Would a national library system have even more leverage? I'll ask a librarian tomorrow and report back.
OverDrive is a strong player but they’re still a commodity. Publishers and libraries can use other lending platforms if and when they emerge as stronger competitors. This article serves as a good overview: https://openeducationalberta.ca/ciicm/chapter/public-library...
They can afford to educate their own line and hoard resources across generations doing so. They can fail as many times as it takes before they finally succeed because of this. They throw the bodies of the world at their problems until they are solved, which necessitates an uneducated populace that doesn't realize they're chattel and canon fodder to this purpose. A populace that fear collective power, that fears community beyond immediate family, that shies away from actions that would better the world in favor of actions that are less risky personally.
Elites are always worried about the labor crisis - “nobody wants to work”. Usually this is about blue collar work, and their desire to underpay and overwork service/laborers.
Globally, this class of people definitely wants to reduce literacy to keep a stream of manual labor inflowing.
The number of vastly unequal societies throughout history who have banned the lower classes from learning how to read, or from any kind of education at all - beyond whatever narrow training will make them better perform their specific duties for those on top.
...and not just historically. Some societies where significant minority groups are banned from getting an education, in order to further perpetuate their marginalisation, still exist today.
The response to your comment thread here is some pretty high flying conspiracies. The thought that those in power would try and make the country illiterate is straight up ridiculous. That would completely undermine the competitiveness of the country AND the time line to get any benefit for the "elites or whomever is behind it" would be significantly long.
Now if you are talking about a country like India - sure I could see Modi doing that. In that case it would be more about restricting growth and investment into education then dismantling an economy built on knowledge.
I don't think I said anything about making people illiterate.
Undermining literacy means so they are not as literate as they could be to improve their lives.
For example, there are more than a few studies on literacy and education levels of the political spectrum for better and worse.
India is a different world. The crime against humanity that is the caste system all but forbade 1-3% of the population to be permitted to learn how to read. 95-98% of Indians were not permitted to learn how to read, and had to rely on the interpretations of the less populous castes.
Ironically it is a minority that largely broke this logjam and helped push literacy for the many forward.
I'll gladly take the downvotes for speaking the truth about caste being a divider between people and society.
Hence book bans and torching, although it's backfiring because they're being too general to try and avoid coming across as too totalitarian, so things like bibles are being banned too. Whoops.
The advocates of "whole-language" learning as against "phonics" seem to do a fair job of limiting or undermining literacy. Yet how it benefits them I don't see. And what is the reference of "it" in the last sentence? Literacy, or limited or undermined literacy?
In contrast, public libraries around the Philly area are essentially dead. Town libraries are so underfunded that their mortar presences are open only until 7 PM M-Th, close at 5 F & Sa, and are closed Sundays. They have greatly reduced their paper book holdings and now rely almost entirely on ebooks, which number fewer than 2000, and interlibrary loans of any kind do not exist.
In contrast, public libraries in Michigan are thriving (another place I know well). I have no idea why the difference is so stark.
In my over 60 years, I've never lived anywhere so illiterate as Philly.
> public libraries in Michigan are thriving (another place I know well). I have no idea why the difference is so stark.
I can't speak for Philly, but Michiganders have a long long-standing community tradition of fighting to defend our public libraries from an onslaught of various attacks. And while the quality of the library system can vary (based on location and local funding authority), Michiganders generally have majority support for public libraries as an institution, and pass successful votes for them regularly.
(historic Library voting records)
https://www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan/-/media/Project/W... (be careful reading this, not every red/failing vote is bad -- for example, May 2023's red line is a success for that public library, that something bad did not pass)
Are you implying the OP was over-sampling on wealthier Michigan neighborhoods? Because I read their quote as applying to Michigan as a whole, and there are certainly parts of Michigan that are poor enough to have strained local taxes.
Not at all. I literally mean that libraries are funded by communities (i.e. private groups, towns, counties, states), and some communities chose to fund them lavishly and some not to fund them at all.
Where in Michigan? I regularly visit libraries in Ann Arbor, and Whitmore Lake. Both have libraries that are a wonderful resource for the community, but the difference in funding is obvious.
This! I'm from Oregon but live in Thailand, where there are ZERO libraries. My absolute favorite thing about going home is just maxxing out my library card and seeing how much I can get through before heading home (I can do ebooks and audiobooks while abroad with Libby but I'm one of those obnoxious people that always prefers physical)
This is an exaggeration. I also live in Thailand, and I just got a library card at the very stately Neilson Hayes library last week. A bit pricey (3000 THB/year) but amazing ambience since the library was built in 1860.
Yea $100 bucks a year for a small historical library with a very limited selection of English books (that's 45 minutes away from me) doesn't really compare to a free library that's in every city in the US (or many libraries in bigger cities)
it's odd to me that you'd expect a large stock of English books in any regular Thai library
even in Japan, with perhaps the very strongest reading culture in the world, you're going to find a relatively limited selection of books in library outside of their own language
you'll likely have less success finding a varied stock of Thai books in Oregon, to the surprise of nobody
There are hundreds of great ones, but Tale of Genji (classic), The Master of Go (amazing if you like the board game Go), Coin Locker Babies (Ryu Murkami > Haruki Murkami), Out by Natsuo Kirino.
I mean there are actually quite a few public libraries here, but of course the selection is primarily in Thai. I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.
To the above posters credit, it sounds like their claim of exaggeration was spot on (he didn't say it was a lie). You didn't say their libraries don't compare to US ones, you said they don't exist.
I haven't been to Thailand, but I assume there are also libraries at the universities. The parent appears to be referring to a tradition of public libraries, so these are not really counterexamples.
I've used private English libraries in various countries of the Middle East and East Asia. For the expat community, they were really a treasure before the internet.
University libraries are sort of a mixed bag. They're not really advertised but they're fairly open to public browsing in some cases, however pretty locked-down in others.
Libraries can be a useful place for homeless, or low income, people to get access to a computer to write up a resume, apply for jobs, etc.
The people who forget about libraries are likely well off. Shutting down libraries to feed the homeless doesn’t make sense, as libraries are a tool that can allow them to eventually feed themselves, if well used.
You mentioning helping the homeless in this convo has the same kind of vibe to me as conservatives only mentioning mental health when talking about gun control.
They only ever mention mental health as a distraction from issues they do actually care about (like gun control), and have no interest in actually solving mental health issues. It's a typical way of bad faith arguing. That's just vibes though; there's a good chance you'd actually in earnest like to divert library funds toward helping the homeless. It's an issue that's very close to my heart too, so I get the sentiment.
Still, I disagree. Just because one of two problems is worse (e.g. literacy and homelessness, or murder and burglary) doesn't mean we can just ignore one problem in favor of another. Just because murder is worse than burglary doesn't mean we should divert all police attention and money currently being spent on burglary to solving murders. Just because women's rights in the US by far surpass those in Saudi Arabia doesn't mean we should take the efforts we put into women's rights issues in the US and divert them to solving women's right's issues in SA. Just because homelessness is in some sense worse than illiteracy and low education doesn't mean we should divert funds from libraries to solving homelessness.
Having written all this out, it feels far too obvious for you to not know this. Maybe it's not just vibes.
I volunteer at my local food bank to help feed to homeless. I understand just how dire the need is. Libraries are a luxury we cannot afford right now, and frankly nobody uses them. Any 'feel good' purpose like 'literacy' is already met by public schools. There's already federal subsidies for internet and telephone for the needy, and the people that live too far away to get internet definitely don't have the money or means to drive into town to use the library.
I would be willing to compromise on small buildings that function as internet cafes that are free to use for the public, we can get rid of all the excess staff and books, though.
> I volunteer at my local food bank to help feed to homeless. I understand just how dire the need is.
If you spent much deal actually dealing with the homeless themselves, you'd know how crucial a resource a library is for homeless people. For something you see as "dire", you don't seem to have even done anything as simple as google "libraries help homeless."
> Libraries are a luxury we cannot afford right now,
Completely false. Libraries are one of the areas of public spending where the return per dollar spent is highest. Libraries are social institutions we cannot afford not to fund.
> and frankly nobody uses them
Again, you seem to have failed to do basic research as libraries get a ton of use and genetally suffer from a lack of funding relative to their usage rates.
> There's already federal subsidies for internet and telephone for the needy, and the people that live too far away to get internet definitely don't have the money or means to drive into town to use the library.
Most poor people are urban and in dense enough areas to that easily access libraries could be (and often are) available.
> I would be willing to compromise on small buildings that function as internet cafes that are free to use for the public, we can get rid of all the excess staff and books, though.
Oh, how generous of you. Why don't you go meet some librarians and learn about what they actually do before you write off their usefulness.
What do you think you've done to sway my opinion on the matter? There's a finite amount of money, and more pressing needs than letting people checkout paper books.
Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy.
You're choosing to let more people be unfed in order that a handful of people can read Harry Potter or whatever is popular these days. Bad trade off.
Libraries have more than Harry Potter books. They have books that allow people to learn skills that would be valuable in getting a job. There are meeting rooms and events. My local library has a ESL program to help people with their English skills, which can help make them more employable. During the heatwaves last summer they were telling people who couldn’t afford AC to come to the library to escape the heat, which may have saved some lives.
Libraries can help get people to the point where fewer people need the food bank. Maybe you should see what the library actually has to offer before you try to cut it from the budget.
There are so many other areas to find room in the budget without cutting libraries.
> What do you think you've done to sway my opinion on the matter?
I thought correcting your facts would have that effect. If your opinion isn't fact based, I doubt there's anything I can do to change your opinion. All I can do is callout the misinformation you are spreading.
> Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy.
Or... set tax rates sufficient to do both? Neither actually costs that much. Lack of funding for either has to do with politics, not practicality.
You do realize that library budget cuts wouldn't automatically go to housing and feeding the homeless, right? And considering most municipalities seem to treat homeless people as cockroaches, the money would probably go to fund a new sports stadium or as a tax break for some new business.
Terribly ironic of you to want to divert library funds to homeless when the homeless are some of the most faithful users of libraries in major cities. Homeless aid organizations even base their programs around libraries.
Maybe this isn't as common in your region, but just about every library I've visited provides social services for the homeless.
If you search /r/libraries you'll find first-hand accounts from librarians who are committed to serving homeless patrons, even though they didn't sign up for a social worker role. Honestly, I wish I could allocate MORE funds to those kind of people instead of the grifters who profit from the "homeless industrial complex."
It's not disruption to make me wait 5 weeks to read a digital file through my local library's Libby service. It's an outdated business model using artificial scarcity that isn't effective at getting books onto readers devices. Spotify doesn't make me take out a hold on the artist I want to listen to. Netflix doesn't make me queue to watch the latest release.
Netflix has licensing restrictions too, but the limitation is time/exclusivity (rather than number of copies). You can only watch whatever Netflix owns distribution rights to. Although Netflix does charge more per device, so that's a bit like charging per "copy" of their service on top of the limited distribution.
I'm wondering if you'd really prefer a library system where you could get some titles instantly, but the majority of content is unavailable because some other digital service provider owns distribution in your region for the next 12-16 months. I'd hate that, personally.
I do pay for my library card, because my city doesn't have a library (unless you count bookmobile), and the nearby cities that do have libraries charge you to get a library card if you aren't a resident. And it is approx. $9.99/mo.
Wow... mine is $25/year. I live in a rural county, but work across the border in a less rural county, with a much bigger library system. For $25/year I get access to probably 10x as much stuff through them. I expect it might go to $30 this year.
The reason Spotify and Netflix don't make you wait is because they give the copyright owners money for views. A library does not, nor do I think they should.
The current business model of selling libraries ebooks that can only be viewed a max number of times before needing to be repurchased, or only for a limited amount of time, is a money grab pure and simple.
Since going full-time on my startup, I often work remotely at my local library. Over my time there, my eyes have been opened to what an absolute treasure public libraries are.
Besides the physical books everyone knows about, which are a treasure by themselves, there are many other valuable resources, as you mentioned, including:
- The Adobe suite, even including Character Animator
- Udemy
- Digital access to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others
- Free notary services
- Print magazines and newspapers
- Puzzles
- Music and films
- eBooks and audiobooks
...not to mention community activities like classes, groups, and concerts.
Just being physically present in the library has benefited me. When I take breaks, I sometimes pick up a book at random. It may be about sales, health, politics, history. I sometimes come away with new ideas for my business, sometimes am just inspired or informed or amused in general.
I encourage anyone reading to stop by a library if you haven't been in a while. See what they offer. You might be surprised. And please, do what you can to support them in whatever way you can, even if that's just to use them, demonstrating the need for them by your patronage. We need these institutions, and they won't be around forever without our support.
I sincerely hope one day they get off their asses and implement casting that their predecessor, overdrive, had.
speaking of, btw, your library likely has 'partner' libraries where you can borrow stuff too using overdrive/libby. You can often see a list on top right of the overdrive page of your respective library.
The licensing costs for Ebooks are unsustainable for library's. The publishers don't want any sharing and so the cost per ebook vs physical is totally out of sync with Ebooks considerably higher. One could argue that publishers are the ones who are strangling the viability of libraries to exist.
This feels like something that could/should be legislated. Libraries should not be subject to the same restrictions on content sharing that consumers are.
Or maybe one better: eliminate restrictions on content sharing.
The only thing that kind of bothers me about libraries is that, as a tech focused individual, basically every book I read or whatever is either an ebook or a audiobook, and I don't want to have to go to the library to pick it out. I understand if I were getting physical books the need to go to a physical location to grab them, but if I'm getting something digital I don't want to have to go to the library. My library doesn't really offer an online catalog that you can just download from, only look at to see what you want to get in the library, and the free library services that they offer like the big ebook repositories don't have any books that I feel like I want to read, so it is just far easier to torrent things or have an audible subscription. Most libraries don't have really cool extra stuff like maker spaces or aquariums or anything remotely interesting other than books and maybe some computers for homeless people to use or whatever, so unless you're physically going there for a book, they're kind of pointless.
I'm not saying I don't appreciate and respect libraries, but they really just didn't change with the times around where I am, and it makes them far more inconvenient to use for someone in my particular position than it does to make them convenient. I will still support them as a public access, and I think it would be tragic if they went away, but I wish they would spend a little bit more of whatever budget they get investing on making it. Not a terrible experience to get shit online.
Yeah... Libraries are very much lovely places. Truly bliss how they can exist...
And about books themselves, I hate subscriptions, and all the DRM garbage, and if I can't own the epub without DRM, then I won't buy it. To be honest, the silver lining is that DeDRM exists, so I can actually obtain Japanese novels for my cute e-ink devices, but.. bleh.
In my city certain people are often using them and leaving... uh... errant trace elements of themselves on said resources, especially the public-use computers... :/
I'm not really a germaphobe, but in the age of the pandemic, I think public resources like libraries are under serious threat, just like busses and public transit. It would be nice if there was some sort of reassurance that cleaning and disinfecting was taking place between each use.
Lots of libraries let you volunteer if you're so inclined. Also, you can lobby for better library funding so that they can be staffed better. While you're at it, you need to find a better euphemism for homeless/unhomed people...
But you realize that you paid for all of this with your local taxes? It’s not like there is a magical place where laser cutters chose to spawn for free.
It might be great, but all the evidence says that we're not willing to nationalize the publishers in order to establish that deal as a durable offer, and that a private-sector publisher would change the terms of the deal the moment they'd gobbled up their competition, or perhaps even before. We would literally require that course of action from the corporate executives via the fiduciary duty.
Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech.
You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.
You print books? Well we have e-books now.
You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it.
You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
What's sad though is that publishers have historically had one power that would have been unassailable – editorial judgement. They could have sustained their brands on quality. Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good". Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors, and here we are.
I can. Book publishers are terrible and they always have been. At least that is the case here in Denmark.
They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices. I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though.
The worst part is how they pay artists. Authors are paid poorly as touched upon in this article. But illustrators are paid criminally low rates. A children book with 50 pages of breathtaking art can earn you as little as $500 for months for work. Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on.
In general the model has never really worked for anyone except a few authors. There are the famous ones who sell a lot of books and then there are the ones who write a billion children’s books who actually don’t get the majority of their money from publishers but from the government compensation programs. But for the most part publishers have always run a business model akin to music streaming services where only a handful of Danish authors can actually make a living just by selling books. Mean while our publishing houses have been able to employ thousands and keep investors happy.
What a lot of artists and authors have done instead is to form smaller independent publishers. Which means you get 0 advertising and 0 product placement and so on, but ironically often will make you far more money than using the big publishers. These smaller indie publishers, and other creative ways of publishing like the article mentions, aren’t doing poorly. The big publishers are suffering. Thanks to the digital age. But I won’t miss them when they are gone.
> books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries
This sounds weird. Wouldn’t the books which are lent more also sell more? Childrens books are a big market for book stores and of course they want to sell the most popular books. Are you referring to some particular book which cannot be purchased?
It may sound weird, but there is not a link between lending from libraries and book sales. Some children’s books sell well, but if you go to the sections of them in book stores you’ll rarely find more than a handful of Danish authors represented. The ones which the bookstores know will sell well.
Our Libraries have to make all Danish published material available. Some of this is indeed not bought, but because children’s books are often on the high end of popularity at libraries they generally by every children’s book which gets published buy one of our major publishers. Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.
Out of curiosity, can you provide some examples of these books which are artificially expensive, popular in libraries, but not for sale commercially?
> Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.
Politicians are supposed to set the overall guidelines but not to decide what individial books libraries purchase. Do you have examples where politicians pressure or force libraries to buy specific books?
So, can I publish a book in Denmark, say it costs 1,000 dollars, and your libraries will be forced to buy it just because they have to make "all Danish published material available."?? There must be some sort of guidelines (though seeing how Swedish law works I wouldn't be surprised you guys just "trust" people to price things correctly).
All publishers are required to supply one copy of any published book to the royal library (for free).
Individual libraries are not required to buy any particular book. They have a fixed budget for buying material and will decid based on quality and expected demand.
> I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though.
There is no universe in which public funds are leeched without political complicity and corruption. Most likely the publishers benefitted are either related to or provided kickbacks to the influential parties.
What do you mean “the deal with the library”? What deal are you referring to? Libraries does not make individual deals with publishers or authors. They buy the books at market price and pay authors some additional royalties determined by objective criteria according to an agreement with the organization for authors and illustrators. It is all public information.
If you want to make an accusation of corruption you need to be more specific.
> Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on.
Who makes decisions for font cover design? Are they in a position to help out their friends with larger typefaces?
> They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices.
This is also true of academic presses. Their market are university research libraries who will pay $400 for a two-volume tome on the spread of printing presses in the New World colonies.
As far as I can tell, the comment you are replying to is just making shit up. The claim about royalties depending on the cover make absolutely no sense, since it is the publisher who commision the cover design.
If you can find people that do months of work for 500 in Denmark of all places then clearly this activity is understood to be a high status signal not a business opportunity.
People are doing it for recognition or some vague notion of arriving as an artist. You can earn that in a week as a waiter
Businesses that remain stagnant don't get shafted so much as outmaneuvered. Instead of investing and pivoting, they cling to the old business model. Short term, their decisions make financial sense, but long term, it's a death sentence.
Meanwhile, Amazon is looked at as the behemoth in the industry, yet it probably isn't thought of as an online book store / publisher by most people. I think of so many things before I get to, "Oh yeah, they also sell books."
The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.
The best survey data I've found for this information is linked here [1]. It breaks data down by age range for those who read at least one book in the prior year. It defines avid readers as having read 50 books/year but doesn't do an age breakdown for this subset.
> The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.
I read a lot of non-fiction books and don't think much has changed over time. For non-fiction you always had groups of people, typically academics and successful business people and politicians, who read tons and tons of books. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, both read many books when they were young in around 1900 to 1930. How many people who worked in factories at the time would have read books? Not many I think. Today it's more or less the same. You have a few people like David Senra or Stephen Kotkin, who read 100-200 books per year, and you have the average person who reads maybe one. Just like book sales, it's a power law.
I suspect I’d read a lot more non-fiction books if I couldn’t access the short form equivalent on my phone readily. But instead I read articles shared on HN or Reddit, with a sprinkling of non fiction books mixed in. Compared to my dad, who devoured non fiction books in the 80s and 90s, my lifetime spend is going to be far lower.
A lot of non-fiction books--especially in the business realm--have always been a long-form (or short-form) article padded out to book length for publishing economics reasons. And, if you look at the programming realm specifically, a lot of reference books are essentially available online.
I don't think a company that publishes books is going to be able to pivot to building an online book selling platform that easily. They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire.
Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not built the same.
>They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire.
Doesn't seem to be true. They pay celebrities (for their boring bs books that no one read) enough to build a dozen online platforms
Well, Amazon started out with almost no capital, so apparently they could have built an online book platform pretty easily. And the capital requirements of selling books online only fell over time as the tech got more widespread.
Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselves.
IMO there are still quality publishers, but they are small and tend to focus on specific topics. Two that I'm aware of, although I'm sure there are more out there:
New York Review Books [1] is another significant one. It's the publishing divison of the confusingly named The New York Review of Books, which is an amazing magazine (it's not really book reviews).
Yes people are buying John Grisham and JK Rowling and the latest celebrity memoir, but eventually (1) interest will run out and people will want the next new thing and (2) these big brands will realize that they don't need the publishers to market for them (and this is already happening, as the article says). What then?
> You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.
That just makes it Easter for publishers. The major problem with Amazon is monopsony, not easier distribution.
> You print books? Well we have e-books now.
Which have to be purchased ultimately from the publishers, so again, they’re still there making money, they just don’t need to bother printing books anymore. You’ll note they’re not any cheaper.
> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
I think this is confusing cause and effect. Authors turned to social media because publishers weren’t doing a great job marketing, not because it makes publishers unnecessary.
> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell. Too much, and you have a cashflow problem today. Too little, and lose out on future returns.
> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
Most authors have no fans yet, and most never will - most authors write only a few books in their lifetime.
From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
> The vast majority of sales is still paper books.
Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie.
Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
> Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell.
A new author with no established celebrity or audience is basically dead in the water. There was a world where a new author could:
1. Write a book that was good on its own merits.
2. Convince an agent to represent them based on that book's merits.
3. The agent convinces an editor at a well-known publisher to take it.
4. The publisher prints it and gets it on bookshelves in stores everywhere.
5. People looking for books stumble onto it and buy it.
That world existed when people had a lot of spare time and attention and relatively few things vying for it. That world no longer exists. You can consume media 24/7 and never come close to running out, all without spending a penny.
The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
> From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
To sales numbers, you're right that revenue skews it somewhat, but see [1] and [2]. Per 2022, print books added up 788 million sold, while e-books did did 191 million in 2020.
2020 was also a big jump up - in 2019 it was 170, after years of decline for e-book sales from a peak of 242 million in 2014. A large part of that is likely explained by the price gap narrowing, as publisher realised they were leaving money on the table.
> Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
This is true for almost all self-published books, because realistically your books are not going to be in many - if any - book stores. But most of the best-selling trad published books are. So for self-published authors, focusing on e-books is certainly the way that is most likely to drive actual sales. Sure, you can get some copies into local book stores, and encourage fans to request them elsewhere, but you need pretty decent numbers already to shift that balance without an established publisher behind you.
> The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
That's true, but somewhat less true for trad published authors where you at least has the shot at getting it into reasonable numbers of book stores. But of course the odds against getting through to a trad published have gotten far worse.
> There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
That's true, but when it comes to writing the reality is most of us can't hope to live off it anyway, and that creates freedoms we don't otherwise have. E.g. I am not bothering trying to sell individual copies and do book signings or talk to book stores, because I don't need the sales bump it might bring, and so it's all about a balance between keeping it enjoyable and the fun of at least a little bit of recognition and feedback on occasion.
When you say "publishing industry" you're really saying "paper book industry", right ?
Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher, and that's a tried and true successful model adopted all around the world.
You'd have made the same argument for vinyl record publishers saying they're cornered into a niche, but no, as you point put artists will still want editorial power and support, so digital music is thrieving.
> Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher
Except that the biggest platform for ebooks (by a big stretch, they own ~70% of the market) is a company that you have a direct adversarial relationship with in most other parts of your business.
Business is business. If a publisher is refraining from going into ebooks altogether because of Amazon, when they get the option to direct sell and also access the other ebook platforms as well, I feel they're not long for this world either way.
It's difficult to prove a negative. Ebooks are a growing market in the US, the EU and SEA (though TBH I have no idea about China amd India)
It's been more than a decade that it's mainstream and takes about 10~20% of book sales depending on the country.
Amwzon's profits are still split with the publishers and publishers have their own venues + competitors (in particular outside of the US) so I'm not sure why Amazon's presence is a blow against the industry as a whole.
What more would be needed to see it as a validated business area?
Ebook sales have trended down in the US since 2013[0]. They got a pandemic bump in 2020 which didn’t put them over the peak years in 2013/14 and like many things had a correction downwards afterwards[1].
Amazon maintains 70% of the US ebook marketplace and keeps a much bigger portion of the money from books published through their publishing arm than they do book published through the traditional publishers. They also have less high standards for publishing. This makes it harder to find traditional published books on the biggest platform for selling them.
I'll take your point: there seems to be a US specific problem with ebooks.
In particular, the lack of numbers from the dominant player (Amazon) makes trend analysis all the more difficult. Yet there's still an increase after 2020:
On Amazon, are you merging publishing and distribution as a single activity ? I thought Amazon in the US only accepted self-publication under their name and the rest of the Kindle available titles are from each publishers only using Amazon as a printer/distributor.
E.g. who would you assign as 50 shades of grey's publisher for the ebook version?
Amazon has both a self publishing arm (kindle direct) and a traditional publishing arm (amazon publishing). Like most traditional publishers they have a variety of imprints (e.g. 47North for Scifi/fantasy). They compete for authors via the same mechanisms other publishers do and have notable non-self published authors (Greg Bear jumps out to me as a scifi fan).
I don't know the specific legal contracts involved with 50 Shades of Grey's ebook distribution but I'd assume that Vintage Books bought those rights after they became the publisher for the book.
The adversarial relationship was basically the publishers' choice.
Remember that Amazon was willing to basically treat eBooks like normal books - negotiate the price they pay with the publishers and then sell the books at whatever price they want. The publishers are the ones who forced the agency model where retailers are forced to sell at a set price.
That’s one way to describe it. The other way is to say Amazon used their outsized power in the book world, including disallowing pre sales and delaying shipments of regular books, to demand a price from the publishers.
It took a bunch of public pressure to change that arrangement.
I think you can easily say the publishers have bad ebook pricing strategy but Amazon certainly wasn’t using normal market practices for setting prices.
> Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good".
this still exists, but the presses are harder to find and mostly independent. FSG books are always good.
also, books these indie presses are always good:
- tyrant (rip)
- graywolf
- new directions
- NYRB
and some more, but idk your taste so not gonna recommend them.
I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution. Those are entirely separate industries. There is almost no way for publishers to lose money because of tech that makes it cheaper and easier than ever to get books to consumers while retaining unprecedented control over pricing (fixed, never discounted or remaindered), resale (prohibited), and lending (also prohibited). Publishers sell eBooks for the same price as print books but pay almost nothing to produce them. That's a big bump in profits.
I don't see how any publisher is losing money on their back catalog due to scanning by Google, either. Google doesn't sell or even offer access to the full text of most books they scan, certainly not any that are under copyright and still being sold by publishers. Out of print books are by definition not earning money for publishers, so it wouldn't make any difference there.
Notwithstanding what I understand about the publishing industry, I'm talking about the marginal cost of distributing a .mobi or whatever versus manufacturing a printed book, not the entire cost of publishing an eBook.
That's only a dollar or two of difference per unit in costs to the publisher. The majority of their costs are exactly the same for ebooks and printed books.
> I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution
You're right that publishers don't handle printing, but they do need to handle distribution. Amazon won't help if you want to get books on shelves of retailers, and printers don't distribute. Smaller publishers will usually use the distribution network of a larger publisher. For example, HarperCollins and PRH both handle distribution in the UK for themselves and others.
> Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good".
I feel this way about DK books although they don’t really do fiction but practical titles.
Martha Wells had a Patreon for a while before Murderbot Diaries blew up. If I have the story right, the short stories she published there are rolled up in a collected short stories book now.
My kid likes to remind me that Naomi Novik was one of the founders of a fanfic site called AO3.
A number of the books we call classics today started out in serialized form in magazines. Atwood, Capote, Christie, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Doyle, Dumas, Hemingway, Joyce, Sinclair, Verne, Wells, have all done serials that are now bound. And if memory serves Asimov and Clarke as well.
The medium may be different but the process is old.
Prior to the digital age where it's possible for the author to self-publish the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books and giving authors 15%.
So while I think it's been hard to make a living as an author I don't think it's necessarily the publisher's fault. Better to be the one's selling shovels than the ones mining for gold.
Having written two novels, I will tell you it's far less work for a lot of writers to write the thing than getting decent sales. It varies - some do slave over their manuscripts for years, while others churn them out in a week, but selling books is hard work.
I don’t think it would have been possible for publishers to deal with the absolutely massive amount of books they’d have to vet to do what you’re saying.
That works if the absolute number of books written is very small, so everyone interested in books pulls from that pool.
The publishers could try to find a bunch of good books and get absolutely nothing.
Curation is a multi-stage filtering pipeline. Such brands do not look at a firehose of content - they rely on existing networks and markers of quality before even considering content.
Hard to feel sympathy for industry that left to its own devices requires a 50% discount to sell in store, near 40% to get to Amazon/BN etc, and for bricks and mortar, requires you to accept returns that end up as a loss.
Authors have been complaining about publishers for ever. Publishers treated authors like crap when they controlled the market. No sympathy for them at all.
If they had any integrity they'd move to be the Spotify of books and serve their customers better. Instead (as the article says) they're spending their efforts trying to bail the sinking boat and resist any such move.
Ebooks are touching or have crossed 50% of sales in certain combinations of markets and genres. Overall they make up 30-50% of all book sales. So no, print books aren't still the vast majority.
I remember reading on Charles Stross' blog that the paperback is kind of dead in the US. At least for his niche. I think his last book only went out in hard cover.
In the UK many years ago, there was the Net Book Agreement, which was price fixing and Amazon, BooksOnline/StreetsOnline comprehensively broke that. Unfortunately, book shops didn't really learn, and we are where we are.
Back to the title. I still buy books. I've stopped buying them from Amazon, and just buy them from my LBS.
Though one thing still makes me irrationally angry - "SciFi + Fantasy" as "a genre" in bookshops. No. It. Isn't. It's two separate. Two loved-up vampires, isn't sci-fi. At least on Amazon I can filter that. Browse on Amazon, buy in the LBS. Which is the reverse of what I did a decade ago.
The Wikipedia article suggests that it was not Amazon and online bookselling that broke the Net Book Agreement, but big high street chain bookstores like Dillons. One of the references links to a newspaper article from December 1994 saying the agreement is "on its last legs", and Amazon was only founded in July 1994, so seems unlikely to have been very influential in its demise.
There are responses to every single one of these. Similar to Radioshack (3D printers, drones, Arduino, Raspberry PI), and Intel's (mobile, GPUs, foundries, AI) bankruptcies or "lost decades".
Distribute Books - They could have built a competitive distribution system by responding to what was an obvious aggressive threat. Amazon founded in 94', public by 97', buying book sellers by 98'. Four years, and Amazon was going International and buying book sellers.
Scanned catalog - Multiple responses. Legally inclined, lawsuits before it was all irreparably scraped (or afterward). Tech inclined, scrape your own stuff and make it available. Culturally or historically inclined, donate the texts to Gutenberg or a museum so the scraping doesn't get them much.
Authors have their own followings - Interact. "Hi, this is so-and-so from PRH, that's a neat idea for the author's work, and we'll discuss trying to work it into the next book launch." There's probably authors who follow authors, "Any of you wanna write a book?"
Cash advances - The cash advances are broke anyways. One of main points of the article. 70% of spending goes to 1% of authors. Try a slightly less power-law distribution. Maybe something a little less than x^60... PRH alone gave 55% of all advances in $1,000,000+ land. Have your own Kickstarters, or crowdfunding site. Arrange crowdfunding campaigns with marginal authors (for better author %). Work with fans directly so fans can put up the advance with pre-orders. Lots of alternatives to wringing their hands. (If Bates White Economic Consulting is correct, then 95% of money likely goes to 5% of authors).
What this article told me was the publishing industry has a bad case of "try to spend zero work, while making infinite $". 'if the platform is there for the advertising, then the spend might be lower.' 'Does the best selling author have the best marketing budget? No. Why? She's the queen of TikTok.' (she does her own marketing)
Ideally, the authors get their own loans from the bank, print their own materials, arrange their own distribution, put out their own marketing, and then we collect a vague value-add for putting our logo somewhere.
Copyright law is ridiculous and abusive (thank you supreme court).
There is some role for domain knowledge, curation, and editing, but the article shows that's not what they make bucjs on: celebrity drivel, bibles, sat prep, and the copyright monopoly.
It's just a cartel, just like the music labels are.
Copyright law is so annoying and its supposed to promote quality...which we get none of. Free youtube tutorials are the best learning resource these days.
The GDP hit would be insignificant too, like <.1%.
Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me.
It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc. I will do anything instead of reading the text. Meanwhile with a paper book I don't have an urge to flip a page back and forth and observe how it behaves. I can focus on the text.
I do the same - I far prefer paper books for reading, and mostly because it makes an enormous difference in my ability to focus.
Re: the ecological side - I'm not actually convinced that a paperback book is markedly more of an ecological burden than an e-reader and the rest of the associated infrastructure. I think it's possible the e-reader pencils out in the long term, but I think a full lifecycle accounting of the energy and resources required to create, use, and dispose of an e-reader would be markedly higher than one would suspect, and I think people replace them more often than necessary.
Books, on the other hand, are trees. Bury 'em in your yard when you're done with them and the fungi will know what to do to recycle them.
Worrying about the environmental impact of books is misguided. You use far more paper products in the course of your everyday life: paper bags, cardboard packaging, paper towels, etc. etc. Even for an avid reader, the impact is negligible.
With paper books I'm more concerned with having to have space to put it when I'm done. But, I find it more enjoyable to read a physical book, and am more likely to re-read it.
Another nice thing about paper books is that you can lend them out to your friends when you're finished reading them. This saves a bit of space, plus your friends can just pick them up and read them without worrying about a bunch of BS like whether it's compatible with their e-reader, if the DRM will work, if the publisher will revoke the rights for some reason, etc.
Or give them away, or leave them in a little free library for someone else to enjoy. In my old neighborhood somebody else had similar taste in scifi and (as far as I could tell) we traded Asimov books back and forth through the book box in the park!
I'd love to keep them all forever but (a) I think my house is about maxed out on shelves and (b) a book's potential is wasted on the shelf.
That has always been a pain point for me. I read a lot, so having physical copies can turn into a storage problem, especially since I keep a good backlog of books. I may not need a new book now, but I found one at the store that looks really good, so I buy it, place it on the shelf and it enters the queue. Although I did get myself used to using a kindle. Especially when I was in the Navy and needed enough to read for a 7 month deployment.
My current strategy is this. If its a book I know that will have re-read value that I really enjoy. I get a physical copy (such as LOTR). If its an interesting book that I want to read, but I don't see it as having high re-read value, I buy it on my kindle. May not be logical, but its a system that works for me so far.
Get the ebook for archival purpose and ditch the paper book when you’re done with your first read through.
If you later find out you want the paper book as home ornament, then spend a little extra to decorate your home.
The two major mistakes we make about books is:
1) we think we have to finish it. No, drop it if it’s boring.
2) we think we have to keep it around. No. Take a picture and write a few notes for your personal blog if you need to keep track. You don’t need it in your room or house.
FWIW - This (GP post) is not my experience with eReaders. Not sure if they have the eInk one or not (like the Fire or tablet ones), but I have the eInk sort.
Anyway, I really like it because it's far lighter weight than a paperback, easier to hold, and I can have like the entire library on there and take it with me. I don't experience the distraction that they are referring to, because there's really not anything else to do except read my book. How much time can I spend on settings? Browsing my library? As far as brightness I leave it alone mostly and don't think about it unless it's irritatingly one way or the other.
I have no idea what "navigation setup pages" are - I've been through several different Kindles and I pretty much just take them out of the box and start reading. There's nothing to "set up" outside of logging into my Amazon account.
Also, while I know the readership of HN skews young, but when you reach your 50s, having the ability to make the text larger in an ebook is a killer feature.
Yeah my vision is still good but farsighted so need low-strength reading glasses, larger fonts, or what I've started doing with this eReader is just getting good at reading fuzzy letters with a relaxed gaze at less than arms length. It's actually less straining than trying to force focusing closer than is comfortable.
I tried using landscape mode or larger fonts but didn't like the extra page scrolling/turning. Eventually I suppose we'll get lightweight and normal looking AR glasses for reading eBooks.
Thanks (everyone) for the replies and different viewpoints.
I already went through all the setup menus, including messing with fonts, layouts, making some collection/folders, and downloading some samples to preview.
So far it all seems pretty good. I don't think I'll be too distracted by it. The 7" screen is a tad small, but I really do like the size and weight so will keep it. Anything larger/heavier will likely not be kept on my person so loses a lot of use.
Another great use I just discovered is loading it with pdf's of all my device/appliance/toys manuals in a User Manuals collection.
Chiming in with the others to say that my experience with e-readers has been great. Physical books can grow to be a huge burden over the years.
For me personally, e-readers have not caused any loss of focus. In fact, the integrated dictionaries often keep me MORE focused than the interruption represented by pulling out a dictionary or googling a word.
I'll acknowledge there is a tactile joy to physical paper that is lost when using an e-reader, but for me it's well worth the trade-off for the the portability and space saved.
Also consider that often, people who are expressing skepticism of digital reading have only ever tried it on laptops and iPads, which is a very different (more distracting) experience from an e-ink reader.
Another massive advantage to using Kindle estead of iPad - enourmous battery life. My like 6-8 year old Kindle survives what feels like a month without recharge with active use. This enables you to just drop it in your backpack and be sure that it works the next time you feel like reading.
A lot of the posts here are just individuals' opinions, not universal experiences. Yours may well be different!
Personally, I carry an e-ink reader everywhere and read it every time I get a spare minute or so. It's done wonders for my reading habits. And unlike this topic's creator, I basically set the font and formatting once and almost never mess with them again.
Everybody's different! I prefer to read on paper, I know many other people who prefer to read on their kindle. Whatever works for you is the right answer for you!
I still use ebooks when I travel - I'll usually have one or two actual physical books with me, but I'll also have a few loaded up on my iPad in case I get bored or finish them early.
The undeniable minus of a Kindle e-reader is: the illustrations suck. They're just too small. Half the time, my "library" has book covers that I can't even make out.
Yeah, I've owned a e-paper Kindle for a decade but probably never finished reading a book on it. Instead I use a iPad 11 or mini, which are superior in every way (that I care about) except reading in sunshine. I love how lightweight the Kindle is, but not its small reading area or lack of color or weak illumination. Or its inability to serve any task other than reading ebooks.
I discovered that, although one really doesn't see the difference between a lower res display and a retina res display, it is just more pleasant to read the retina display.
Another nice benefit of paper is that the company that sold it can't just bust down your door, steal the book, drop off a few bucks, and then go back along their merry way. Amazon did exactly this with, amongst other books, 1984. Such a perfectly appropriate book.
If someone a) finds my calibre-web installation on the public internet b) manages to crack my username and password to log in c) scan the contents d) notify the correct rights holders e) send a subpoena for pirating content
Accidentally? My calibre-web is actually exposed online :P
It doesn't list any books that I have publicly though. All you'll see is a login prompt. Books? what books? You can't DMCA me because I only have gutenberg collections in there ;)
You've got to wonder what the hapless Amazon employee asked to implement this felt, and how much leeway they had in which book for that to happen to first.
I am kind of the opposite; I have found it much easier to read on Kindle simply because I can make the text as big as I want.
In high school, I remembered that I really struggled to read The Once and Future King, and I never finished it. I eventually assumed I was too dumb to understand it, and that it’s just not for me.
Fast forward about 13 years, and I decide to give the book a try again, this time on the Kindle, and I surprisingly was able to get through it really quickly and didn’t have any issues understanding it.
I don’t think that I’ve gotten appreciably smarter than I was in high school, and I realized that the only really different variable is the font size. As a teenager I was reading my dad’s hand me down copy, which had tiny text on fairly small pages. With the Kindle I make the font gigantic. I have to turn the page more often, but that doesn’t really bother me.
Overwhelmingly I find it easier to read stuff if the text is really big; I am not sure why. My eyesight is fine, and I am not dyslexic (I was tested as a teenager), but tiny text is just really hard for me to read, while big text isn’t.
Yes, surely the only reason you'd dislike something at 14-18 years old and like it at 27-31 is the font size.
I take it your tastes have otherwise been immutable in that time period, and that you listen to the same music, follow the same fashion trends etc. as you did back then?
I didn’t say that they were immutable, but from a comprehension level I don’t think that things have changed substantially. Is it really controversial that bigger fonts are easier for me to read?
I thought I made that pretty clear, that it was that I was having trouble parsing and understanding the small text.
ETA:
Also, lol, my tastes in music really hasn’t changed either. Looking at my YouTube music history, the last 40 songs I listened to were ones I listened to in high school. I also wear more or less the style clothes; I still have of the shirts I wore back then actually.
Note that only having a certain chunk of text on the screen at one time may be a variable as well as the age/life-place difference as others have so politely hinted at.
I prefer to read paper books, but there are three reasons I generally don't.
a) Font size is getting too small for me. Years ago I changed to large hardcover (sometimes large but softcover) versions instead of the smaller-sized books I used to buy, simply because the fonts are larger then. With the Kindle I can set the font size to what I want.
b) Weight and size. I read on airplanes, in hotels etc. I read a lot and I read fast, so I bring more than one book (and even that is too big and heavy, see a). The Kindle is king here.
c) Storage. I don't have enough room for more books at home. I've sadly had to dump lots and lots and lots of books, even though I like to read the same books again (and again). Tried to sort out those most unlikely to get re-read, but..
I can't even give them away. Used-book stores have more than they can handle.
As to the Kindle - I've never felt any urge to tinker with anything, except when I'm forced to: I set the font size, that's one single operation, forget it (at least for that book). If I occasionally read at night I have to add some backlight.
And that's about it. I just read.
What I miss about paper books is the nice cover (color..), how easy it is to "see" the book (bookmarks, flip it open somewhere else and so on). In addition to actually reading it. But the Kindle is actually very nice to read (unlike phones, PC monitors, tablets, all of that. I can't ready more than a couple of paragraphs on LCD displays)
Another benefit to paper books, in my experience, is it's a lot easier to remember the rough location of a particular passage (towards the front, middle, near the end, etc.) than with digital
A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.
My own personal anecdata on this comes from being able to find a passage I read in a 500-page book in 1992 for a class I was taking in 1998. I could probably even find that same passage now if I were to walk across the room to the bookcase where I have that book.
Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.
While physical "progress bar" is much easier to remeber than digital one (on the side of the screen for pdfs), because you actually interact with it the whole time, i don't find (ha) finding a particular passage hard without it.
I personally usually can remeber a phrase or just a word and search for them in a PDF to find the needed passage.
It's pretty easy to highlight passages with most e-reader software. Some even let you write a note that goes with the highlight. You can then look through a list of all highlighted passages.
It's when something comes up and you remember that you read something relevant in the past. In most of those cases it's not about "Ah, this is something I may want to check again at a later time, so let's highlight it". So, there's no list of highlighted passages to search through.
Indeed this is one of those things I miss about paper books. When the above happens I have a terrible time finding that on my Kindle. Most of the time I'm not able to, while with a paper book I didn't have that problem, mostly.
I classify skimming as a "distracting" activity. I always ask myself: What information do I need? And then it's very easy to get to the relevant passage. And outlines are there for a reason (PDF Expert can edit them) so navigating between the same file is not that cumbersome for me. I do agree that the experience is more pleasant with a paper book, but in a focused session, the result is pretty much the same.
Skimming is great for building a mental map, but that is a separate activity than reading to learn. And it can be done digitally too, just differently.
That's a software choice issue. You can definitely flip through digital texts more easily than physical. With a decent monitor, you can flip through multiple books at the same time which is quite difficult to do with physical books, assuming you haven't summoned eldritch appendages to help.
> Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections.
Whatever works for you, of course. PDFs have bookmarks, which instantly take me to a specific spot on a specific page. Also, I can open multiple instances of the PDF, viewing multiple pages of the same book (or some PDF readers allow split screens to do the same thing). Edit: And if I don't recall where something is, I can search for it.
I prefer PDFs for informative material (various documentation), though they're less useful if it's just a photocopied old manual (no OCR).
It's when reading books (literature, not documentation) that the e-readers have something going for them. I read nearly all my books on the Kindle, but I never use it for documentation - I've tried, that's just cumbersome. PDFs on a PC are fine.
I read paper books because I can flip back and forth without friction, and I can underline and scribble.
I don't know why eReader interfaces make these two functions -- critical for deep reading -- so difficult.
Kindle is optimized for linear reading only. So beach reading and long romances.
But if you do the kind of reading that Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" proposes (skimming, inspectional reading, writing notes), you pretty much can't with Kindles.
I truly don’t mean to be pedantic, but there’s a giant implicit “for me” in there. I do not want or need to scribble or write in my books for “deep reading”. It’s totally fine if you want to, but that’s your preference and not a general requirement everyone has.
I just finished “Moby Dick” on a Kobo. It’s no “Ulysses”, thank heavens, but I’ve never heard anyone describe it as a long romance or a beach read.
I think Moby Dick is a romance. I guess the term is confusing in English because people think “love story” but an older use of the word just means a novel with adventure, chivalric elements.
There is also a giant implicit “for me” in your preference. It just happens that your preference happens to be one that is mainstream. A lot of types of reading are not linear —- for instance, if you have to read to write a book report, you have to go back, make notes, flip back and forth. A straight through reading will not produce a good book report.
I read non-fiction and also great books (of the western canon) and in order to really read to understand, I need to flip back and forth and take notes and engage with the text. My reading instructor always tells me, “good reading is re-reading.” Single pass reading works for entertainment reading, but not for deep reading. (By deep reading, I mean the kind of reading that is taught in Mortimer Adler’s book referenced above)
For deep reading you have to interact with the text, most commonly by debating with it in the margins. This is pretty standard for academic reading (say when taking a humanities or literature class). It’s a pretty common use case that eReaders don’t support.
All of that is perfectly fine, of course, so long as you recognize that it’s not the correct or better way to study literature. It’s the way you were taught and I’m guessing most of us have learned different methods for learning the canon.
For example, I take notes in a separate book. The thing crucial to your preferred method is not at all needed for mine. In other words, most ereaders are not optimal for your process but just fine for most of us.
And yes, even for classic great books and not just amusement. I suspect you’ll find a higher than average portion of readers here are familiar with the books you’re talking about. We’re a reasonably erudite group.
This is interesting, I'm pretty much the opposite. I only read paper books if there are no electronic versions available.
Fiction I read on a Kindle.
My deep reading all happens on a PC actually. Not even a tablet. I find it much easier to highlight and annotate reading material with mouse and keyboard and look up references with a proper multi-window screen.
Also, while you certainly can underline and write notes on paper, this information then stays on paper and in this book. No way to index it easily, no way to cross-reference etc.
While you can scribble, you can easily highlight and comment on books. Going back and forth is maybe slightly harder than a book, but it isn't "so difficult." I'm not saying reading on a Kindle is better than a paper book. But I didn't think it is as bad s you claim it is. I personally like it because I can read anywhere. I don't need to carry a large heavy book around.
It's likely some arbitrary jargon that someone made up. I have my own method of reading, which since we're throwing out pretentious flowery prose, I'm going to call "predictive perusal".
For each chapter or titled section, I read the first sentence or title and then mentally position myself as the writer of that section and attempt to predict the contents. For convergence I attempt to traverse further plies. For divergence, I attempt to figure out the root of the difference.
EDIT: For the record, I have never felt the need to scribble in the margins of a book. It's far better to take notes on separate media to prevent "preloading" your existing thoughts at the time should you choose to re-read the book years later.
The older I get, the more I appreciate being able to select a larger font with my Kindle. I love books, but the accessibility features of a modern ereader are pretty great too.
I've been putting off glasses for as long as I can. I suspect I'll return to my Kindle again in the future for this reason. It's good to be reminded that both things can coexist.
Because I want minimal complexity. (Usually in the tropics, often with rum and a hammock)
Dead tree books' short term failure modes are water and fire, and once failure is confined to emergencies-that-are-already-emergencies they impose no additional cognitive burden.
Also, I suspect the physical friction involved in "swiping away from" paper books helps reset my dopamine baseline / memory, but that's just suspicion from having lived pre-smartphone.
PS: Also, re: environmental impact. eBay and Amazon sell tons of used books. Sure you're shipping them around, but I really buy new these days.
You forgot the third and fourth failure modes: weight and bag space. Books take a lot of it. An e-reader is thinner than any book and weighs the same no matter how many it's holding.
I used to take my e-reader on field expeditions when I was an archaeologist. Never had one die or break even after months in places like Siberia. The number of notebooks that were ruined during those same expeditions is non-zero, usually from condensation or the physical trauma of a backpack.
Considering you're on HN, it's likely a safe bet to say you also travel with a laptop. In which case, an e-reader is still a waste of space because your laptop can just open ebooks too. Or if you don't, then your phone is still a better space saver for reading books with. Yet, you will likely prefer to take your e-reader with anyway (and its charger if it isn't the same as other devices).
This is why I find "saving space during travels" a very relative argument to make, because it's clearly down to preference.
Of course it's a relative argument. Everything is.
I don't personally travel with a laptop unless I plan on working remote. Too heavy/bulky and more importantly, you need to take them out going through TSA. The e-reader doesn't need a charger for the 2-4 weeks I usually travel. If I'm traveling longer, I'll bring a single additional USB cable (that will go away the next time I upgrade).
A phone doesn't take bag space because it's always in my pocket, but it's significantly less ergonomic and much less power efficient for reading. The value-add of being able to read without draining battery on my most important travel tool is worth it on its own.
My laptop and phone can't last through a long-haul flight. My e-reader doesn't need charging until I come home, fits in a jeans pocket and is a similar weight to my passport.
That's kind of my point - your preferences are to the advantage of the e-reader. For others, the same might apply to physical books instead, despite the disadvantage of bulk.
The ergonomics on any laptop is dogshit compared to a dedicated e-ink reader. Just the amount of brightness the display beams to your face makes it suboptimal for reading in low light.
And the "charger" I need with my ancient Kindle is a standard micro-USB cable, not exactly exotic. And as soon as this one breaks down, the next one will be USB-C like a good 90%+ of my devices I travel with.
I'm just the opposite. One of the worst things about vacations was having to carry along all those books or take a detour to a bookstore (if there were any) to buy more. Now I just carry a single small e-reader. It's a great savings in terms of cargo space.
I don't consider an e-ink reader very complex. You charge it once in a while, download books to it once in a while, and otherwise it's basically a book except it remembers what page you were on.
E-readers are often very simple devices. Their main audience is older people.
Light being a dependency of reading a printed book is one of the biggest plus for e-ink readers. You don't need light, they already come with it! It's so much easier reading with a Kindle (in dark mode) at bed time than it is a paper book.
Well, yes and no.. I do use the backlight on my Kindle if it's dark, but this changes how it looks. I have a Paperwhite Kindle. With the backlight on it's more like reading on LCD, though not as bad. The Kindle looks much nicer if I can use a bedside lamp instead of the backlight, just as I would with a paper book.
There's a tiny amount of light, yes. I don't know why Amazon made it that way. It's not really visible.. not to me, at least. But it's probably one reason the battery is slowly drained, over weeks, even if not in use.
I have a slightly different problem. What I miss about the physical book is its context - that is to say, the cover art, its particular weight, the font face, how the chapter numbers are printed, etc., which give a book its certain "feel." With an e-book, you don't get any of that, so all books have a kind of sameness.
I feel this strongly. Physical books make a deeper impression in my memory. There are all sorts of particularities of how the book was bound: it's size, it's smell, the texture of the paper, etc. It's like the book exists in its own unique space (vs all digital books existing in the single shared space of my computer/reader). I think a book's reading environment loses some richness when all these subtle little details are homogenized.
Well you can get the cover art, but yeah. I mean you can get the differing font faces and etc. if the publisher built that into the file, but most don't go to that amount of effort on their e-books.
I use my iPad and my Kobo for digital reading. I have paper version of "important" books (stuff I'd like to read if I don't have power), but some are unwieldy (Algorithms by Cormen et Al).
I prefer e-ink for reading, but it's too slow for my learning workflow. I highlight and mark interesting stuff, that I export later to condense and reflect upon. And that is cumbersome on an e-reader. There's also the matter of size. I generally like the PDF version of technical books as they're typeset well, but my e-reader is too small for them. So I use my iPad for those (Distraction is handled by the fact that I read those in short focused sessions).
But for fiction books, the e-reader is perfect. I don't highlight text in those books, I just read. Any other operation is slow enough that I just can't fiddle with it. And it's perfect for long sessions of reading as it does not project light in my eyes. It's light, so I just bring it with me everywhere.
Same. I recently got one of these wirecutter book lights: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/glocusent-reading... Does an amber color for bedtime reading, and now I' tearing through books again. It's so much easier to skim, skip, re-find something (yes, even without fancy search) and I just find myself reading faster with real books again. It's rekindled :) a love of books again I feel like I lost somehow only doing it on e-readers.
On top of all of that, nobody's going to revise the book out from under me while I'm reading it, or prevent me from loaning it to a friend, or even yanking it entirely from my device.
As far as I know (in the sense that I've never experienced anything like it in a decade of using a Kindle) that the book's getting revised from under me while I'm reading it. There's an occasional update for some books, but I have to actively choose to download the updated version, otherwise my original stays the same. I think I've only downloaded an updated version a single time.
Same here. I'm not sure if it's psychological. When reading my Kindle, I have to constantly fight my urge to do something else, maybe except for reading a page-turner novel.
I haven't had much trouble focusing on reading on computers, my only expectation is for the device to be touch screen and a pressure sensitive pen. The touch screen makes moving through pages trivial (for casual reading on say, my kindle, I have the habit of laying back and just tapping with my nose to flip pages lol) and the pen makes it trivial to mark up more serious reading material. With paper books I tend to not be near them right when I need them, and tend to be too wary of just marking them up. With digital stuff, and all the syncing we have between devices these days, I pretty much always have multiple devices at hand where the material is accessible.
I do still prefer physical books for things like art, I find it easier to study it and understand how it's put together that way (maybe because a physical copy forces me to look at the piece as a whole, rather than getting distracted by and overfocusing on minute details that turn out to not matter until I grasp the whole structure). However, even there, once I do understand how to look at the art, I can go with the digital version just fine.
It's also more ... social perhaps. I'm reading a book that an uncle bought, but never really got around to reading. I would have never picked up that book myself, but he brought it over an I stuck it in the bookshelf.
Similarly my dad has a bunch of books I bought years ago. It's not books that I'd want to re-read, but interesting enough. With ebooks that just not possible, unless you do some cumbersome DRM removal.
There's a lot of good things about ebooks, but the usability just isn't there yet. It is a nice alternative for long out of print books though.
I'd buy and read move, I think, if more stuff was translated to Danish, but most of the books you can get in Danish easily is repetitive crime novels. It's all variations of someone got brutally murdered and now some alcoholic Scandinavia cop / ex-cop with a broken love life has to solve the case for some reason.
Yes, there's a strange habit with things we can twiddle and the surface area for twiddling physical books is much more limited and less engaging than with electronic devices.
There's something to dedicated physical entities being single purpose and dead end that allows them to serve you in a very focused manner. Things with more bells and whistles, knobs and pulls will simply draw you into their twiddling even when it serves no purpose. It's like working with these things creates an itch that we need to scratch and it is distracting even if the recovery for focus for those things is minimal, it all adds up and gets you out of the focus state.
Last Saturday I went to the bookstore, bought a paperback novel, and then went home and started reading it right away. It felt great and it reminded me of doing this in the past as I used to do this a lot in the past, but for some reason I had stopped.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts now, and that really cuts into my book reading. But nothing beats sitting down in the sun and reading a good paperback.
Yes plus the emotion of sitting on a couch with a paper book vs. a device is very different. The feeling of flicking pages is better than the UI of book readers or smart phones.
exact opposite for me - the more i got into ebooks, the harder i found it to handle the ergonomics of paper books, and today my reading is pretty much 100% on my phone or kindle.
Honestly it is likely more ecological than ebooks after you factor in everything. Think about how many e-readers are sitting in the bottom of a landfill somewhere. Screens, batteries, plastic shells. The energy to not only power the device but all of the infrastructure for transmitting and storing the book.
I'm the opposite. I stopped reading books because I was accumulating too many and it was difficult to find the ones I like without paying full price for new copies (which I'd eventually just discard). Also I find them cumbersome. Now I have a Kobo I read a lot. I can read on my side in bed. It's great.
However, paper is still the best format by far for text books and references. I can't stand having to use a screen for that. If I'm using a reference sheet I always print it out.
What goes on in your head that you even consider the "ecologicity" of a book. It has no impact. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Stop feeling guilty about meaningless things.
I used to buy and read a lot of physical books. Around 2013-204, I started moving to eBooks, and Amazon Kindle played a significant role in my journey. But a couple of years later, I had an epiphany while discussing books with my daughter, “I never see you read books. You are just reading on your computer (kindle) or the phone and are not reading.”
Since then, I have returned to reading physical books with an approximate ratio of 1:5 against digital ones. I have kinda rule/understanding with my daughters -- you have unlimited access to books that you can read, and you also get extra pocket money for reading them. Of course, it is OK not to finish a book, but in that case, a few cool-down days before buying another one.
Yes, buy and read physical books. I believe, the return is a magnitude higher for everyone than the loss it does to anything. If you have kids, read more physical books in front of them. Encourage them to read physical books. They are less distracting and help the kids focus.
> If you have kids, read more physical books in front of them.
I think this part is so important. I want to show my kids that reading is fun, but instead what they see is me looking at my phone all the time. There’s nothing differentiating reading on my phone from watching youtube videos from their perspective. Ereaders help to some extend, but only a bit.
> They are less distracting and help the kids focus.
That’s such an incredibly personal preference though. It’s far easier for me to read with an ereader when I don’t have to have 2 hands holding a heavier hunk of paper wants to close itself if I let go for a moment. I have a huge book collection but I’ve switched almost entirely to ebooks because I find the ergonomics so much better. Physically fighting with dead tree media is more distracting than my ereader.
It happened to me multiple times that I bought a real paper book, but the ergonomics was so bad, I've pirated the book and read it on my kindle instead (since I bought it I feel entitled to get the e-variant). Especially paperbacks are bad - tiny letters, yellow low-contrast paper, difficult to hold open.
Reading good night stories to children is even more challenging, since it's usually dark. Bringing some extra light is annoying and distracting for the child.
i grew up with books around me, both my dad and my granddad were collecting books, and our walls were lined with bookshelves and i loved it. though most of the books i read myself came from the library.
but as a digital nomad myself, physical books were just not practical anymore. i remember a friend of mine when he moved from europe to asia, he shipped several containers full of books. that's a move you only do once in your life (and only if your employer covers the cost). so all my books stayed in my parents home.
then i also didn't have time to read anymore until i discovered audiobooks and audio drama. i am now listening to about 3 books worth of audio per month (including audio drama and short stories) but my kids would not know.
and there is no way to fix that. the books that i would want to buy are not available locally and would need expensive international shipping, and every time we move i'd have to discard my collection because books are just to heavy to be carried in a suitcase.
i'd love to show my kids how much i enjoy reading, but i just see no way to do it. it's a conundrum that i don't know how to solve.
i used to read a lot but buying paper books was a real pain for me, i read hundreds of books on the kindle but figured out i could just slap a video on my phone and actually sleep.
since then i've read maybe 15 books in the last couple years and my kids never see me reading, however we've read to them and had them read to us for their whole life and they now both read independently for fun. i don't think leading by example is anywhere near as important as reading with your kids
The title is provocative clickbait, but the actual point is this:
> These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
Given that spending per capita, adjusted for intlation is only a couple of percent higher than they were 20 years ago, the "boom" isn't particularly impressive.
But there are more books published than ever before.
Most of the books that sell hundreds of copies wouldn't have been published in the past. If you write a niche book about something and a few hundred people read it, that seems great. If you're (stochastically) subsidized by a few huge hits and bestsellers, that also seems great. People are reading the Bible, Harry Potter and celebrity memoirs? Great too, I'm sure they are enjoying them. Possibly many of those people have not chosen those books in preference to other more "worthy" books but in preference to other pastimes.
The only problem I can see is if you wrote a book and had it published hoping it would be this year's runaway success, and it wasn't. Fine, but someone's book was. By its nature not everyone can achieve this.
I also read the article and felt that the tone was weird. Much of what's described is unsurprising in a for-profit business. The fact that these big companies are willing to publish so many unprofitable books seems like a good thing to me. And if you don't want to work with big publishing there are many avenues.
I'm not sure what the author wants from the big publishers. Should they stop publishing hits, spend more money marketing books that won't sell, and then declare bankruptcy?
I do appreciate the opportunity to learn more about what a bad deal traditional publishing can be for authors. Seems like valuable information for anyone who wants to start writing professionally.
It's a bit weird that those niche books are sold - as opposed to just published free with maybe print-on-demand for those who want hard copies.
The authors don't make (practically) any money out of those books. Even the publisher probably doesn't. Vast majority of books aren't written to get any significant money (from sales at least), unless the author is delusional.
It's probably a kind of status thing and cultural lag. To get a publishing deal is a "stamp of approval" that it's a "real book" from a "real author" that has passed the gatekeeper. And that a copy of it costs something means it's not worthless, unlike e.g. the Linux kernel.
It's a combination of status and an attempt at an investment, and I guess somewhat of a lottery ticket.
There are also costs involved in a quality release even of a self-published novel. You want a cover. It's not expensive, but unless you're a talented artist it will show if you do it yourself. You can avoid paying for an editor, but it will generally be noticeable (you might have near perfect grammar and orthography, but you will miss things). If a publisher is going to put their name on it, those things will be at least a bit more expensive, and people tend to want to at least try to recoup some or all of costs even if they don't expect a significant return.
And if you want to turn writing into something more, you want to build an audience, and you want at least some signal of how large a portion of that audience are actually people prepared to pay, so that maybe next time your publisher is willing to put a little bit of money into marketing.
But yes, a lot of books could just as well be free. But vast quantities of writing - including fiction - is also released for free. Turns out there's signalling the other way too. It's hard to get people to read anything, but for at least some parts of the market, it's harder to convince them something free is worth their time.
> The title is provocative clickbait, but the actual point is this.
It's an aside, but this is just so frustrating we have succumbed to this level. In principle I don't even want to read the article because the title is ridiculous, but on the other hand, they wouldn't generate any traffic if they don't because our brains are too fixated on "drama" and "controversy" that clickbait titles generate.
I gotta admit: I rarely make time for any recent fiction. Too busy catching up on the last 5,000 years. I don’t expect that to change before I die.
Film has a similar problem—there are plausibly low-thousands existing films worth my time, a whole lot of them 30+ years old. I could never watch a film made after 2000 and not run out of good entertainment in my lifetime. They’re damn lucky the Mouse got copyright extended to a century or more.
> I will say that it seems entirely possible to relatively quickly see all US animated kids movies
Decent or better ones… maybe.
There’s a deep bench of poor-to-terrible animated kids’ movies that were straight to VHS/DVD/streaming. For god’s sake, there are like nine Land Before Time movies alone.
There are gems coming out today that will be considered great works by our descendants.
By avoiding current authors or media you miss out on the cultural story and critique/commentary that influences all our media. Sure, the last 5000 years are interesting, but isn't right now pretty amazing too? You might accidently read the best book ever written but you won't know until history plays out. But I think it's important to see how recent history has shaped the narrative of the worlds authors in today's world.
Weve lived through a lot of major events. Everyone does. But these are our events.
I’m not avoiding them, but “rando probably-just-ok new thing” versus any of hundreds of major classics I haven’t made it to yet… it’s tough to pick the new thing very often.
[edit] or, hell, not even major. Odds that a recommended-by-people-online got-some-hype-in-review-rags new book is gonna make me happier to have read it than, say, a 2nd-tier Maugham or Faulkner or something? Not great.
Yeah, if you like sorting garbage. Which of the 1.5 million books published this year will you read? People routinely hide money in mattresses, so why not head to the landfill and start looking?
I sometimes read/watch/play something if a friend recommends it. But I've no time/interest in sorting through the random deluge of media in the hope of finding diamonds. I'll let someone else find the diamond and tell me about it.
I'm trying to think back over "new releases" that I've read, and ... all of them have been by authors that I had already enjoyed reading some of their works.
It would have to be a technical book on a subject I'm interested in (and even then moderately rare) or something that someone I know well personally strongly recommended.
read "the sarah book" or "crapalachia" by scott mcclananhan if you want to read fiction from a living author that should be included in your reading list for the past 5k years of language arts.
This is the argument I bring up whenever people start ranting about how widespread torrenting means we will never have new music or movies. Who cares? I have multiple lifetimes of good stuff to enjoy already.
Video games, too. I live through the 90s yet my backlog includes thousands of hours of reputedly-amazing games from that decade that I didn’t get to at the time.
To be fair the awesomeness of many blockbuster games could be condensed way down with little harm to the game (e.g., Final Fantasy without all the random battles).
There are some dedicated publishers that make bibles (most any Christian publishing house will have a bible of some sort) but the big names on Amazon or the bookstore are from the big houses (often under an imprint, mind you).
I'm currently writing a book about independent thinking and I have zero expectations that it will sell even a single copy. However, the net gain I will get from having completed the goal of writing the book is invaluable to me personally.
I had this idea for a hard science fiction story that I have been thinking about for years. Nobody else is going to write it, so I started. 20 000 words in my beta readers say it is good, so I think I will continue. And I don’t expect to sell it, but I want to know what happens and so do the beta readers. So on we go.
You really have to write it for yourself if you want to keep going - unless you're lucky or have a large following already it's hard to get a lot of readers. I've written stories and serials and posted them on social media, my personal site, etc. (I release them as Creative Commons works) and few people read them. Self-published authors who want to make a living typically have to do a lot of promotion to get a chance.
Also there are times when I decide I want to read my own stuff for entertainment instead of a published novel. And the joy I get from that keeps me writing.
Many successful artists in any medium say they create things for themselves; it's more a compulsion than a business activity. Some are lucky that others like it; some are even luckier that others like it during the creator's lifetime; the luckiest even make money from it!
If you want to make money you're often creating for your audience rather than for yourself too. For instance I know professional artists who don't enjoy their work that much since they end up having to please the client rather than make what they really want. Even for my own CC fiction my themes and language are affected by current trends and what I think my readers will like. Of course if you're lucky you can create whatever you like and your fans will eat it up, but how many people can do that?
As an aside though I feel that the science/engineering heavy HN crowd would bring some life to science fiction. We have the ability to write things that make technical sense and I'm sure many of you internally roast the handwaviness seen in some franchises. I don't know if I'm the only one that does this but I plan out the computer networks my characters use, draw cutaways and chip architecture diagrams for new devices I come up with, read scientific papers for research, and so forth. Sometimes that's even more fun than the actual writing!
Cixin Liu was a computer engineer working at a power plant before writing 3 Body Problem and its sequels. He very clearly embeds his love for science into his books.
Keep at it. I've self-published my first two (and beaten the odds - somewhat - judging by this article, while still paying substantially below minimum wage for my time, but that's ok), and the experience is "interesting". The first time I had someone somewhat accusingly message me on twitter to ask when I'll get the next one out (I'm way overdue) was exciting.
I have two projects at the moment. Both slow-going because of other things, but one is the third in a series and I'm hopeful it will reach (very) low thousands based on the performance of the previous ones (over a period of years, not quickly; it's niche SF), the other is fiction, but will have code fragments in between chapters and I'd consider myself lucky if I sell a dozen. I'm more excited about writing that one...
Or in other words you are doing research, a bit like a PhD and the book is a byproduct!
Like how HN was recently talking about 8 hours to code the first time, but half hour to retype the same code from memory the next day. The code is almost an small (but critical) artefact.
I love the idea of owning books you can’t find anywhere else. One of the main reasons I don’t bother going to bookstores is because I know everything there is just gonna be on Amazon anyway, and with reviews.
But the idea of coming across a strange book few people have read, and finding unconventional wisdom and writing inside that no publisher would ever put out, sounds exciting!
I think more people should write books and publish them in small quantities and just give them away for others to discover some day. Let the books circulate through the world, growing old and more mysterious with time. It’d be better than keeping some static blog site that will disappear after a decade.
Pretty much all of the physical books I own are like this: rare and impossible to find online, in digital format or otherwise. People really overestimate how many books have been digitized.
- Paradigms Lost by John Simon. A lot of these older cultural/writing commentary books don't seem to be digitized, but are absolutely worth reading
- Some older tourism books. For example, I have a little pamphlet book on visiting Yugoslavia, written in Polish.
- Unique/interesting formats. For example, I have a book of "useful words for dealing with capitalists and their markets" that was written in German during the DDR. It has about 2,000 words written side-by-side in 8 languages, including English, German, French, Czech, and some others.
- Older magazines, especially fashion magazines. Very hard to get a hold of or find online.
What I want is some easy way to print any website as a book. Some web serials would be best read as a physical book, but it’s often hard or impossible.
I'm not sure I'd phrase it as a _joke_, but I see your point. I think a lot of people aren't even aware of how much of their thinking is done for them. We all hold assumptions (like your comment) that are subject to different kinds of biases or influence. If you can read something that provides a framework for helping analyze your own decision-making and introspectively discover how you arrived at your conclusions, then I think that can be helpful.
Main value prop of physical books for me: guaranteed zero interruptions from the book itself. Worst case, the pages stick together, or pages are missing, or damaged, or other very infrequent causes of distraction.
All modern digital systems are by comparison, distraction machines. You never know when the next interruption ('notification') gets surfaced, the next update, the next forced restart, the next bug, the next battery problem, the next broken or lost charger cable.
Physical books require light, the book, and your mind. All else fades away, and your mind is given free reign to ponder, to consider, to deliberate. No wonder civilization flourished whenever the physical written form was embraced at sustained scale.
No one bought books. If one can believe Edward Dahberg, the first run of Thus Spake Zarathusra sold ten copies, the first run of Stendhal's On Love, seventeen copies. That considered, Thoreau selling just more than 200 of the first printing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appears as a raging success--but he had many literate friends.
Simon Leys, in the essay "Readers' Rewards and Writers' Rewards", quotes the French writer, and sometime publisher, Jacques Chardonne as saying that "Any good book will find 3,000 readers, no more no less." Leys goes on to say the number hasn't varied significantly in last 400 years. (Collected in The Hall of Uselessness)
Almost everything this post describes is not new, not even 21st century new. E-books market share seems to be stuck at about 20% of the total market, where it's been since the early teens. The decline of the print book is more or less like the decline of vinyl albums, except that it never actually declined that much.
However, a lot more people want to be a best-selling author, than there are spots available, so most books don't sell much, and there are lots more authors who cannot get any advance at all. It was ever thus.
Kobo and Google Play both tell you up-front if a book has DRM or not. And very often - not "rare"-ly as you claim - buying directly from the publisher results in a DRM-free ebook.
All of the major eBook stores sell books with and without DRM (including Amazon Kindle, Rakuten Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play Books).
Whether an individual book includes DRM on all of these stores is down to the publisher, and you won't typically see books from the major publishers offered without DRM.
I am fairly certain that most, if not all, mass market ebooks use DRM tied to the software. If the servers go, the books will be fine for as long as the software continues to work.
There are also authors and publishers who offer books without DRM.
Please note: I do not like DRM. I simply view disinformation as a good way to loose good will from those who would otherwise support a cause.
DRM being tied to the software is effectively still the same end result. Software maker for any number of reasons stops publishing new versions of the app and they become unlisted from appstores eventually for failing to use recent SDKs or patching security flaws and users still cannot read their books.
So you depend on a company paying someone to run a DRM server or you depend on them paying someone to maintain an app and a CI/CD system. Sooner or later when the DRM content supplier stops paying for the infrastructure, your book stops working one way or the other.
Most Kindle books are not sold with DRM, for many years now. I don't know about other platforms. Readers yelled at publishers until they stopped enabling it, and turned out it didn't make enough difference to keep annoying their core customer base.
Never seen a "download DRM-free ePub" option for any Amazon book url but if they have that, the Internet seems to not know about it on a cursory search.
If you mean it downloads the book exclusively to the Kindle app in a proprietary format only that app can read, then it is just a different form of DRM a user has to hack around.
Yep. No money in it short of not just getting optioned for TV or film, but an actual released production. Even then, a hit or two likely won’t pay as much as you’d think. Some pretty damn successful authors have boring day jobs, or stopped after a handful of “successful” books that didn’t make them much money and went back to a normal corporate career.
The other option is to crank out (ha, ha) short romance novels like a machine and market like mad. The money’s in hard work at writing porn, or in big broad-audience grand slams, probably written at a junior high reading level, with a small niche supporting a handful of authors in writing based-on-a-true-story stuff (bonus if “true crime” connection) aimed directly at getting optioned for film or tv (but that one’s very hard to break into, studios have some go-to authors for that stuff and you ain’t one of them)
I've asked a number of agents online for two numbers:
1) How many unsolicited queries have you received, in whatever time period you like: month, quarter, year, forever?
2) How many turned into published books?
None will provide that data, but I strongly suspect that the answer to #2 is "zero."
They'll happily quote you BS quantities, like "a bunch" or "a handful."
So as this article says, they spend their time chasing celebrities, online influencers, and friends of friends. And not making a whole lot of money anyway.
I don't think this is what the article says at all. It says that publishers make all their money celebrities and the backlist, and that those titles pay for all the midlist titles, most of which don't recoup their advances.
It's not like publishers can simply decide to focus on new and midlist authors. The books that sell, sell. The top line of this article is well described by its title.
No, you're quite mistaken. The agents try to divine what the publishers want, which is, as you said, "celebrities [and the backlist], and that those titles pay for all the midlist titles, most of which don't recoup their advances."
> It's not like publishers can simply decide to focus on new and midlist authors
who said anything about what they should or shouldn't do?
But since you brought it up: the same applies to the music business, as Ted Gioia (my original source). At one time in history, everyone in the music business was focused on selling more music, so nurturing and promoting new artists was good business. They didn't simply look at "what are people buying now?"
I have what the article says to go on, and the article contradicts you. But I know a bit more about the music industry, and it is absolutely the case that midlist music acts don't --- and never did --- generate enough record sales to cover their nut. There's a famous Steve Albini zine article that indicts the recording industry for never recouping an advance, and a less famous David Lowery article that explains why nobody could reasonably expect any of these titles to recoup.
It may be that we don't disagree at all, and are just talking past each other? At any rate: my only point here is, like startup investing and the music industry, we're talking about a hits business. And they aren't hits businesses because a cabal of cigar-chomping executives wants them to be that; they're that way because the median investment never recoups, and so the winners have to pay for the losers.
Just in case it's helpful: I think you're going to find this approach to dealing with disagreements on HN isn't going to work out to your benefit, or to the benefit of whatever point you're trying to make.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That's always been the case; it's merely a proxy for likely sales. It used to be that audience was demonstrated by previous sales; now it can be proved by being a celebrity, twitch/twitter/instagram/whatever followers, etc.
He has 0.77 dollar profit on an 51 dollar book. A minimal campaign with some organisational backing on HN alone should be able to get 1000 books sold, no? Every programmer who lived trough the doom craze is interested. It would place him above the average number of books sold.
>> Q. And Penguin Random House pays Amazon to improve its search results?
>> A. There is something that is available to our publishers, it’s called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS, and all publishers can spend money and give it to Amazon to have hopefully better search results.
>> — Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House
Wait, "hopefully better"?
What the hell is Amazon selling, magic publishing advertising snake oil?
If I'm paying for placement, I'd expect something more than hope.
Here's how it works: The big companies that pay for AMS get listed ahead of companies that don't in the search results. Since they all pay, it means that the top results are basically ranked the same as if none of them paid. But if you don't pay, your books will appear in the "organic" results - after all the marketed ones - essentially destroying any chance of being seen.
This way Amazon can claim that their search results are fair and algorithmic, protecting them from accusations of monopolistic practices. AMS is a simple paid marketing service, not at all like a tax or protection money, right?
But what's really happening is companies are paying just to make sure they're included somewhere in the top results rather than the organic ones, which no one bothers to look at.
They do the same for their App Store search on Fire TVs. No rev share? Good luck finding that app - even if you search for it by name.
So "hopefully better" is all the publishers are paying for.
I wish my daughters would stop reading books (not really) so I could stop buying them all the time (happy to pay this expense). I was worried for a while because my wife and I are both voracious readers, but none of our children seemed to be developing a similar love for literature. That changed practically overnight. They went from Anime to Manga to YA lit to full blown novels in less than a year. Their tastes are still very particular, so we can't reliably go to a used book store to find things they are willing to try. But each time we go to buy them books, their selections get a little more varied than before.
The latest game is "How many books can I get?". I think they know perfectly well that I'll buy them as many books as they want because I've never told them I wouldn't buy them a book. So in a way it's them exploring their own impulsiveness and desire to consume versus what they consider to be reasonable. I always make them set their own limit. But I'm also fortunate to be a tech worker who doesn't have to even think about budgeting for books. Telling them no has never been a practical consideration here.
How much new information is there published in book form each year which the average person needs to (or wants to) read?
How much leisure time does the average person choose to dedicate each year to reading? How do they decide which book(s) will be selected for this?
Arguably the problem is that much of the purpose which books traditionally take up has been replaced by:
- encyclopedias --- Wikipedia
- magazines/newspapers --- Facebook and social media
- dime store novels --- fan fiction and webcomics
Time was that the way to be successful w/ a self-published book was to manage to get it bought by the ~9,000 library systems in the U.S. --- how many of these books are being purchased by libraries?
In Poland we publish 9000 new books each year, of course initial runs are like 500-1k copies. Not sure how it breaks down in detail on types like science publications and else but average person reads 1 book a year, avid readers read 7 and above but they are 1% of the population.
Just some stats as I watched discussion on this topic. I think the question was rhetorical but feels like a nice thing to add.
I believe another factor is frequency of moving, because that’d disincline people from buying significant amounts of any kind of heavy and/or bulky media, of which books are both. More than a small bookshelf’s worth is a real pain to haul around.
This. I donated half a lifetime's collection of physical books a few years ago, when I moved into my girlfriend's apartment. I kept books which are either a) impossible to get electronically (mostly technical or academic works), or b) worthless on screen (mostly large-format photography and art books, or c) for which I have a sentimental attachment to the physical artifact (a couple of first editions; some gifts; some that bring back particular memories).
It's so freeing! I read a LOT, and being able to curate a massive library in Calibre, and keep >3k books on my Kindle, is (for me) entirely superior to lugging around heavy physical objects.
I rip DRM off of (most) every ebook I buy, and back up the files, so I'm not worried about losing access, either. Even if the apocalypse arrives my Kindle + a solar charger fit in my bug-out bag better than a box of books.
I've done the DRM ripping in the past, but from what I've understood Calibre or other tools are unable to do that for the latest DRM variants Amazon is using. Is that correct? I would like to back up my entire Kindle collection as it is now.
As I understand it the problems are with Kindle Unlimited files, and it's more complicated if you don't actually own a Kindle (like, you have to use the Kindle app, but only some app versions work?). I don't have KU, and I import the files directly into Calibre from my Kindle and it all Just Works. Or it did last time I ripped a batch a month or two ago. Maybe something's changed in the meantime and I'm due for some frustration the next time I try. I dunno.
Thanks. I'll try that. I have a Kindle, but in the past I downloaded the books to the PC when I wanted a backup, and used Calibre on that. I did this because the docu said that it could only un-DRM books in "PC" format, the Kindle used something different. This is from a few years ago.
> How much new information is there published in book form each year which the average person needs to (or wants to) read?
> How much leisure time does the average person choose to dedicate each year to reading? How do they decide which book(s) will be selected for this?
I mean, the thing is, people aren't reading books, they're reading instagram. We haven't substituted one knowledge-accumulating method for another, we've replaced books with social media. If you want to talk about which one generates or propagates more information-as-knowledge, that's an interesting conversation, but I think the effective mechanism here is someone figured out how to hypercharge the dopamine roller-coaster to a degree that books just can't compete.
From the article: "The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles"
Well that was a depressing read (no pun intended).
Books are functionally a type of merch (low end) or art object (high end) at this point. The companies that sell the most understand this, whereas those that adhere to the old model of focusing on the words/information inside are struggling.
For example: celebrity books like David Goggins’ sell extremely well at a lower price point. At the other end, Taschen, who makes expensive art books and partners with celebrities often, also does well.
OK, I haven't read the whole thing yet but this bit raised an eyebrow...
>These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: _publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)._
Why do we view this as a vanity project and not the purpose of the whole endeavour? The celebrity books are just to raw material that allow them to dot heir real job; to make books those fragments of human connection widely available to the people who might need them, a service to readers and to future generations that isn't just about making money.
Theres something rather magical about reading books. Or perhaps Im just an old fart that grew up without the internet.
The article is fascinating but worrying. I do hope the industry survives in some form. I love the experience of reading books. It would be a shame if everything was digital although it seems like an inescapable conclusion after looking at the data in the article…
Reading, if you’re good at it, is the most sophisticated and powerful form of storytelling, allowing detail and scope far beyond movies or games. And writing is far more accessible and cheaper than any other form of media creation. I think thats the magic.
But it has such a high requirement of education and practice, and demands such a high price in focus and attention. Its no wonder that it doesnt fit most people’s lives.
Nothing is going to go all digital, except maybe sales. Print-on-demand means that every ebook can also be a physical trade paperback, if the publisher chooses. Amazon even have a button you can click to give a free copy of the ebook to everyone who buys the printed version (not sure if this encourages printed sales, or more to expose people to the dark side).
The headline isn't accurate. "No One Buys Most Books" maybe, but the article talks about books that sell more than 300,000 copies in a year. 90% of books sell fewer than 2000 copies in a year, but 2000 is actually a decent number, especially considering it will be a lot more than 2000 over the lifetime of the book.
There's more to this as well. You have to factor in that a lot of people write books because they want to say they wrote a book, and others do it because it supports their professional brand, so there was never an intention or expectation of selling a thousand copies.
The article doesn't say these books sell 2000 copies a year; it says they sell 2000 copies, period. Generously assume a $30 new release hardcover cost ("The City Is Up For Grabs", the most recent book I bought, cost $25) and a 20% gross margin for the publisher, and you're talking $35k total to split between the publisher and the author.
It does talk about celebrity books selling some low number of copies within the year of publication. Presumably those books do keep selling at some level for some long tail of the book being in print. But unless books are utterly unlike all other media, 80-90% of the proceeds from selling the book will come during the new release window.
Also, the author conflates fiction with non-fiction. No kidding, if you include science books , guides, how-to books, etc. most books do not sell many copies, but they are not expected or intended to. It's not like the market for calculus books is that big. Fiction books by major publishing houses for a general audience still sell a lot.
Fiction only sells a lot if you hit the best seller lists. Most books do not, and it has been this way since at least 2000. For most fiction authors, you would make more money at a minimum wage job. You know, all the ones you haven't heard off because they didn't hit the best seller lists.
Most libraries that people have access to are more like "Disney+ for books". They have a limited selection of extremely mainstream books. If you're happy to make do with whatever they have on offer then you're fine, but if you want something specific you'll have to go out and buy it.
Back in the DVD days and before everyone broke ranks and tried to start their own service, the thing that made Netflix great was that no matter what you wanted they had it. Having no retail footprint meant they could stock everything without having to compromise. Libraries don't have that advantage.
This is also one of the areas in which the Internet has actually delivered on early promise (though the success has been a long time coming, and remains precarious): the Internet Archive offers access to over 20 million records, and aims to have a web page for every book ever published. Note that this still isn't full access to all material, but it's quite good.
The US Library of Congress has also been expanding its public access, as have other large public libraries (the New York Public Library notably). LoC also have specific programmes aimed at disabled readers such as its NLS BARD programme for the visually- and reading-disabled.
Books are too expensive to buy every week in any quantity greater than 1.
I read 7-12 new books a week to my son, I'd go bankrupt if it wasn't for libraries.
(We typically read 5-10 books a day, ur the 12 books we get from the library each week have an uneven distribution of what gets read again and again).
Presumably as my son gets older we'll move to books that take longer to read and the absolute # will go down.
Back when I was single and didn't have a kid, I'd go through 2 or 3 long form fiction books a week. At that point in life, Half Priced Books (the book store chain with that name) was my financial savior.
Books are expensive. A kids picture book is easily $15-$20, with outliers costing even more. Whenever I do go book shopping with my son we end up spending almost $200.
Technical books are part of it, and O’Reilly can probably do much more accurate forecasting on their titles than others do, but they still have total reach problems.
If I think of all the technical things I’ve done, there are some I’ve bought lots of books for, and others I’ve never bought a book at all, including some relatively major languages.
Counterpoint: after taking a big hit during the pandemic years of 2020-2022, global book sales are climbing again. Sales are down compared to the years before 2019, but the trend recently has been positive, especially for audio and e-books.
> I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
I know this is in some way an irritating thing to say, but this is exactly what I would have guessed before I read the article. It's cool to see numbers put to it but I don't think this was a secret.
I am struck by the coda where the antitrust intervention did nothing to preserve a healthy market. Kind of a common story.
Everyone can easily access the books they want. People choose to read the Bible and Harry Potter because that's what they want to read.
Of course, it might be a shame that we all coordinate on reading a few hits that everyone else is reading rather than check out some underappreciated books. But is the market really to blame for that? Amazon makes it easier than ever to find all the books. Publishers, as pointed out in the quote, are publishing tons of books that don't make it, in part because of a belief that it's a good thing to do. It's easier to self publish than ever before. And social media is often playing a big role in discovering the huge hits that everyone else is reading - many are not the books pushed by the marketing machine, but word-of-mouth successes that get discovered and shared by a huge group of dedicated, articulate readers.
If there were hardly any books selling 3-digit numbers, that to me would suggest an unhealthy market. The presence of lots and lots selling that many seems very positive.
Not particularly. New niche-interest non-fiction books are expensive ( $60+ ) and tend to have short print runs, after which their price on the second-hand market quickly escalates. And few are available as ebooks.
I've had to let a lot of books pass me by, even before they've been printed, simply because I couldn't afford them.
I realise that this isn't an argument to show that the book market is healthy, but have you considered piracy? Many of the type of books you are describing are very easily available via libgen.
Their idea of the problem with the proposed merger, making it unhealthy, was that it would reduce the number of players in the market. How is one of the players getting picked apart by private equity instead of merging with a different player a better outcome, then?
Paper Books for random-access Technical Reference.
Electronic Books for General 'Beginning-to-End', or 'Story-Telling' reading.
In general, though most books can be either paper or electronic depending on personal convenience at the time. It's not a 'Black and White', 'One Thing or the Other' choice. Both formats are as good as the other if need be.
Weird, I have the exact opposite preference. I do like looking things up in paper reference books, but a lot of the time I remember context well enough that I can type a key phrase and have it instantly. I prefer learning from paper, so if it's a scientific paper that's too complex/deep to just skim and longer than 10-15 pages I'll often print it.
Reading for pleasure on the other hand, I will only do on paper. The physicality of the book, down to the wrinkles and texture of the paper, are part of the enjoyment.
For "linear fiction"[0] I use an e-ink reader exclusively. I also re-read books pretty much never. There are way too many excellent books I haven't read yet, so why would I spend time redoing something I have already experienced? I can easily hi-light stuff on the Kindle and check them out from Goodreads if I need to later.
For books I read for work and other knowledge stuff it's either PDF on an iPad or a web page. In some rare cases a physical book, but stuff tends to move so fast paper reference books expire too fast to have any advantage compared to asking a large language model.
If I get the urge to make any notes from this category, they go into Obsidian.
[0] Books that are read from beginning to end with no need to jump around to check stuff you read before. Could be a biography too, which isn't fiction per se.
I've published a few self-published books on Amazon about my global adventures. While sales are not making me rich, they certainly do sell month after month.
No one buys books, cd's, dvd's, blurays, magazines, comics, games, and many other things that were bought a lot 10-30 years ago. These days everything is online and (usually) subscription based.
Looking at myself, the only things I buy regularly, is food ;)
n = 1, but I purchase physical books, comics, references, etc. under two circumstances:
- cannot find an easy way to de-DRM media available on online stores. I want the ability to copy epub files across my devices and read offline.
- the digital version is a poor-quality scan. This frequently happens with comics.
This is embarrassing to discuss normally, but an additional perk of physical comics and light novels is that I can look at the obi and get reminded what I was doing in the past, where I was in the past, what was happening in the past, etc. especially for those which I have finished reading. The subset of my friends with similar interests as me tend to discard the obi, since it becomes bothersome while reading. I have the habit of removing the obi while I am reading something, then add it back when finished reading the entire thing. Things like this can't really be done with digital media, especially subscriptions.
Surely CDs have become Spotify, tidal. Blu rays have become Netflix, Disney, etc. magazines have become websites, etc.
The content is still there just the medium has changed. Has the same been true for books though? eBooks do exist of course, but did they replace the publishing industry that existed 50 or a hundred years ago?
It seems obvious that books lost some market share.
People have a limited amount of time for entertainment and have a lot more choice between Netflix, YouTube, Books and thousands of other things than they did back then.
True for fiction books. But if you think about fiction generally, as the poster said, the medium has changed. People still love fiction, but now it's movies and shows.
As far as I can tell eBooks aren't significantly more popular than physical books. Surely the publishers cited in the article wouldn't have neglected that topic if it was actually a major revenue stream.
As far as audiobooks go I don't know. Do you have any numbers?
I have about 6000 books, about 1000 of these are on Kindle.
Of the 6000, most have bookmarks. I read at least the first 50 pages of most of them. I've finished a couple hundred so far. I found my old business cards make perfect bookmarks.
I guess "No one buys books" isn't strictly true.
I tried to write 4 books. I was told that I'd likely sell less that 1000. Beyond that would be considered a major win. I finished one, published it, and have made about $500. It took me months to write.
I love books. I have a copy of "I, Robot" signed by Asimov. I really like books signed by authors.
My book took a year and a half to write and has made about $400 in direct royalties.
I can't precisely quantify the return on investment, but I believe that having the ISBN on my resume has resulted in me getting more work opportunities and/or salary, so it's a pretty good investment. Also people think you're smart for having the stupidity to start writing a book without having the good sense to abandon the project halfway through.
I'm not sure I understand the "I read at least the first 50 pages of most of them". Did you somehow receive 6000 books in one huge batch and you're just checking them out, one by one?
I mean, I've thousands of books in my collection (though I've had to dump a ton of them lately due to space restrictions.. that's sad), and I've read all of them end-to-end. If a book is so bad that I can't finish it.. it does happen with "free" Kindle books, but for my paper book collection I think there are maybe two or three I didn't read all through.
> Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that…..
I guarantee any book-length post on substack will get substantially LESS views than that.
This person discovered what any aspiring writer who cares already knows: Publishing like music runs on proven revenue generating content and gambles on the next big hit. Same as it ever was, and Amazon changes nothing about that fact.
Maybe publishing consolidates and changes, companies boom or bust but the business itself has always been like this.
Books are like the wayback machine. You can reread authors as they actually wrote their oeuvres without editing from modern day overzealous publishers who censor or otherwise alter the originals.
I've been buying scifi books from thrift stores for a decade or more.
But in the last couple years, there's been a near complete collapse in it. The racks of scifi have abruptly dwindled to a handful of lonely books. The entire book section has dramatically shrunk as well. This is across thrift stores, not just one.
Is it:
1. nobody buys physical books anymore
2. nobody donates physical books anymore
3. donations seem to be driven by estate sales. Maybe the book lovers have already all died out and their estates are liquidated
I don't know. But I'm glad I bought the books when I could.
It's partially number one but definitely this for me, insofar as thrift stores go. The two thrift stores around me that take books are Goodwill and the Salvation Army and I won't donate anything to them any more.
My book donations go to the neighborhood independent bookstore for them to price and resell and keep their employees paid.
The large chain bookstore near me still has several shelves of science fiction, new release and perennial favorites, so I think at least some are still being made and sold. Hopefully you can find what you seek.
I think there's a fourth option - those little kiosks (like the Little Free Library ones) have started to spring up everywhere so it's a lot easier to just leave one's read books there.
So, I usually think in terms of longevity. I do own some books, because in case computers don’t work anymore, well I can still read good stuff. I have plenty of PDFs/epubs in my laptop because the internet may not work anymore anytime. I do have some stuff in the cloud, but just for convenience (I don’t care if those files disappear).
Same with music,
movies and video games. I want to be able to “run” stuff offline. Electricity is still a big dependency (i’m looking into solar panels)
I'm the same way, and also: I want to not have to pay a subscription fee forever. Once I have what I want, then that's it! I'm don't need to spend another dime. But if I use Spotify or whatever, I have to keep paying forever. It is a much worse deal.
The difference between music and books is time investment. New music comes out all the time, and I'm always discovering old music. A subscription works great for music because I can listen to so many songs. Books not so much, and I consider myself a reader.
> A subscription works great for music because I can listen to so many songs. Books not so much, and I consider myself a reader.
It can work for books too, kinda. You can check "J-Novel Club" for an existing example. Chapters are translated in parts, and each part is released ASAP to subscribers, before the whole thing is translated (though they're clear that it's still a WIP).
It's also extremely common for... uh... "gray-zone indie translators" to translate web novels from Japanese into English, and release the translations first to Patreon supporters, and a week later to everyone else.
Granted, everything I'm saying is very specific to the niche of JP novels.
And even with books it becomes much easier to say “I’ll reread the lord of the rings on this flight” than it is to take a wild risk on an unknown book and author.
Yeah, if you're frequently getting new music then a subscription makes sense. My music library is pretty much static. I don't like the vast majority of new music, and I've already gotten the vast majority of old music that I care about. My music purchases are something like $30 (at most, usually much less) per year, which is way cheaper than Spotify.
I pay for streaming 90% because my wife wants to, and 10% because it's the only way I can legally watch things in some cases. So I would say yes, in that I would rather ditch those too, but no in that they have uses I can't replace at this time.
Our brains our overloaded with text these days with all the scrolling of news, email, texts and at work which mostly involves even more text.
Reading a great book has great value, I think most people would agree, but to even get to the cognitive state where we could even consider doing this, we have to reduce our enormous load of text that is not work-related.
I started doing this a few years back and I got back into reading in my spare time and I will never regret it.
I love reading books, and I write: I've had essays published in various internet corners, and I'm working on a humble little book of my own. Few who write do so for the money, and like most things, the Pareto Principle applies. That being said, another commenter has pointed out that book sales data suggests we are actually in a book boom.
Also, publishers are absolutely in it for the money. But the quotes and analysis of this article suggest that publishing houses are too big and a victim of their own size. It seems like they can't "run lean" and are big enough that they are trying to find books that can sell millions of copies.
Other questions I had while reading the article:
- Is there any Hollywood accounting in the book industry?
- Do writer's advances still make sense? What if advances were smaller but royalties are bigger?
- These companies are looking for books that can sell millions of copies, but they could also a) raise the price, or b) have supplemental products + content for avid readers and fans.
In my essay “Writing books isn’t a good idea” I wrote that, in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.
yaawn..this useless stat again? The author erroneously mixes fiction with non-fiction. Of course, non-fiction from a boutique or niche publishing house will have smaller sales and thus depress the average. This includes such books as "trail guides in California" and so on, or science books. These non-fiction books are never expected to sell many copies and are marketed for a small or specific audience in mind, and there is minimal or no marketing push. So if you include these non-fiction books by tiny publishing houses, of course, most books sell few copies.
Fiction books by major publishing houses marketed to a general audience and with a significant marketing push are expected to sell a lot of copies, and do. Hence the large advances commonly seen for authors who write these type of books.
the stat is also leaving out an important part of the market, 10,000 books. (I think that's the size of a run of books; the actual number is not important, the vast range between 1000 and 100,000 is)
I like paper books. I get alot of enjoyment from giving them to friends to read. To me it’s like the difference between when I used to make a mix tape or mix cd and give to someone vs sharing a Spotify playlist.
Also I find that it adds character. Like if someone comes into my house they can see what type of stuff I’m into via my “analog” music movies and books.
Books are a vestigial organ. Nobody uses books as their primary mode of accessing information about the world anymore.
What is interesting is that the cultural mores around this vestigial organ have persisted to such a great degree. Harry Potter Books are a psycho-social mechanism of self-construction more than an actual work of fiction. The phenomenon of "I am a bookish person who reads Harry Potter" as a psychological thing that people do is larger and more significant than the actual story of Harry the young wizard. Likewise, the phenomenon of "I am a successful luminary who has written a book" is more important than the actual content of the book itself. Celebrities paying ghostwriters to write books and going to book signings to sign a book for people who will never actually read the book. A perfectly airtight simulacra.
I think I can rewrite this post using simpler language:
"I don't read books, and I assume nobody else does too.
People who read fun stories have ulterior motives besides enjoying the stories. (As opposed to the honest motives of people who enjoy movies or music, or other media)
People who write books have ulterior, egotistical motives to do so.
Celebrities sometimes write memoirs. See, this proves something!
The above points show that books are a "vestigial organ" and a "simulacra."
"
The fact that you have enough reading comprehension to summarize my comment, deconstruct its arguments, and formulate a counterargument puts you in an extremely small minority. You and I spend time around people who read, who have reading comprehension. Of those, a shrinking minority occasionally read actual books.
Most people never, ever, ever read paper or e-reader books. They struggle mightily in school to read the things they are _forced_ to read, and then say "never again" for life when they graduate. This is true even for intelligent people who have "good jobs" with disposable income and time set aside that they could conceivably spend reading paper or e-reader books. Seriously, if half of your friends have read a single paper or e-reader book in the last year, you are in a very very small minority.
Media that people regularly consume: Cable TV, Streaming Services, Instagram and TikTok, Movies, Sports, Reddit/Twitter/the news (CNN, etc), paper or e-reader books. What is your intuition about how large each of these categories is compared to the others? If you say "books" is even 5%, you are off by an order of magnitude.
What I am saying is that this holds true, even for a fandom like Harry Potter, which is ostensibly based around reading a book!
You're talking about midwits or whatever. Millions of very intelligent people still get most of their knowledge from books. Books remain the highest octane fuel.
A big audience means publishing houses don’t have to spend money on marketing
Only blockbuster authors get serious marketing support. For everyone else, big publishers want authors to shoulder marketing and publicity costs and responsibilities. Many lower tier authors are shocked to find they get zero marketing support:
I’d hate for readers to think this happens to every author who signs with a traditional publisher. I have worked with several “Big 5” publishers, and never got even a hint of marketing.
I think most cultural goods compete in hit-driven markets. That is a given. But as far as I understood the article claims the downfall of books in general. And that is not true, in my opinion at least. Books are bought as web novel or viewed on Kindle Unlimited or in general as self-published endeavors. And as the link in my post states, KU pays good, Patreon works as well. There also emerge more and more paid and sponsored newsletters etc. All completely independent to classical publishing channels.
> Books are bought as web novel or viewed on Kindle Unlimited or in general as self-published endeavors.
I've seen no data to suggest this is true at least in the sense it's some sort of major revenue shift. "Traditional" - so non-web novel - type e-books make up about 20% of sales of traditional books, and this has been very slow to change in recent years.
As far as I can tell - and this might well be way off, so I'm happy to see better numbers, the web novel market might maybe be somewhere between 3%-5% of the size of the traditional book market. Both likely can make up substantially more of indie authors earnings - it's certainly far easier for me to sell to Kindle users than getting my books into bookstores, and so paper sales largely come from Amazon too.
The webnovel market is really hard to justify spending time on unless you write in a very specific set of genres, and is prepared to death-march until you get traction. That's fine - some people want to do that.
But KU etc. does not pay well either for most. They pay well for a similarly minuscule fraction of writers, and next to nothing for most. For my part, I'm considering pulling my stuff from there, as it prevents you from putting up your ebooks elsewhere.
This isn't really surprising, sure - it's a market where it's now trivial to enter but still hard to get both good and find a product market fit. So you have a flood of people churning out vast volumes, most of which isn't very good, some of which is good but just up against a deluge of amazing work.
I don't know about the US, but I know there was a survey in the UK a couple of years back that showed that in the UK the average full-time writer, irrespective of platform, earns well below minimum wage, and the vast majority of writers are not full-time. Most full-time writers in the UK at least depend on the income of a partner to be able to afford to write full-time. And that average is pulled significantly up by the top end of the market.
Some people do better on KU or serialized venues than traditional books, sure.
With respect to the click-bait headline, it's not so much that all that much has changed, but that this is the most we've seen the publishing industry numbers laid bare.
And "no one" really do buy books in the sense that reading "books" be they traditional, or webnovel.com or other serial formats, is something most people just don't do very often.
I think web novel and similar channel revenue is hard to estimate, since Patreon revenue and so on flies below the radar.
It is of course still a niche, but I don't think it will stay that way. And I assume publishers see the effects already in consumer behavior. Just look at the Chinese web novel market.
You can not assume you can guess read-throughs based on reviews, is my first problem.
It's against their terms to buy reviews, but you still trivially can (and risk getting banned if Amazon suddenly decides to enforce their rules - it's not worth the risk), and plenty of "grey hat" review services exist that costs money and where the provider will "gift" the readers copies bought off Amazon, but where the readers aren't paid, and are at least in theory given instructions that somewhat tries to comply (or pretend to comply) with Amazon's rules. Wouldn't use that either.
If the reviews aren't verified, then ARC (advance reader copies) are also common and accepted by Amazon w/caveats (you need to be very careful about wording, and for KU it's against the terms for you to send the book out while it's exclusive to KU, but you can do it before, or pause KU), and a fairly large percentage who receive ARCs will leave reviews. ARCs is the norm in the publishing industry, and so anyone remotely decently prepared will line up reviewers that have no direct link to sales, and someone with a following somewhere can sometime line up fairly chunky numbers of reviews right off the bat.
But this means the ratio can be far lower. It's likely a lot of the early reviews will have come from free giveaways and early efforts that did not earn the author a single cent and might even have had a net cost.
Without knowing how the author in question promoted their book, it's a guess that could easily be off by a factor of ten. But it could also be better.
$200k is certainly possible. Just rare.
To do well on KU, people also usually focus on maximising page count. That means writing series, and pushing out "box sets" to encourage. It's a very different game from writing standalone novels, and one probably better suited to people already used to the webnovel/serials on Patreon game.
With respect to the Chinese web novel market, my son spends a fortune on it, but it's still a tiny sliver of overall publishing. I suspect it's likely to outpace the growth in the rest of the e-book market though.
I don't think that's right. It's just too good. Imagine that you are an author and maybe you pay one line editor and get beta-readers for free, maybe you do your own cover, and you don't print a large batch of your book and because you are the author, you can't pay yourself an advance. That kind of resourcefulness that a trad publisher can't afford would allow that same 35/100, maybe a little higher, or maybe a little lower, depending on how you do with self-promotion. Still, it means that if you are not a terrible writer, or one who consistently writes stuff nobody wants to read, you will make money with one book out of three. Which I think is too good.
I'm pretty sure that means 35% of books covered their advance (ie. authors actually started getting paid royalties). I think it is still about $1 per full price paperback (physical or ebook).
Just to refute the title: I've sold a dozen of my textbooks in the last two weeks. I bought them almost fifty years ago for my applied physics degree. So some people are buying some books.
But yes of course no one buys most of the books that are published, I don't suppose that Lorrain and Corson sold more than a few thousand copies of Electromagnetic fields and waves (one of the books I sold) and I doubt that they made enough money to pay for the work it must have cost them.
It must be even worse for academic textbook authors nor that many university courses don't even use textbooks any more because they have switched to modular online instruction.
I'm in a very heavy library family; we are checking out and reading a few hundred books per year between all of us.
Yet we still buy a few books, and I bet that if we made an inventory of the books we currently own that are in the house, it would number in the hundreds. But... most were purchased secondhand. I take my daughter to the bookstore every few months; it is always busy. While she is browsing, I also look around. I'd buy half a dozen or more books on each visit if it weren't for the price. At retail price, books aren't a good deal. Even buying a paper copy of a public domain book will run $15-20. Why?
The US prices averages out to ~$15, while the Japanese prices average out to $10. You might say most of that is due to the current exchange rate (1 USD = 154 JPY), but then most books listed on Amazon Japan's "novels" best sellers seemed to be priced around ~$6 USD (~900 JPY), compared to the $18-22 in Amazon.com's "literature and fiction" list.
Did you mean page count? For the novels I read, 200-300 per volume seems common. This seems comparable to the English novels I have, so it feels like less money for roughly same amount of content.
Because many light novels come in series that are spread over several volumes, it's arguable that it costs more money to finish a story because you have to read all these volumes instead of one monolithic tome. I buy the volumes one by one as they are released and don't feel that the individual books are that expensive, but someone catching up on an old series might feel different.
If you mean physical size, the average English books does seem physically larger than the average Japanese book.
Everybody needs to get paid, and everybody needs to make a profit.
The folks that store the books (think Wholesale), the movers/couriers, the retail that has to pay rent/employees/etc _and_ make a profit.
The consider that (depending on the country) there is a VAT on that book. It slowly adds up.
I remember in Brighton back in the 90s I had found a second hand bookstore, that had 5x the books per sqm comparing to the Barnes & Noble in the center of London. B&N had wide corridors, the shelves on the perimeter were all the way to the ceiling, but the non-walled ones were 1.5m high. And considering that they wanted the books to look cool, they were nicely spaced.
Now when you compare this to the second hand bookstore, where presentation is not 'a thing'.. you got many-many more books per sqm, and the authors/publishers don't need to get paid again. But still.. a second hand book will always been 1/3 to 1/4 of a new book (from own experience).
EDIT: I sometimes think that if my life takes a very dark turn, and for whatever reason I end up poor and alone, I will find the smallest/cheapest possible village that has a public library back to my country of origin, and I will be spending max amount of hours in that library.. free wifi, free heating/cooling, and ALL the books I can read(hey, my name is Henry Bemis after all!!)
Off-topic, but wow there were some good used bookstores in Brighton. I think I know the one you mean, but the quirkiest was the one with a massive pile (literally a pile) of unshelved, uncategorized books in the basement. Hardbacks were £1, paperbacks 50p. It smelled faintly of mould down there, and there were some chairs and beanbags (the beanbags were too dodgy for me to sit in, lol) around the edges, so we'd sneak in cans of beer and spend the afternoon going through the pile and reading what we found. Once or twice the owner shouted down the stairs that he was going to the pub and to turn off the lights and make sure the door was locked when we left.
Sometimes I miss being young and poor. I'm not sure I'd enjoy spending a day like that anymore, and I'm not sure why.
I think at least half of the top level comments didn't read the article, and mistook it for an article about reading habits. It's actually about the number of books that sell well, not the number of readers.
Being mostly into technical books and textbooks, I WOULD BUY BOOKS if the publishers didn't goddamn charge $300 for an undergrad textbook.
I have no love for textbook publishers AND authors. They could all crash and burn for all I care.
The best real analysis textbook I've seen recently by Jay Cummings sells on Amazon for $16. So it is possible to (self)publish books that people can and would buy. Granted that the author probably doesn't live on this book's income, it points out that more affordable solutions can at least exist.
They're not new, but that's a feature not a bug. The books are more affordable, you're consuming sustainably, and who really cares if a book has been read before?
> The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
This distribution is pretty common in artistic professions and professional sport. A tiny fraction takes most of the pot.
As they say around here, that's a feature and not a bug. In art, people tend to do stuff not because they are looking to earn an income, but they have something to prove or say or show.
I think novels also suffer from a lack of independent tastemakers. Book stores all went out of business, and none of the publishing houses have an identity beyond publishing what sells. I can't think of any book review blogs that have loyal followings, so you end up with the only exposure being pay-for-play. It's really difficult to discover new authors that I like with the current systems.
Interesting article. I have a book still in print, very niche subject. First released in 2013, Amazon mysteriously stoppped stocking it last May, even with recent annual sales of 150-250/yr. Life time print sales are over 1,300 with close to an additional 500 in digital copies.
Hardly a life changer but I've managed to keep the bottom line compensation to $6 per copy, give or take, the entire time so dinner money ;)
Despite the narrative that copyright holders in every industry like to push, a pirated copy is not equal to a lost sale. Their actual losses are likely a small fraction of that number.
They may or may not have bought it, but the calculations of "lost sales" assume that 100% of them would have bought it at full price, which is absurd. I'd wager it is closer to 10%.
In my lifetime I've easily bought 100x more books used than new, which (from their perspective) is economically indistinguishable from piracy. Any of those "lost sales" estimates strike me as entirely bogus.
So much discussion about children's books, yet they don't mention The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rick Brandt, Ken Holt, Nancy Drew, Dig Allen, Tom Corbett, Dana Girls, Trixie Belden, Donna Parker, Brains Benton, Power Boys, Sandy Steele, Biff Brewster, Judy Bolton, and all the shenanigans of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
Interesting analysis, but it misses one group of authors: those who write books for fun, not profit.
Writing is an effective way to convey your thoughts and ideas. Writing a book has the added benefit of forcing you to plan, prioritize, and edit at a much larger scale. With it comes a greater feeling of achievement. Selling a few copies is a nice cherry on top.
I'm currently writing a book about the What? How? & Why? of Bitcoin.
For me, the gain and street cred I will receive from having completed a book is invaluable to me personally.
I'm writing this book in Dutch, so I really don't expect any sales. Okay, maybe a few if there was another bull-run and frenzy, but that's not why I am writing this book.
If the title is the conclusion you're reaching after reading all the testimony (or whatever it is) then you're probably the kind of person who never buys books. Other than the heavy hitters and back catalogs, there are too many other books for there not to be a long, sparse tail of sales.
I consume a LOT of comics on bittorrent, read them then buy expensive physical editions of the ones i like.
That is VERY bad for my wallet (:i consume comics a lot), but it is always a sure shot when going to the comics store.
The only major reading I do these days is via audiobooks, I simply read them faster than via visually looking at the page. It might be my attention span, but somehow audio is just faster to literally cram words into the mind at high speed than consciously moving your eyes over a page.
I'm the opposite - I read many times faster than audio, so I have big problems with using e.g. Youtube to get information. It feels agonizingly slow to get the information over. I feel like I could get that in two minutes of reading versus listening for half an hour.
When I read novels I take a few pages - depending on what I read - to get my mind into the story, and from then on what's written isn't text on paper (or e-reader) anymore, it's just a story unfolding in my mind. I don't "see" the text.
I know what you mean with the last sentence, it feels the same for me when reading text too in that it disappears if I'm engrossed in the story. However, for audio, I listen at 3 to 5x speed so audio can be magnitudes faster than text. You should probably try increasing the speed of your YouTube videos, that's also what I do, plus I use add-ons like SponsorBlock which provide a "skip to video highlight" button as well as cutting out all of the filler content in a video.
I buy books of all kinds. Paperback, hard cover, audio (rarely), e-book prefer non DRM. In fact, the number of books I buy has not really changed much. I just end up reading more books!
People trade or loan me books. I get electronic ones via many means too.
I buy used books all the time, sometimes several per month. And I pre-ordered a new book for which I am pretty excited. "Speaking"in universals (the irony of this statement is not lost on me) is unwise.
> Penguin Random House owns Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar intellectual property. The book has been on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list every week for 19 years.
This is insane. To be fair, it’s a fun book. But 19 years?!
On the flipside, it’s nice that there’s a thriving small and fine press community out there with lots of news press’ appearing over the last few years and some really beautiful books being published.
isnt there a logical twist in all this.. The problem is that
there are so many _different_ books. I have a house not exactly filled, but certainly loaded with books. So people certainly buy books. But of each book, I seldomly have more than one or two.
It's a bit like random numbers
filling the interval 0-1.
each number has 0 probability, but they fill out the infinite space 0-1 fully.
But how horrible it would be to only have the 10 best selling books. The bible, anyone..
There is a steady stream of tech books being published.
Does anyone know what sort of advance a tech author can get,
if we leave out the biggest author.
Since years back I already can’t help but keep thinking of paper books as nothing but printouts of text files. (And I no longer want or need printouts.)
I wish I had gotten to the comment section earlier because the top-level summary of this article is simply incorrect.
The majority of the revenue of the Big 5 publishers may come from celebrities and repeat best-sellers. But the majority of the profit comes from the un-anticipated best sellers: books that the publishers offer low advances but end up going on to vastly out-sell expectations. While some of those books may have ended up in the "anticipated top selling books" category identified in the trial, the point is that their eventual sales are vastly greater than anticipated, for whatever level was offered.
This means that the rest of their publishing business is absolutely not a "vanity project": it is the business of publishing itself. The reason why these publishers have a backlist (older books that earn a profit long after release) is because of the unanticipated best-sellers. The trial data makes it very clear that publishers (and authors) are actually better at pricing the very high-end books and therefore the profits are typically less (because authors have more leverage to get a fair price in their initial negotiations).
So TL;DR: publishers hope to find promising, but under-rated, authors who may potentially go on to become best-sellers. They continue to fund the books of such authors (despite generally not making a profit) because the few that do fund the rest of the business. But (ironically) once such authors are actually established as best-selling franchise authors, those very same authors' ability to negotiate drives profit margins down, which drives the endless search for fresh talent in the publishing industry.
I feel like I finally need to complete my own analysis of the trial results, because I don't think this is well understood.
Books are, in many cases anyways, an outdated medium. Or at best, a medium that has fierce competition from many other mediums that did not exist for the majority of time the printing press has been around. There's just so many ways to consume fiction today and the barrier to entry is essentially 0. Literature still has its place but that has always been a very small place for the highly intellectual - a limiting factor on its own. Similarly for non-fiction, there's just so much competition from other mediums that frankly, people tend to prefer over books.
People who love reading (I count myself here) will continue to and books will be viable to them. But the vast majority of people only ever read because there wasn't an alternative.
>> Obviously, given the number of people searching on Amazon for products, that gives them a huge advantage because when people go onto Amazon, they—if the book isn’t there for what they are searching for, they could create that book.
This is a really weird thing to say. It seems to assume that people are indifferent to the quality of the writing in the books they read.
The observation in the essay that "the romance category has already gone independent" also leaves that impression - for the romance category.
But the fact that one of two profitable genres is "franchise authors" suggests the opposite. Franchise authors become franchise authors by producing high-quality writing.
Writing is art, just like painting, acting, playing an instrument, etc.. Great hobby. Don't expect to make it a profession. There's a truth behind the phrase "starving artist".
Lottery winners are famous. It's easy to forget that most lottery tickets don't win.
Yeah. I'm a member of the Furry Writer's Guild and in a few anthologies. This is a discussion that comes up occasionally. The sad fact is a lot of people don't read and furry fandom is pretty niche market to start with. Art and music are a lot easier to consume.
It's really easy to get disillusioned and give up.
I have started to buy some technical books again, because the ebook version requires some insane locked down proprietary application to read, or causes the book to self destruct after a few months...
No.
I prefer ebooks for many reasons, and I have purchased thousands of them over the past two decades.
Sometimes a printed book is better for dense technical material. But I'm starting to see textbooks that seem to have been designed as web pages: large x-height, clumsy justification and hyphenation.
When you say “no one buys books” in the title, and then proceed to describe how big publishers don’t make a lot of money from books, you are engaging in disingenuous clickbait.
There are small publishers. There are also print shops. You can design and sell a book yourself. I buy physical books. I bought Greg Egan’s self-published books.
There does exist a real threat to the book market, and that’s LLMs, but as of 2024 the market is far from dead.
They basically make money scumming celebrity crap on the market and riding the 150 years (and counting) copyright window.
With AI floods the editors and reviewers do become more important. But like music labels, one of the biggest exploiters of art and talent, the technical aspects of media delivery and production aren't held by labels or publishing houses.
>>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?"
I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local branch even has a Makerspace with 3D printers, laser cutters, sewing machines, and other misc tools.
I love libraries.
It also feels like all our public institutions in the US are crumbling under assault from all sides.
If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want.
Sadly many people seem to think they are really showing the folks up there by retreating from any form of self-education once they are out of school. The opposite couldn't be more true.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library
Not undercutting the role of libraries, just pointing out that philanthropy from the wealthy can be a mixed bag of indirect control and agenda pushing at times, wrapped up in tidy looking tax avoidance multi layered "charity" arrangements.
Also, as long as the outcomes are good, I personally don't care one iota whether a person is doing them for the wrong reasons.
People can be rich and try to do the right thing even if there seems to be no direct economic incentive to do so — and I applaud them if they do realize that money alone doesn't create a meaningful life. Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.
I agree that tax rates should be higher, but I have absolutely no faith that politicians will do a better job stewarding money toward good causes than a billionaire who cares about them (and/or wants to brag about their philanthropy for clout)
Why? Why isn't reducing waste ever an option?
This smells like a half-baked conspiracy theory. It's not like the overwhelming majority of people want to get smarter in their free time. I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the world, but in American and all (individual) European cultures, most people don't pursue self-education. I would not be surprised if this applies to most other cultures as well
You might say that's how a lot of people on this website got their knowledge, but this website is statistically insignificant compared to the world population. Plus, it's not like every single member here pursues self-education. I'm willing to wager most people come on here just to be entertained
Just don't increase the funding while inflation increases and you're basically cutting funding. And then when things eventually start to look like shit tear them down. And these are not even things a rich, powerful and unethical person needs to do willingly or on purpose. It is just a thing that happens, because it isn't high on the priority list. And it isn't high on the priority list because it doesn't make them direct money.
Now if you're a politician that profits from your constituents being not too critical why should you actively support a thing that has the potential to make them more critical? Not that you actively have to be against it, it just isn't that high on your list of priorities..
This is how incentives work. And while there are people who will support measures which won't directly profit them short term, it seems to me they are an endangered species, at least in the US.
To add to the conspiracy, endless entertainment is another way that the rich and powerful want to keep the population complacent. Add some unsubtle propaganda about how great and diverse the US is, too.
That said, the propaganda isn't as straightforward as it used to be, and foreign propaganda is sprinkled in as well with e.g. China funding and adding their section to big blockbuster films.
I saw the article, and it does indeed show this, however, I'm not sold that education is the only criterion when it comes to how someone votes... or does anything else, for that matter
It's far too simple of a cause-and-effect type of deal for this to be the only factor, or even, for this to be a factor at all, perhaps. The world is a bit more complex than chucking everything up to how someone does something based solely on their administered level of institutional education
I've been just a tiny bit more skeptical of all of these cause-and-effect type stories ever since I read Nassim Taleb
It isn't, however if your education or world view is superficial, you're more susceptible to right-wing talking points, like a broad spectrum "fear of ones that are different to you". But when you're more educated, more worldly, less blinkered you won't be as afraid of the other and less susceptible to a politician that They are after your jobs and benefits, and more aware that the politicians and rich people are trying to keep you down for their own gains.
I recommend giving Who Voted for Hitler? by Richard F. Hamilton a read. The world is infinitely much more complex than our story-making minds would have us believe
We're experiencing this very same thing now in Alabama. Or one could simply look at Florida. Things aren't getting better here. The current GOP leadership is trying their best to be as regressive as possible.
I feel like I am doing my son an incredible disservice by raising him in Alabama, but my wife refuses to leave while her mother is still living here.
The single most valuable thing I learned is what is really possible to do. I got to see that because I ended up helping people of means who took me aside and showed me a look outside the place I was living.
For many, and this is true of my peer group, just knowing what is possible really mattered.
Of course I left town, found work and married someone I thought highly of and got to work building a better life.
Your son can do that too. Make sure he knows it.
I moved out of my mother's home when I was 16 and I managed to graduate high school. But I left town two days after graduation and I've only been back three times in 24 years.
Had I not left Alabama, and the US, I would have likely ended up just as bigoted and close minded as most of my family. The ten years I spent outside of the US allowed me to learn a completely different perspective and finally made me realize that my mother and my other family were wrong about so many things.
My boy just turned five a few weeks ago and he's already travelled more than I did by the time I turned 21.
I ran a bar before I became a carpenter. My neighbors around my bar included people from India, Senegal, all over Europe, and Japan. I become close friends with a much older couple from Senegal and also an Indian family. They welcomed me into their homes and fed me and taught me about their music and food and such.
I likely would not have had those experiences if I remained on the mainland.
"Education", as you have used it, is a measure of collegiate accomplishment, not of merited learned-ness.
It correlates more with socio-economic class.
The same argument can easily be made about Democrats and their inability to repair trivial household items, or empathize with those outside of their privileged groups.
You just pick a characteristic and then label it "good" measure of [x]. Ironically the same thought process is too blame for "telling too many people to goto college"
The lack of self-agency, accountability, and ability to empathize on the left is astounding.
When citizen journalists on X (and other places) are putting corporate media to shame because they're willing to faithfully report what the corporates aren't, that's a clear sign there's something amiss. Breaking free of this one-sided media conglomerate is essential for critical thinking, because journalists have no place in thinking for people, which is unfortunately true on all sides, in practice.
Worse, corporate media sources use their powerful positions not just as a beacon of authority, but as a way to enforce false narratives through their close partnerships with their preferred political partners, who are working to manipulate those narratives in their favor for political gain, like winning elections at nearly any cost. Additionally, shaming and declaring citizen & independent journalists as "misinformants" for questioning mainstream narratives that have been identified as patently false/twisted, either by lying or by omission, evidenced by whistleblowers calling out these issues in interviews with independent sources, knowing their stories won't be edited for political purposes.
Similarly on X, now that it isn't captured by a political side that openly believes censorship is acceptable to elevate their own preferred narratives, information can flow freely and users on X can think for themselves (scary, I know... imagine if YOU could think freely and post your own convictions! How will humanity survive?). Since the previous "community guidelines" enforcers at Twitter have been fired, faithful counter-reporting is no longer being policed (the "now" true Hunter Biden report comes to mind conveniently after the 2020 election was over). Now Conservatives can have an equal and prominent voice there, given that Twitter/X has always been a premier source of real-time news and reporting.
If something cannot be questioned, speculating on the motives around it is essential. The 20th century saw too many tyrants dictating the flow of information for us to conveniently forget its devastating impacts on their respective societies. Not a single politician, media outlet, scientist, or "expert" is above being questioned, for any reason whatsoever. It is the only path to healthy, inclusive dialogue.
Now seeing how people are on to our plot, the urgency is clear. I am proposing that over the next few decades we work secretly behind the scenes to gradually reduce funding for various local libraries which have seen visitors decline since the rise of the Internet.
Public libraries? With easy access?
PR: “sir, with enough money you can make the public believe whatever you want.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewashing_(censorship)
Do you refuse, on principle, to visit the Frick when in New York City? For that matter do you avoid the Rockefeller Center?
This is conspiracy level thinking. Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
The assault on public institutions like libraries comes from 2 places: 1) Stop wasting my tax dollars on stuff I don't use or care about. Or 2) I bet there is an untapped commercial market that can be built, and people will love my solution more than public libraries.
> This is conspiracy level thinking.
The prevalence of assholes is a documented thing (latest numbers I've heard was over 6% of clinical narcissists, reportedly a very conservative lower bound), and who would ever be surprised that high-status people like being high-status?
I don't know about libraries specifically, but the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious.
I am of course not denying the existence of nice rich people. Though I'm afraid they tend to be selected out of ludicrous wealth. In fact, I fully expect to find many more assholes among super-rich people than I would among the general population. (But I'm not sure either: the strife we find among some of the poorest people also tend to generate assholes…)
("the idea" is what you claimed is obvious)
Quoting myself, "I am of course not denying the existence of nice rich people".
>Though I'm afraid they tend to be selected out of ludicrous wealth.
The irony is that one of the most ludicrously wealthy people in history was also probably the single largest contributor to public libraries. Whether or not he was simply an outlier, I think that’s an important thing to point out.
Further, some data suggests that as much as 5% of the general population are narcissists. So collectively, your point seems to be that rich people are pretty much like the rest of us, just with more money.
I said "tend to". A tendency does not make an absolute and complete genocide. I also said "I'm afraid", which is supposed to convey some level of uncertainty. Carnegie's donation doesn't invalidate my point, even if he wasn't an outlier.
> The irony is that one of the most ludicrously wealthy people in history was also probably the single largest contributor to public libraries.
Where you see irony, I see expected statistics: the largest contributor to pretty much anything has to be ludicrously rich. Because the only way to give that much, is to own even more.
And I will add that one incentive for rich people to donate is their public image. And in many cases their "donations" are largely neutered by tax cuts or by increasing the return on some of their other investments (basically their donations causing other of their investments to increase their returns). Donations by rich people aren't always genuinely generous.
If the wealthy don't fund something, it's because they're narcissists. If they do, it's because of statistics. At the same time, you ignore the statistics about narcissism.
I said no such strawman, and it's not my main point anyway.
My main point is: the idea that rich & powerful people will generally do what it takes to stay rich & powerful is not conspiracy thinking, it's common sense. The idea that a sizeable proportion of them will resort to unethical (even lethal) means to do so is not conspiracy thinking, it's common sense.
That's it, and I don't think Mr Carnegie here provides any significant evidence to the contrary. I mean, the same guy reportedly had strikers shot and killed, didn't he? It's hard to believe such a guy donated large amounts of money out of the goodness of his heart.
There’s a philosophical argument that all altruism is actually selfish in nature, so I don’t think your premise holds that the wealthy are unique in this regard. What you seem to be saying is that they are complicated just the same as everyone else, just with more resources. If your only point is that wealthy people are status-minded, I don't disagree. I disagree that they are uniquely status-minded. As William Storr's work attests, we are all status-driven apes, whether wealthy or not.
You also didn’t answer the question about what it would take to change your mind, which is usually indicative of a dogmatic, rather than reasoned, position.
Quote me, or I didn’t.
Feel free to clarify, but to me, this reads as, "Rich people, being narcissists, will try to maintain their high status by keeping the education level of the general populace low."
It also reads as a narrative talking point without good evidence to support it. I.e., "I can't prove it, I just know it's true."
Or is your point that people are assholes in general? If the latter, I’m failing to see how that gets connected to rich people actively suppressing education, especially when, as you say, they are the most likely to donate money to those causes.
It seems likely. But that's a detail, because I believe the more important effect is the contempt higher-class people can have towards lower-class people. Some of it may even come from cognitive dissonance. See, barring a few exceptions, one does not get rich just by working. One also has to exploit other people, to spoil them of a fraction of their added value. The richer you are the truer this gets, and then you have to find some way to look at yourself in the mirror despite that.
> actively suppressing education
I don't recall saying that. My exact words were: "I don't know about libraries specifically, but the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious."
> especially when, as you say, they are the most likely to donate money to those causes.
I didn't say that either. My exact words were: "the largest contributor to pretty much anything has to be ludicrously rich. Because the only way to give that much, is to own even more."
To be generous, you said they are the "largest contributors" which I agree is different than being "most likely." But the research does show they are more likely, possibly because they are in a position to do so. I think that's what connects to your point.
Just as a counterpoint to your late-stage capitalism-esque viewpoint, wealthy are also shown to over index in conscientiousness in some studies. This is a personality trait that relates to persistence which is an alternate explanation for goal-attainment (ie wealth).
I fail to see how this is a counter point. Sure, conscientiousness, and I would add work ethics certainly explain some inequality. But even if they explained most of it (exploiting people does require work, and I'd expect the more conscientious capitalists are better at it), they would still come far, far short of morally justifying the level of inequality we observe today.
No billionaire ever deserved to be that wealthy.
Now we can discuss incentives, and I can accept that a good system may need to allow some people to accumulate undeserved wealth. Still, I will note that the mere existence of billionaires is a threat to democracy. (Or a blocker: our representative governments aren't very democratic to begin with, and we have studies showing that when billionaires and the people disagree over a piece of legislation the billionaires win most of the time.)
My current opinion on this is that putting a hard cap on individual wealth is a good thing. Furthermore, I think this hard cap should be well under $1B, almost certainly below $100M.
Well, that's probably because you are constantly arguing different points that aren't necessarily germane to the discussion. Remember, this was about your point that wealthy people build their wealth by suppressing education in the general populace. So this is a counter-point in that it is possible to build wealth by conscientious behavior instead. There is some research on the latter, but really only conjecture and false narratives on the former.
Wealth inequality and the state of democracy are digressions from that point. I don't think I made any statements about what level of wealth inequality is healthy for the stability of a society, let alone a moral argument for it, nor did I make any claims about democracy. Again, this just comes across as you having an axe to grind, and you'll shoehorn in talking points without addressing the central claim.
No.
> Wealth inequality and the state of democracy are digressions from that point.
Yes.
>Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
To which you replied:
>"the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious."
To which I replied:
>"The irony is that one of the largest contributions to the public library system was one of the richest guys ever."
It was all about the conspiracy that the wealthy actively suppress education until you went off the rails on a completely different rant.
Of course not. They're scheming about how to monetize education, knowledge, and research.
> 1) Stop wasting my tax dollars on stuff I don't use or care about. Or 2) I bet there is an untapped commercial market that can be built, and people will love my solution more than public libraries.
(2) Gets a lot easier if you first advocate for (1) to make the public libraries worse.
They dont sit around scheming, they work, walk around doing it in action.
Company executives keep adding ingredients to processed food to make them addictive knowing it’ll hurt health outcomes and lead to more death.
Company executives continue to sell medicine that they sell for $20 or $10 in Europe or India, but charge americans $5000 or higher for the same medicine in the same package.
They shut down any research paper that outs them, by suppressing the findings, like Facebook or Junk food companies do whenever a research is conducted on their products.
We should celebrate our pioneers and innovators, but we shouldn’t ignore it blindly when MBA execs and Beancounters actively sabotage and hurt their own customers and the masses. Businesses are awesome, but it shouldnt be used to give a no questions asked green flag to anyone who runs businesses.
There are people actively lobbying for policies that lead to more american deaths, bankruptcies, families breaking into shambles, and the government watching from the sidelines and even sometimes helping to make it all happen.
Yes, there are people who do want to subdue the masses and keep them dumb, just as long as it helps them buy 1 more yacht or few more 0s in their bank balance.
I say it as a free market capitalist who is ardently anti-communist.
There are corporate divisions doing A/B tests, etc. to find out what works for the lowest common denominator, and how to profit more from someone's ignorance. Many people here are directly involved in making it happen.
I wonder what kind of negotiating power a regional library has in that situation. Do state library agencies have more leverage than regional libraries? Do large states like California have more leverage in negotiating digital licenses than smaller states? Would a national library system have even more leverage? I'll ask a librarian tomorrow and report back.
The problem is the publishers - they don’t always sign on to provide books to every new platform and don’t always release to every platform. But other platforms do exist: https://bookriot.com/comparing-public-library-ebook-platform...
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000085962
Those already on top.
They can afford to educate their own line and hoard resources across generations doing so. They can fail as many times as it takes before they finally succeed because of this. They throw the bodies of the world at their problems until they are solved, which necessitates an uneducated populace that doesn't realize they're chattel and canon fodder to this purpose. A populace that fear collective power, that fears community beyond immediate family, that shies away from actions that would better the world in favor of actions that are less risky personally.
Globally, this class of people definitely wants to reduce literacy to keep a stream of manual labor inflowing.
Any decent book about Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
...and not just historically. Some societies where significant minority groups are banned from getting an education, in order to further perpetuate their marginalisation, still exist today.
Literacy for more people is a relatively new thing.
Now if you are talking about a country like India - sure I could see Modi doing that. In that case it would be more about restricting growth and investment into education then dismantling an economy built on knowledge.
Undermining literacy means so they are not as literate as they could be to improve their lives.
For example, there are more than a few studies on literacy and education levels of the political spectrum for better and worse.
India is a different world. The crime against humanity that is the caste system all but forbade 1-3% of the population to be permitted to learn how to read. 95-98% of Indians were not permitted to learn how to read, and had to rely on the interpretations of the less populous castes.
Ironically it is a minority that largely broke this logjam and helped push literacy for the many forward.
I'll gladly take the downvotes for speaking the truth about caste being a divider between people and society.
Undermining is a form of limiting, and limiting is a form of undermining.
In contrast, public libraries in Michigan are thriving (another place I know well). I have no idea why the difference is so stark.
In my over 60 years, I've never lived anywhere so illiterate as Philly.
I can't speak for Philly, but Michiganders have a long long-standing community tradition of fighting to defend our public libraries from an onslaught of various attacks. And while the quality of the library system can vary (based on location and local funding authority), Michiganders generally have majority support for public libraries as an institution, and pass successful votes for them regularly.
(historic Library voting records) https://www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan/-/media/Project/W... (be careful reading this, not every red/failing vote is bad -- for example, May 2023's red line is a success for that public library, that something bad did not pass)
It's one of those somewhat rare livable working class cities, no? With a pretty big DIY scene.
even in Japan, with perhaps the very strongest reading culture in the world, you're going to find a relatively limited selection of books in library outside of their own language
you'll likely have less success finding a varied stock of Thai books in Oregon, to the surprise of nobody
Like for English a good 3 would be Infinite Jest (trendy, pretentious), Moby Dick (classic), and Lord of The Rings (meme worthy).
I've used private English libraries in various countries of the Middle East and East Asia. For the expat community, they were really a treasure before the internet.
The people who forget about libraries are likely well off. Shutting down libraries to feed the homeless doesn’t make sense, as libraries are a tool that can allow them to eventually feed themselves, if well used.
Still, I disagree. Just because one of two problems is worse (e.g. literacy and homelessness, or murder and burglary) doesn't mean we can just ignore one problem in favor of another. Just because murder is worse than burglary doesn't mean we should divert all police attention and money currently being spent on burglary to solving murders. Just because women's rights in the US by far surpass those in Saudi Arabia doesn't mean we should take the efforts we put into women's rights issues in the US and divert them to solving women's right's issues in SA. Just because homelessness is in some sense worse than illiteracy and low education doesn't mean we should divert funds from libraries to solving homelessness.
Having written all this out, it feels far too obvious for you to not know this. Maybe it's not just vibes.
I would be willing to compromise on small buildings that function as internet cafes that are free to use for the public, we can get rid of all the excess staff and books, though.
If you spent much deal actually dealing with the homeless themselves, you'd know how crucial a resource a library is for homeless people. For something you see as "dire", you don't seem to have even done anything as simple as google "libraries help homeless."
> Libraries are a luxury we cannot afford right now,
Completely false. Libraries are one of the areas of public spending where the return per dollar spent is highest. Libraries are social institutions we cannot afford not to fund.
> and frankly nobody uses them
Again, you seem to have failed to do basic research as libraries get a ton of use and genetally suffer from a lack of funding relative to their usage rates.
> There's already federal subsidies for internet and telephone for the needy, and the people that live too far away to get internet definitely don't have the money or means to drive into town to use the library.
Most poor people are urban and in dense enough areas to that easily access libraries could be (and often are) available.
> I would be willing to compromise on small buildings that function as internet cafes that are free to use for the public, we can get rid of all the excess staff and books, though.
Oh, how generous of you. Why don't you go meet some librarians and learn about what they actually do before you write off their usefulness.
Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy.
You're choosing to let more people be unfed in order that a handful of people can read Harry Potter or whatever is popular these days. Bad trade off.
Libraries can help get people to the point where fewer people need the food bank. Maybe you should see what the library actually has to offer before you try to cut it from the budget.
There are so many other areas to find room in the budget without cutting libraries.
I thought correcting your facts would have that effect. If your opinion isn't fact based, I doubt there's anything I can do to change your opinion. All I can do is callout the misinformation you are spreading.
> Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy.
Or... set tax rates sufficient to do both? Neither actually costs that much. Lack of funding for either has to do with politics, not practicality.
Random stat from my Oregon county (pop. 600k) library collective of 16 local libraries: 2023 saw 10.8M items checked out, up 4% from 2022
The same type of revelation of the person, who says that foodstamps are totally unnecessary expenditure.
If you search /r/libraries you'll find first-hand accounts from librarians who are committed to serving homeless patrons, even though they didn't sign up for a social worker role. Honestly, I wish I could allocate MORE funds to those kind of people instead of the grifters who profit from the "homeless industrial complex."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-libraries...
I'm wondering if you'd really prefer a library system where you could get some titles instantly, but the majority of content is unavailable because some other digital service provider owns distribution in your region for the next 12-16 months. I'd hate that, personally.
I agree that it's artificial scarcity and it's hard to feel bad for the publishing companies
Which suggests a possible solution the the greater problem.
https://www.oba.nl/service/word-lid.html
Netflix and Spotify make a fuck ton of money. The library doesn't. As always it's the publishers you should be pissed at.
The current business model of selling libraries ebooks that can only be viewed a max number of times before needing to be repurchased, or only for a limited amount of time, is a money grab pure and simple.
It's NOT a business!
That seems very much like a disruption to me. In the "interruption to the regular flow or sequence of something" meaning of the word.
So I just go to the better library - genesis, which is free and unlimited.
Besides the physical books everyone knows about, which are a treasure by themselves, there are many other valuable resources, as you mentioned, including:
- The Adobe suite, even including Character Animator
- Udemy
- Digital access to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others
- Free notary services
- Print magazines and newspapers
- Puzzles
- Music and films
- eBooks and audiobooks
...not to mention community activities like classes, groups, and concerts.
Just being physically present in the library has benefited me. When I take breaks, I sometimes pick up a book at random. It may be about sales, health, politics, history. I sometimes come away with new ideas for my business, sometimes am just inspired or informed or amused in general.
I encourage anyone reading to stop by a library if you haven't been in a while. See what they offer. You might be surprised. And please, do what you can to support them in whatever way you can, even if that's just to use them, demonstrating the need for them by your patronage. We need these institutions, and they won't be around forever without our support.
speaking of, btw, your library likely has 'partner' libraries where you can borrow stuff too using overdrive/libby. You can often see a list on top right of the overdrive page of your respective library.
Or maybe one better: eliminate restrictions on content sharing.
I'm not saying I don't appreciate and respect libraries, but they really just didn't change with the times around where I am, and it makes them far more inconvenient to use for someone in my particular position than it does to make them convenient. I will still support them as a public access, and I think it would be tragic if they went away, but I wish they would spend a little bit more of whatever budget they get investing on making it. Not a terrible experience to get shit online.
Yes I'd love more spyware and another platform as a service that reduces ownership of things
I check out a lot of books at the library, but I can't get access to all of the books I would like to access.
Should a tech solution replace the library? No. But there should be another option than buying it from Amazon.
And about books themselves, I hate subscriptions, and all the DRM garbage, and if I can't own the epub without DRM, then I won't buy it. To be honest, the silver lining is that DeDRM exists, so I can actually obtain Japanese novels for my cute e-ink devices, but.. bleh.
I'm not really a germaphobe, but in the age of the pandemic, I think public resources like libraries are under serious threat, just like busses and public transit. It would be nice if there was some sort of reassurance that cleaning and disinfecting was taking place between each use.
The cycle of enshittification consumes all.
You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.
You print books? Well we have e-books now.
You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it.
You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
What's sad though is that publishers have historically had one power that would have been unassailable – editorial judgement. They could have sustained their brands on quality. Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good". Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors, and here we are.
They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices. I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though.
The worst part is how they pay artists. Authors are paid poorly as touched upon in this article. But illustrators are paid criminally low rates. A children book with 50 pages of breathtaking art can earn you as little as $500 for months for work. Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on.
In general the model has never really worked for anyone except a few authors. There are the famous ones who sell a lot of books and then there are the ones who write a billion children’s books who actually don’t get the majority of their money from publishers but from the government compensation programs. But for the most part publishers have always run a business model akin to music streaming services where only a handful of Danish authors can actually make a living just by selling books. Mean while our publishing houses have been able to employ thousands and keep investors happy.
What a lot of artists and authors have done instead is to form smaller independent publishers. Which means you get 0 advertising and 0 product placement and so on, but ironically often will make you far more money than using the big publishers. These smaller indie publishers, and other creative ways of publishing like the article mentions, aren’t doing poorly. The big publishers are suffering. Thanks to the digital age. But I won’t miss them when they are gone.
This sounds weird. Wouldn’t the books which are lent more also sell more? Childrens books are a big market for book stores and of course they want to sell the most popular books. Are you referring to some particular book which cannot be purchased?
Also libriaries does not have to buy any book.
Our Libraries have to make all Danish published material available. Some of this is indeed not bought, but because children’s books are often on the high end of popularity at libraries they generally by every children’s book which gets published buy one of our major publishers. Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.
> Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.
Politicians are supposed to set the overall guidelines but not to decide what individial books libraries purchase. Do you have examples where politicians pressure or force libraries to buy specific books?
Individual libraries are not required to buy any particular book. They have a fixed budget for buying material and will decid based on quality and expected demand.
There is no universe in which public funds are leeched without political complicity and corruption. Most likely the publishers benefitted are either related to or provided kickbacks to the influential parties.
Depending on how they got the deal with the library, and how much they get compensated for that, yes it is.
If you want to make an accusation of corruption you need to be more specific.
Who makes decisions for font cover design? Are they in a position to help out their friends with larger typefaces?
> They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices.
This is also true of academic presses. Their market are university research libraries who will pay $400 for a two-volume tome on the spread of printing presses in the New World colonies.
Meanwhile, Amazon is looked at as the behemoth in the industry, yet it probably isn't thought of as an online book store / publisher by most people. I think of so many things before I get to, "Oh yeah, they also sell books."
The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.
1 - National Endowment for the Arts - "U.S. Patterns of Arts Participation: A Full Report from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" - <https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts...>, page 44
I read a lot of non-fiction books and don't think much has changed over time. For non-fiction you always had groups of people, typically academics and successful business people and politicians, who read tons and tons of books. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, both read many books when they were young in around 1900 to 1930. How many people who worked in factories at the time would have read books? Not many I think. Today it's more or less the same. You have a few people like David Senra or Stephen Kotkin, who read 100-200 books per year, and you have the average person who reads maybe one. Just like book sales, it's a power law.
Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not built the same.
Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselves.
Seem to remember that if the publishers hadn’t been lax about Amazon’s delinquent debt the publishers could have forced Amazon into bankruptcy
(Worked for a major US technical / educational publishing house in the late 90s / early 00s)
- https://lostartpress.com
- https://tinhouse.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press
https://www.otherindiabookstore.com/about
I got to know about them through coming across the book Tending the Earth, by Winin Pereira.
https://www.banyantreebookstore.com/product-page/tending-the...
I have some background in organic gardening, and think it is a very good book.
It is about more than just organic gardening, though.
https://press.stripe.com/
[1] https://www.nyrb.com/
Meet Fitzcarraldo, the publisher house with four Nobels so far: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/10/four-nobels-an...
It's often the same publishers publishing the e-books. They did successfully make that transition.
> Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors
If they're best sellers, as you note, that was clearly a good choice. They were selling what people actually wanted.
That just makes it Easter for publishers. The major problem with Amazon is monopsony, not easier distribution.
> You print books? Well we have e-books now.
Which have to be purchased ultimately from the publishers, so again, they’re still there making money, they just don’t need to bother printing books anymore. You’ll note they’re not any cheaper.
> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
I think this is confusing cause and effect. Authors turned to social media because publishers weren’t doing a great job marketing, not because it makes publishers unnecessary.
The vast majority of sales is still paper books.
> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell. Too much, and you have a cashflow problem today. Too little, and lose out on future returns.
> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
Most authors have no fans yet, and most never will - most authors write only a few books in their lifetime.
From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie.
Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
> Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell.
A new author with no established celebrity or audience is basically dead in the water. There was a world where a new author could:
1. Write a book that was good on its own merits.
2. Convince an agent to represent them based on that book's merits.
3. The agent convinces an editor at a well-known publisher to take it.
4. The publisher prints it and gets it on bookshelves in stores everywhere.
5. People looking for books stumble onto it and buy it.
That world existed when people had a lot of spare time and attention and relatively few things vying for it. That world no longer exists. You can consume media 24/7 and never come close to running out, all without spending a penny.
The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
> From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
2020 was also a big jump up - in 2019 it was 170, after years of decline for e-book sales from a peak of 242 million in 2014. A large part of that is likely explained by the price gap narrowing, as publisher realised they were leaving money on the table.
> Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
This is true for almost all self-published books, because realistically your books are not going to be in many - if any - book stores. But most of the best-selling trad published books are. So for self-published authors, focusing on e-books is certainly the way that is most likely to drive actual sales. Sure, you can get some copies into local book stores, and encourage fans to request them elsewhere, but you need pretty decent numbers already to shift that balance without an established publisher behind you.
> The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
That's true, but somewhat less true for trad published authors where you at least has the shot at getting it into reasonable numbers of book stores. But of course the odds against getting through to a trad published have gotten far worse.
> There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
That's true, but when it comes to writing the reality is most of us can't hope to live off it anyway, and that creates freedoms we don't otherwise have. E.g. I am not bothering trying to sell individual copies and do book signings or talk to book stores, because I don't need the sales bump it might bring, and so it's all about a balance between keeping it enjoyable and the fun of at least a little bit of recognition and feedback on occasion.
[1] https://wordsrated.com/book-sales-statistics/
[2] https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/
(they don't cite sources, but a quick checks makes it quite clear the numbers come from Statista - some of it behind their paywall)
Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher, and that's a tried and true successful model adopted all around the world.
You'd have made the same argument for vinyl record publishers saying they're cornered into a niche, but no, as you point put artists will still want editorial power and support, so digital music is thrieving.
Except that the biggest platform for ebooks (by a big stretch, they own ~70% of the market) is a company that you have a direct adversarial relationship with in most other parts of your business.
It’s mostly not a going business model outside of the profits Amazon brings in from it.
Amwzon's profits are still split with the publishers and publishers have their own venues + competitors (in particular outside of the US) so I'm not sure why Amazon's presence is a blow against the industry as a whole.
What more would be needed to see it as a validated business area?
Amazon maintains 70% of the US ebook marketplace and keeps a much bigger portion of the money from books published through their publishing arm than they do book published through the traditional publishers. They also have less high standards for publishing. This makes it harder to find traditional published books on the biggest platform for selling them.
[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/426799/e-book-unit-sales...
[1]https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/us-ebooks-sales-dec...
In particular, the lack of numbers from the dominant player (Amazon) makes trend analysis all the more difficult. Yet there's still an increase after 2020:
https://www.tonerbuzz.com/blog/paper-books-vs-ebooks-statist...
On Amazon, are you merging publishing and distribution as a single activity ? I thought Amazon in the US only accepted self-publication under their name and the rest of the Kindle available titles are from each publishers only using Amazon as a printer/distributor.
E.g. who would you assign as 50 shades of grey's publisher for the ebook version?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B007J4T2G8/ref=tmm_kin_swatch...
I don't know the specific legal contracts involved with 50 Shades of Grey's ebook distribution but I'd assume that Vintage Books bought those rights after they became the publisher for the book.
Remember that Amazon was willing to basically treat eBooks like normal books - negotiate the price they pay with the publishers and then sell the books at whatever price they want. The publishers are the ones who forced the agency model where retailers are forced to sell at a set price.
It took a bunch of public pressure to change that arrangement.
I think you can easily say the publishers have bad ebook pricing strategy but Amazon certainly wasn’t using normal market practices for setting prices.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/13/amazon-hachett...
this still exists, but the presses are harder to find and mostly independent. FSG books are always good.
also, books these indie presses are always good: - tyrant (rip) - graywolf - new directions - NYRB
and some more, but idk your taste so not gonna recommend them.
I don't see how any publisher is losing money on their back catalog due to scanning by Google, either. Google doesn't sell or even offer access to the full text of most books they scan, certainly not any that are under copyright and still being sold by publishers. Out of print books are by definition not earning money for publishers, so it wouldn't make any difference there.
You're right that publishers don't handle printing, but they do need to handle distribution. Amazon won't help if you want to get books on shelves of retailers, and printers don't distribute. Smaller publishers will usually use the distribution network of a larger publisher. For example, HarperCollins and PRH both handle distribution in the UK for themselves and others.
I feel this way about DK books although they don’t really do fiction but practical titles.
My kid likes to remind me that Naomi Novik was one of the founders of a fanfic site called AO3.
A number of the books we call classics today started out in serialized form in magazines. Atwood, Capote, Christie, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Doyle, Dumas, Hemingway, Joyce, Sinclair, Verne, Wells, have all done serials that are now bound. And if memory serves Asimov and Clarke as well.
The medium may be different but the process is old.
Publishers have been shafting authors for centuries. I'll shed no tears on their behalf.
So while I think it's been hard to make a living as an author I don't think it's necessarily the publisher's fault. Better to be the one's selling shovels than the ones mining for gold.
It seems to me that you're rather underestimating the importance of having something to put in the book.
That works if the absolute number of books written is very small, so everyone interested in books pulls from that pool.
The publishers could try to find a bunch of good books and get absolutely nothing.
Authors have been complaining about publishers for ever. Publishers treated authors like crap when they controlled the market. No sympathy for them at all.
If they had any integrity they'd move to be the Spotify of books and serve their customers better. Instead (as the article says) they're spending their efforts trying to bail the sinking boat and resist any such move.
The world will be a better place without them.
> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
Both of those seem very positive to me.
Uncanny valley, or maybe I just read the signals and interpreted them right.
And ebook instead of paperback, of course.
When was the last time someone bought you an ebook as a gift? This is is the main market for cookbooks, for example.
Back to the title. I still buy books. I've stopped buying them from Amazon, and just buy them from my LBS.
Though one thing still makes me irrationally angry - "SciFi + Fantasy" as "a genre" in bookshops. No. It. Isn't. It's two separate. Two loved-up vampires, isn't sci-fi. At least on Amazon I can filter that. Browse on Amazon, buy in the LBS. Which is the reverse of what I did a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement
Distribute Books - They could have built a competitive distribution system by responding to what was an obvious aggressive threat. Amazon founded in 94', public by 97', buying book sellers by 98'. Four years, and Amazon was going International and buying book sellers.
e-books - Great. Sell e-books yourselves. Sell better e-books with Publisher extras.
Scanned catalog - Multiple responses. Legally inclined, lawsuits before it was all irreparably scraped (or afterward). Tech inclined, scrape your own stuff and make it available. Culturally or historically inclined, donate the texts to Gutenberg or a museum so the scraping doesn't get them much.
Authors have their own followings - Interact. "Hi, this is so-and-so from PRH, that's a neat idea for the author's work, and we'll discuss trying to work it into the next book launch." There's probably authors who follow authors, "Any of you wanna write a book?"
Cash advances - The cash advances are broke anyways. One of main points of the article. 70% of spending goes to 1% of authors. Try a slightly less power-law distribution. Maybe something a little less than x^60... PRH alone gave 55% of all advances in $1,000,000+ land. Have your own Kickstarters, or crowdfunding site. Arrange crowdfunding campaigns with marginal authors (for better author %). Work with fans directly so fans can put up the advance with pre-orders. Lots of alternatives to wringing their hands. (If Bates White Economic Consulting is correct, then 95% of money likely goes to 5% of authors).
What this article told me was the publishing industry has a bad case of "try to spend zero work, while making infinite $". 'if the platform is there for the advertising, then the spend might be lower.' 'Does the best selling author have the best marketing budget? No. Why? She's the queen of TikTok.' (she does her own marketing)
Ideally, the authors get their own loans from the bank, print their own materials, arrange their own distribution, put out their own marketing, and then we collect a vague value-add for putting our logo somewhere.
There is some role for domain knowledge, curation, and editing, but the article shows that's not what they make bucjs on: celebrity drivel, bibles, sat prep, and the copyright monopoly.
It's just a cartel, just like the music labels are.
Copyright law is so annoying and its supposed to promote quality...which we get none of. Free youtube tutorials are the best learning resource these days.
The GDP hit would be insignificant too, like <.1%.
Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me.
It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc. I will do anything instead of reading the text. Meanwhile with a paper book I don't have an urge to flip a page back and forth and observe how it behaves. I can focus on the text.
Not sure why I am this way.
Re: the ecological side - I'm not actually convinced that a paperback book is markedly more of an ecological burden than an e-reader and the rest of the associated infrastructure. I think it's possible the e-reader pencils out in the long term, but I think a full lifecycle accounting of the energy and resources required to create, use, and dispose of an e-reader would be markedly higher than one would suspect, and I think people replace them more often than necessary.
Books, on the other hand, are trees. Bury 'em in your yard when you're done with them and the fungi will know what to do to recycle them.
I'd love to keep them all forever but (a) I think my house is about maxed out on shelves and (b) a book's potential is wasted on the shelf.
My current strategy is this. If its a book I know that will have re-read value that I really enjoy. I get a physical copy (such as LOTR). If its an interesting book that I want to read, but I don't see it as having high re-read value, I buy it on my kindle. May not be logical, but its a system that works for me so far.
If you later find out you want the paper book as home ornament, then spend a little extra to decorate your home.
The two major mistakes we make about books is:
1) we think we have to finish it. No, drop it if it’s boring.
2) we think we have to keep it around. No. Take a picture and write a few notes for your personal blog if you need to keep track. You don’t need it in your room or house.
I have one professional development book and was going find a work of fiction to start. Hope it works out.
Anyway, I really like it because it's far lighter weight than a paperback, easier to hold, and I can have like the entire library on there and take it with me. I don't experience the distraction that they are referring to, because there's really not anything else to do except read my book. How much time can I spend on settings? Browsing my library? As far as brightness I leave it alone mostly and don't think about it unless it's irritatingly one way or the other.
I have no idea what "navigation setup pages" are - I've been through several different Kindles and I pretty much just take them out of the box and start reading. There's nothing to "set up" outside of logging into my Amazon account.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
I tried using landscape mode or larger fonts but didn't like the extra page scrolling/turning. Eventually I suppose we'll get lightweight and normal looking AR glasses for reading eBooks.
I already went through all the setup menus, including messing with fonts, layouts, making some collection/folders, and downloading some samples to preview.
So far it all seems pretty good. I don't think I'll be too distracted by it. The 7" screen is a tad small, but I really do like the size and weight so will keep it. Anything larger/heavier will likely not be kept on my person so loses a lot of use.
Another great use I just discovered is loading it with pdf's of all my device/appliance/toys manuals in a User Manuals collection.
For me personally, e-readers have not caused any loss of focus. In fact, the integrated dictionaries often keep me MORE focused than the interruption represented by pulling out a dictionary or googling a word.
I'll acknowledge there is a tactile joy to physical paper that is lost when using an e-reader, but for me it's well worth the trade-off for the the portability and space saved.
Also consider that often, people who are expressing skepticism of digital reading have only ever tried it on laptops and iPads, which is a very different (more distracting) experience from an e-ink reader.
Personally, I carry an e-ink reader everywhere and read it every time I get a spare minute or so. It's done wonders for my reading habits. And unlike this topic's creator, I basically set the font and formatting once and almost never mess with them again.
I still use ebooks when I travel - I'll usually have one or two actual physical books with me, but I'll also have a few loaded up on my iPad in case I get bored or finish them early.
I also wound up inadvertently encouraging other people to get them.
Only one person out of about 6 who got them after I got them didn't use them. She didn't actually read much.
I slightly prefer physical books and still collect them, but a tablet lets carry dozens on the road
...they can get my money.
It doesn't list any books that I have publicly though. All you'll see is a login prompt. Books? what books? You can't DMCA me because I only have gutenberg collections in there ;)
In high school, I remembered that I really struggled to read The Once and Future King, and I never finished it. I eventually assumed I was too dumb to understand it, and that it’s just not for me.
Fast forward about 13 years, and I decide to give the book a try again, this time on the Kindle, and I surprisingly was able to get through it really quickly and didn’t have any issues understanding it.
I don’t think that I’ve gotten appreciably smarter than I was in high school, and I realized that the only really different variable is the font size. As a teenager I was reading my dad’s hand me down copy, which had tiny text on fairly small pages. With the Kindle I make the font gigantic. I have to turn the page more often, but that doesn’t really bother me.
Overwhelmingly I find it easier to read stuff if the text is really big; I am not sure why. My eyesight is fine, and I am not dyslexic (I was tested as a teenager), but tiny text is just really hard for me to read, while big text isn’t.
This and the fact that the kindle is _exactly_ where I left it, no need for physical bookmarks.
Didn't you say you're 13 years older than last time?
I take it your tastes have otherwise been immutable in that time period, and that you listen to the same music, follow the same fashion trends etc. as you did back then?
I thought I made that pretty clear, that it was that I was having trouble parsing and understanding the small text.
ETA:
Also, lol, my tastes in music really hasn’t changed either. Looking at my YouTube music history, the last 40 songs I listened to were ones I listened to in high school. I also wear more or less the style clothes; I still have of the shirts I wore back then actually.
As to the Kindle - I've never felt any urge to tinker with anything, except when I'm forced to: I set the font size, that's one single operation, forget it (at least for that book). If I occasionally read at night I have to add some backlight. And that's about it. I just read.
What I miss about paper books is the nice cover (color..), how easy it is to "see" the book (bookmarks, flip it open somewhere else and so on). In addition to actually reading it. But the Kindle is actually very nice to read (unlike phones, PC monitors, tablets, all of that. I can't ready more than a couple of paragraphs on LCD displays)
I can skim through a shelf full of books in a way that I’m just not able to with ebooks, even with stuff like full text search available in Calibre.
A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.
Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.
Indeed this is one of those things I miss about paper books. When the above happens I have a terrible time finding that on my Kindle. Most of the time I'm not able to, while with a paper book I didn't have that problem, mostly.
Skimming is great for building a mental map, but that is a separate activity than reading to learn. And it can be done digitally too, just differently.
Whatever works for you, of course. PDFs have bookmarks, which instantly take me to a specific spot on a specific page. Also, I can open multiple instances of the PDF, viewing multiple pages of the same book (or some PDF readers allow split screens to do the same thing). Edit: And if I don't recall where something is, I can search for it.
It's when reading books (literature, not documentation) that the e-readers have something going for them. I read nearly all my books on the Kindle, but I never use it for documentation - I've tried, that's just cumbersome. PDFs on a PC are fine.
I don't know why eReader interfaces make these two functions -- critical for deep reading -- so difficult.
Kindle is optimized for linear reading only. So beach reading and long romances.
But if you do the kind of reading that Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" proposes (skimming, inspectional reading, writing notes), you pretty much can't with Kindles.
I just finished “Moby Dick” on a Kobo. It’s no “Ulysses”, thank heavens, but I’ve never heard anyone describe it as a long romance or a beach read.
There is also a giant implicit “for me” in your preference. It just happens that your preference happens to be one that is mainstream. A lot of types of reading are not linear —- for instance, if you have to read to write a book report, you have to go back, make notes, flip back and forth. A straight through reading will not produce a good book report.
I read non-fiction and also great books (of the western canon) and in order to really read to understand, I need to flip back and forth and take notes and engage with the text. My reading instructor always tells me, “good reading is re-reading.” Single pass reading works for entertainment reading, but not for deep reading. (By deep reading, I mean the kind of reading that is taught in Mortimer Adler’s book referenced above)
For deep reading you have to interact with the text, most commonly by debating with it in the margins. This is pretty standard for academic reading (say when taking a humanities or literature class). It’s a pretty common use case that eReaders don’t support.
For example, I take notes in a separate book. The thing crucial to your preferred method is not at all needed for mine. In other words, most ereaders are not optimal for your process but just fine for most of us.
And yes, even for classic great books and not just amusement. I suspect you’ll find a higher than average portion of readers here are familiar with the books you’re talking about. We’re a reasonably erudite group.
Fiction I read on a Kindle.
My deep reading all happens on a PC actually. Not even a tablet. I find it much easier to highlight and annotate reading material with mouse and keyboard and look up references with a proper multi-window screen.
Also, while you certainly can underline and write notes on paper, this information then stays on paper and in this book. No way to index it easily, no way to cross-reference etc.
I believe the original article wasn't about technical/self improvement etc books.
I don’t take notes when I’m reading fiction like “A Man Called Ove”. But I do take notes and flip back and forth when I’m reading say Girard.
For each chapter or titled section, I read the first sentence or title and then mentally position myself as the writer of that section and attempt to predict the contents. For convergence I attempt to traverse further plies. For divergence, I attempt to figure out the root of the difference.
EDIT: For the record, I have never felt the need to scribble in the margins of a book. It's far better to take notes on separate media to prevent "preloading" your existing thoughts at the time should you choose to re-read the book years later.
You can take a similar approach for other words and phrases you don't know, too!
A printed book requires light as just about it's only dependency!
I definitely agree with you about the distractions of digital devices. Switching to a book is a focused mode.
Because I want minimal complexity. (Usually in the tropics, often with rum and a hammock)
Dead tree books' short term failure modes are water and fire, and once failure is confined to emergencies-that-are-already-emergencies they impose no additional cognitive burden.
Also, I suspect the physical friction involved in "swiping away from" paper books helps reset my dopamine baseline / memory, but that's just suspicion from having lived pre-smartphone.
PS: Also, re: environmental impact. eBay and Amazon sell tons of used books. Sure you're shipping them around, but I really buy new these days.
I used to take my e-reader on field expeditions when I was an archaeologist. Never had one die or break even after months in places like Siberia. The number of notebooks that were ruined during those same expeditions is non-zero, usually from condensation or the physical trauma of a backpack.
This is why I find "saving space during travels" a very relative argument to make, because it's clearly down to preference.
I don't personally travel with a laptop unless I plan on working remote. Too heavy/bulky and more importantly, you need to take them out going through TSA. The e-reader doesn't need a charger for the 2-4 weeks I usually travel. If I'm traveling longer, I'll bring a single additional USB cable (that will go away the next time I upgrade).
A phone doesn't take bag space because it's always in my pocket, but it's significantly less ergonomic and much less power efficient for reading. The value-add of being able to read without draining battery on my most important travel tool is worth it on its own.
And the "charger" I need with my ancient Kindle is a standard micro-USB cable, not exactly exotic. And as soon as this one breaks down, the next one will be USB-C like a good 90%+ of my devices I travel with.
I don't consider an e-ink reader very complex. You charge it once in a while, download books to it once in a while, and otherwise it's basically a book except it remembers what page you were on.
Light being a dependency of reading a printed book is one of the biggest plus for e-ink readers. You don't need light, they already come with it! It's so much easier reading with a Kindle (in dark mode) at bed time than it is a paper book.
I suppose the use case is picking up the kindle at night in a dark room while you disabled the light when you were reading outside during the day.
I prefer e-ink for reading, but it's too slow for my learning workflow. I highlight and mark interesting stuff, that I export later to condense and reflect upon. And that is cumbersome on an e-reader. There's also the matter of size. I generally like the PDF version of technical books as they're typeset well, but my e-reader is too small for them. So I use my iPad for those (Distraction is handled by the fact that I read those in short focused sessions).
But for fiction books, the e-reader is perfect. I don't highlight text in those books, I just read. Any other operation is slow enough that I just can't fiddle with it. And it's perfect for long sessions of reading as it does not project light in my eyes. It's light, so I just bring it with me everywhere.
If it makes you feel better, just think of your bookshelf as a carbon sequestration facility.
I do still prefer physical books for things like art, I find it easier to study it and understand how it's put together that way (maybe because a physical copy forces me to look at the piece as a whole, rather than getting distracted by and overfocusing on minute details that turn out to not matter until I grasp the whole structure). However, even there, once I do understand how to look at the art, I can go with the digital version just fine.
You have missed the forest for the trees.
Similarly my dad has a bunch of books I bought years ago. It's not books that I'd want to re-read, but interesting enough. With ebooks that just not possible, unless you do some cumbersome DRM removal.
There's a lot of good things about ebooks, but the usability just isn't there yet. It is a nice alternative for long out of print books though.
I'd buy and read move, I think, if more stuff was translated to Danish, but most of the books you can get in Danish easily is repetitive crime novels. It's all variations of someone got brutally murdered and now some alcoholic Scandinavia cop / ex-cop with a broken love life has to solve the case for some reason.
There's something to dedicated physical entities being single purpose and dead end that allows them to serve you in a very focused manner. Things with more bells and whistles, knobs and pulls will simply draw you into their twiddling even when it serves no purpose. It's like working with these things creates an itch that we need to scratch and it is distracting even if the recovery for focus for those things is minimal, it all adds up and gets you out of the focus state.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts now, and that really cuts into my book reading. But nothing beats sitting down in the sun and reading a good paperback.
As if food packaging is particulary ecological, but we continue to order food, eat takeaway and processed food reliant on packaging.
I also buy paper books. Cheap paperback ones.
Books can easily be recycled as opposed to food packaging which mostly ends up in landfills or litters the environment.
Seems like a fair compromise to me re: ecological impact.
However, paper is still the best format by far for text books and references. I can't stand having to use a screen for that. If I'm using a reference sheet I always print it out.
Since then, I have returned to reading physical books with an approximate ratio of 1:5 against digital ones. I have kinda rule/understanding with my daughters -- you have unlimited access to books that you can read, and you also get extra pocket money for reading them. Of course, it is OK not to finish a book, but in that case, a few cool-down days before buying another one.
Yes, buy and read physical books. I believe, the return is a magnitude higher for everyone than the loss it does to anything. If you have kids, read more physical books in front of them. Encourage them to read physical books. They are less distracting and help the kids focus.
Five years ago, I wrote a story about it. https://story.oinam.com/2018/why-physical-books-matter/
I think this part is so important. I want to show my kids that reading is fun, but instead what they see is me looking at my phone all the time. There’s nothing differentiating reading on my phone from watching youtube videos from their perspective. Ereaders help to some extend, but only a bit.
That’s such an incredibly personal preference though. It’s far easier for me to read with an ereader when I don’t have to have 2 hands holding a heavier hunk of paper wants to close itself if I let go for a moment. I have a huge book collection but I’ve switched almost entirely to ebooks because I find the ergonomics so much better. Physically fighting with dead tree media is more distracting than my ereader.
Reading good night stories to children is even more challenging, since it's usually dark. Bringing some extra light is annoying and distracting for the child.
but as a digital nomad myself, physical books were just not practical anymore. i remember a friend of mine when he moved from europe to asia, he shipped several containers full of books. that's a move you only do once in your life (and only if your employer covers the cost). so all my books stayed in my parents home.
then i also didn't have time to read anymore until i discovered audiobooks and audio drama. i am now listening to about 3 books worth of audio per month (including audio drama and short stories) but my kids would not know.
and there is no way to fix that. the books that i would want to buy are not available locally and would need expensive international shipping, and every time we move i'd have to discard my collection because books are just to heavy to be carried in a suitcase.
i'd love to show my kids how much i enjoy reading, but i just see no way to do it. it's a conundrum that i don't know how to solve.
since then i've read maybe 15 books in the last couple years and my kids never see me reading, however we've read to them and had them read to us for their whole life and they now both read independently for fun. i don't think leading by example is anywhere near as important as reading with your kids
We are going through a massive book boom right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLSGuGOWoAArd-K.jpg:large.
Book sales are the highest they've been in 20 years lol. So all the comments mourning books can relax.
> These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
Given that spending per capita, adjusted for intlation is only a couple of percent higher than they were 20 years ago, the "boom" isn't particularly impressive.
Most of the books that sell hundreds of copies wouldn't have been published in the past. If you write a niche book about something and a few hundred people read it, that seems great. If you're (stochastically) subsidized by a few huge hits and bestsellers, that also seems great. People are reading the Bible, Harry Potter and celebrity memoirs? Great too, I'm sure they are enjoying them. Possibly many of those people have not chosen those books in preference to other more "worthy" books but in preference to other pastimes.
The only problem I can see is if you wrote a book and had it published hoping it would be this year's runaway success, and it wasn't. Fine, but someone's book was. By its nature not everyone can achieve this.
I'm not sure what the author wants from the big publishers. Should they stop publishing hits, spend more money marketing books that won't sell, and then declare bankruptcy?
I do appreciate the opportunity to learn more about what a bad deal traditional publishing can be for authors. Seems like valuable information for anyone who wants to start writing professionally.
The authors don't make (practically) any money out of those books. Even the publisher probably doesn't. Vast majority of books aren't written to get any significant money (from sales at least), unless the author is delusional.
It's probably a kind of status thing and cultural lag. To get a publishing deal is a "stamp of approval" that it's a "real book" from a "real author" that has passed the gatekeeper. And that a copy of it costs something means it's not worthless, unlike e.g. the Linux kernel.
There are also costs involved in a quality release even of a self-published novel. You want a cover. It's not expensive, but unless you're a talented artist it will show if you do it yourself. You can avoid paying for an editor, but it will generally be noticeable (you might have near perfect grammar and orthography, but you will miss things). If a publisher is going to put their name on it, those things will be at least a bit more expensive, and people tend to want to at least try to recoup some or all of costs even if they don't expect a significant return.
And if you want to turn writing into something more, you want to build an audience, and you want at least some signal of how large a portion of that audience are actually people prepared to pay, so that maybe next time your publisher is willing to put a little bit of money into marketing.
But yes, a lot of books could just as well be free. But vast quantities of writing - including fiction - is also released for free. Turns out there's signalling the other way too. It's hard to get people to read anything, but for at least some parts of the market, it's harder to convince them something free is worth their time.
It's an aside, but this is just so frustrating we have succumbed to this level. In principle I don't even want to read the article because the title is ridiculous, but on the other hand, they wouldn't generate any traffic if they don't because our brains are too fixated on "drama" and "controversy" that clickbait titles generate.
Seems almost poetic, somehow.
Film has a similar problem—there are plausibly low-thousands existing films worth my time, a whole lot of them 30+ years old. I could never watch a film made after 2000 and not run out of good entertainment in my lifetime. They’re damn lucky the Mouse got copyright extended to a century or more.
I will say that it seems entirely possible to relatively quickly see all US animated kids movies …
Decent or better ones… maybe.
There’s a deep bench of poor-to-terrible animated kids’ movies that were straight to VHS/DVD/streaming. For god’s sake, there are like nine Land Before Time movies alone.
It's hard to even find a list; and some are pretty decent, for what they are.
By avoiding current authors or media you miss out on the cultural story and critique/commentary that influences all our media. Sure, the last 5000 years are interesting, but isn't right now pretty amazing too? You might accidently read the best book ever written but you won't know until history plays out. But I think it's important to see how recent history has shaped the narrative of the worlds authors in today's world.
Weve lived through a lot of major events. Everyone does. But these are our events.
[edit] or, hell, not even major. Odds that a recommended-by-people-online got-some-hype-in-review-rags new book is gonna make me happier to have read it than, say, a 2nd-tier Maugham or Faulkner or something? Not great.
I sometimes read/watch/play something if a friend recommends it. But I've no time/interest in sorting through the random deluge of media in the hope of finding diamonds. I'll let someone else find the diamond and tell me about it.
It would have to be a technical book on a subject I'm interested in (and even then moderately rare) or something that someone I know well personally strongly recommended.
Wow. Can't wait for the next Harry Potter / Avatar / Celebrity book / Spiderman movie !!!!11!!!1! Great works!
> but isn't right now pretty amazing too?
No.
Have to say I'm kind of surprised about the bibles part. Aren't those usually printed by smaller church-associated publishers?
welcome our overlords.
Also there are times when I decide I want to read my own stuff for entertainment instead of a published novel. And the joy I get from that keeps me writing.
As an aside though I feel that the science/engineering heavy HN crowd would bring some life to science fiction. We have the ability to write things that make technical sense and I'm sure many of you internally roast the handwaviness seen in some franchises. I don't know if I'm the only one that does this but I plan out the computer networks my characters use, draw cutaways and chip architecture diagrams for new devices I come up with, read scientific papers for research, and so forth. Sometimes that's even more fun than the actual writing!
The best part about writing the story yourself is that it never ends unless you want it to (or you end, I suppose).
Like how HN was recently talking about 8 hours to code the first time, but half hour to retype the same code from memory the next day. The code is almost an small (but critical) artefact.
But the idea of coming across a strange book few people have read, and finding unconventional wisdom and writing inside that no publisher would ever put out, sounds exciting!
I think more people should write books and publish them in small quantities and just give them away for others to discover some day. Let the books circulate through the world, growing old and more mysterious with time. It’d be better than keeping some static blog site that will disappear after a decade.
- Paradigms Lost by John Simon. A lot of these older cultural/writing commentary books don't seem to be digitized, but are absolutely worth reading
- Some older tourism books. For example, I have a little pamphlet book on visiting Yugoslavia, written in Polish.
- Unique/interesting formats. For example, I have a book of "useful words for dealing with capitalists and their markets" that was written in German during the DDR. It has about 2,000 words written side-by-side in 8 languages, including English, German, French, Czech, and some others.
- Older magazines, especially fashion magazines. Very hard to get a hold of or find online.
I'd love it if the first page was just "Stop reading other people's thoughts and go think." And then the rest of the pages are blank.
Reading gets me away from a computer screen, which I would otherwise stare at from sunrise to sundown.
I tend to be a late adopter. Once things are close to obsolete I usually get involved!
Although books have the disadvantage of being a similar focal distance as a screen and for this reason is still bad for my eyesight!
All modern digital systems are by comparison, distraction machines. You never know when the next interruption ('notification') gets surfaced, the next update, the next forced restart, the next bug, the next battery problem, the next broken or lost charger cable.
Physical books require light, the book, and your mind. All else fades away, and your mind is given free reign to ponder, to consider, to deliberate. No wonder civilization flourished whenever the physical written form was embraced at sustained scale.
Simon Leys, in the essay "Readers' Rewards and Writers' Rewards", quotes the French writer, and sometime publisher, Jacques Chardonne as saying that "Any good book will find 3,000 readers, no more no less." Leys goes on to say the number hasn't varied significantly in last 400 years. (Collected in The Hall of Uselessness)
However, a lot more people want to be a best-selling author, than there are spots available, so most books don't sell much, and there are lots more authors who cannot get any advance at all. It was ever thus.
This happened with the Microsoft ebooks store and has happened with countless other DRM media.
Sometimes books are automatically revised, or censored. Sometimes accounts holding DRM licenses are deleted or deactivated by mistake.
The only way to actually own a book these days is to buy it on paper, or from one of the rare few publishers that do not use DRM.
If you want a DRM free e-book collection you will need a book scanner or send it to a scanning service.
Well, technically there's a third option...
Most books Apple sells come with DRM.
This section of the Apple documentation explains how a publisher can control whether DRM is used for their book:
https://itunespartner.apple.com/books/support/30-manage-book...
All of the major eBook stores sell books with and without DRM (including Amazon Kindle, Rakuten Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play Books).
Whether an individual book includes DRM on all of these stores is down to the publisher, and you won't typically see books from the major publishers offered without DRM.
There are also authors and publishers who offer books without DRM.
Please note: I do not like DRM. I simply view disinformation as a good way to loose good will from those who would otherwise support a cause.
Microsoft is a noteworthy example of a major ebook seller shutting down ebook accs: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3k3wkk/microsoft-ebooks-will...
DRM being tied to the software is effectively still the same end result. Software maker for any number of reasons stops publishing new versions of the app and they become unlisted from appstores eventually for failing to use recent SDKs or patching security flaws and users still cannot read their books.
So you depend on a company paying someone to run a DRM server or you depend on them paying someone to maintain an app and a CI/CD system. Sooner or later when the DRM content supplier stops paying for the infrastructure, your book stops working one way or the other.
If you mean it downloads the book exclusively to the Kindle app in a proprietary format only that app can read, then it is just a different form of DRM a user has to hack around.
The other option is to crank out (ha, ha) short romance novels like a machine and market like mad. The money’s in hard work at writing porn, or in big broad-audience grand slams, probably written at a junior high reading level, with a small niche supporting a handful of authors in writing based-on-a-true-story stuff (bonus if “true crime” connection) aimed directly at getting optioned for film or tv (but that one’s very hard to break into, studios have some go-to authors for that stuff and you ain’t one of them)
1) How many unsolicited queries have you received, in whatever time period you like: month, quarter, year, forever?
2) How many turned into published books?
None will provide that data, but I strongly suspect that the answer to #2 is "zero."
They'll happily quote you BS quantities, like "a bunch" or "a handful."
So as this article says, they spend their time chasing celebrities, online influencers, and friends of friends. And not making a whole lot of money anyway.
It's not like publishers can simply decide to focus on new and midlist authors. The books that sell, sell. The top line of this article is well described by its title.
> It's not like publishers can simply decide to focus on new and midlist authors
who said anything about what they should or shouldn't do?
But since you brought it up: the same applies to the music business, as Ted Gioia (my original source). At one time in history, everyone in the music business was focused on selling more music, so nurturing and promoting new artists was good business. They didn't simply look at "what are people buying now?"
It may be that we don't disagree at all, and are just talking past each other? At any rate: my only point here is, like startup investing and the music industry, we're talking about a hits business. And they aren't hits businesses because a cabal of cigar-chomping executives wants them to be that; they're that way because the median investment never recoups, and so the winners have to pay for the losers.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This comes up constantly and it’s just wrong.
https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
He has 0.77 dollar profit on an 51 dollar book. A minimal campaign with some organisational backing on HN alone should be able to get 1000 books sold, no? Every programmer who lived trough the doom craze is interested. It would place him above the average number of books sold.
>> A. There is something that is available to our publishers, it’s called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS, and all publishers can spend money and give it to Amazon to have hopefully better search results.
>> — Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House
Wait, "hopefully better"?
What the hell is Amazon selling, magic publishing advertising snake oil?
If I'm paying for placement, I'd expect something more than hope.
Here's how it works: The big companies that pay for AMS get listed ahead of companies that don't in the search results. Since they all pay, it means that the top results are basically ranked the same as if none of them paid. But if you don't pay, your books will appear in the "organic" results - after all the marketed ones - essentially destroying any chance of being seen.
This way Amazon can claim that their search results are fair and algorithmic, protecting them from accusations of monopolistic practices. AMS is a simple paid marketing service, not at all like a tax or protection money, right?
But what's really happening is companies are paying just to make sure they're included somewhere in the top results rather than the organic ones, which no one bothers to look at.
They do the same for their App Store search on Fire TVs. No rev share? Good luck finding that app - even if you search for it by name.
So "hopefully better" is all the publishers are paying for.
The latest game is "How many books can I get?". I think they know perfectly well that I'll buy them as many books as they want because I've never told them I wouldn't buy them a book. So in a way it's them exploring their own impulsiveness and desire to consume versus what they consider to be reasonable. I always make them set their own limit. But I'm also fortunate to be a tech worker who doesn't have to even think about budgeting for books. Telling them no has never been a practical consideration here.
How much new information is there published in book form each year which the average person needs to (or wants to) read?
How much leisure time does the average person choose to dedicate each year to reading? How do they decide which book(s) will be selected for this?
Arguably the problem is that much of the purpose which books traditionally take up has been replaced by:
- encyclopedias --- Wikipedia
- magazines/newspapers --- Facebook and social media
- dime store novels --- fan fiction and webcomics
Time was that the way to be successful w/ a self-published book was to manage to get it bought by the ~9,000 library systems in the U.S. --- how many of these books are being purchased by libraries?
Just some stats as I watched discussion on this topic. I think the question was rhetorical but feels like a nice thing to add.
Curious what the distribution is for types of books.
In the U.S., bookstores lose money almost the entire year --- only making money for the Christmas holidays.
It's so freeing! I read a LOT, and being able to curate a massive library in Calibre, and keep >3k books on my Kindle, is (for me) entirely superior to lugging around heavy physical objects.
I rip DRM off of (most) every ebook I buy, and back up the files, so I'm not worried about losing access, either. Even if the apocalypse arrives my Kindle + a solar charger fit in my bug-out bag better than a box of books.
> How much leisure time does the average person choose to dedicate each year to reading? How do they decide which book(s) will be selected for this?
I mean, the thing is, people aren't reading books, they're reading instagram. We haven't substituted one knowledge-accumulating method for another, we've replaced books with social media. If you want to talk about which one generates or propagates more information-as-knowledge, that's an interesting conversation, but I think the effective mechanism here is someone figured out how to hypercharge the dopamine roller-coaster to a degree that books just can't compete.
Well that was a depressing read (no pun intended).
For example: celebrity books like David Goggins’ sell extremely well at a lower price point. At the other end, Taschen, who makes expensive art books and partners with celebrities often, also does well.
>These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: _publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)._
Why do we view this as a vanity project and not the purpose of the whole endeavour? The celebrity books are just to raw material that allow them to dot heir real job; to make books those fragments of human connection widely available to the people who might need them, a service to readers and to future generations that isn't just about making money.
If you are ever planning on visiting Barcelona I promise you won't regret it if you can arrange it so you are there on Apr 23rd.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_Books_and_Roses
The article is fascinating but worrying. I do hope the industry survives in some form. I love the experience of reading books. It would be a shame if everything was digital although it seems like an inescapable conclusion after looking at the data in the article…
But it has such a high requirement of education and practice, and demands such a high price in focus and attention. Its no wonder that it doesnt fit most people’s lives.
There's more to this as well. You have to factor in that a lot of people write books because they want to say they wrote a book, and others do it because it supports their professional brand, so there was never an intention or expectation of selling a thousand copies.
It does talk about celebrity books selling some low number of copies within the year of publication. Presumably those books do keep selling at some level for some long tail of the book being in print. But unless books are utterly unlike all other media, 80-90% of the proceeds from selling the book will come during the new release window.
Back in the DVD days and before everyone broke ranks and tried to start their own service, the thing that made Netflix great was that no matter what you wanted they had it. Having no retail footprint meant they could stock everything without having to compromise. Libraries don't have that advantage.
This is also one of the areas in which the Internet has actually delivered on early promise (though the success has been a long time coming, and remains precarious): the Internet Archive offers access to over 20 million records, and aims to have a web page for every book ever published. Note that this still isn't full access to all material, but it's quite good.
<https://openlibrary.org/about>
The US Library of Congress has also been expanding its public access, as have other large public libraries (the New York Public Library notably). LoC also have specific programmes aimed at disabled readers such as its NLS BARD programme for the visually- and reading-disabled.
<https://federalnewsnetwork.com/open-datatransparency/2022/02...>
<https://www.loc.gov/nls/how-to-enroll/sign-up-for-bard-and-b...>
$94 for a used copy /s
Because I buy them every week. So does my wife. I guess we are No One.
I read 7-12 new books a week to my son, I'd go bankrupt if it wasn't for libraries.
(We typically read 5-10 books a day, ur the 12 books we get from the library each week have an uneven distribution of what gets read again and again).
Presumably as my son gets older we'll move to books that take longer to read and the absolute # will go down.
Back when I was single and didn't have a kid, I'd go through 2 or 3 long form fiction books a week. At that point in life, Half Priced Books (the book store chain with that name) was my financial savior.
Books are expensive. A kids picture book is easily $15-$20, with outliers costing even more. Whenever I do go book shopping with my son we end up spending almost $200.
If I think of all the technical things I’ve done, there are some I’ve bought lots of books for, and others I’ve never bought a book at all, including some relatively major languages.
https://wordsrated.com/global-book-sales-statistics/
I know this is in some way an irritating thing to say, but this is exactly what I would have guessed before I read the article. It's cool to see numbers put to it but I don't think this was a secret.
I am struck by the coda where the antitrust intervention did nothing to preserve a healthy market. Kind of a common story.
Everyone can easily access the books they want. People choose to read the Bible and Harry Potter because that's what they want to read.
Of course, it might be a shame that we all coordinate on reading a few hits that everyone else is reading rather than check out some underappreciated books. But is the market really to blame for that? Amazon makes it easier than ever to find all the books. Publishers, as pointed out in the quote, are publishing tons of books that don't make it, in part because of a belief that it's a good thing to do. It's easier to self publish than ever before. And social media is often playing a big role in discovering the huge hits that everyone else is reading - many are not the books pushed by the marketing machine, but word-of-mouth successes that get discovered and shared by a huge group of dedicated, articulate readers.
If there were hardly any books selling 3-digit numbers, that to me would suggest an unhealthy market. The presence of lots and lots selling that many seems very positive.
Not particularly. New niche-interest non-fiction books are expensive ( $60+ ) and tend to have short print runs, after which their price on the second-hand market quickly escalates. And few are available as ebooks.
I've had to let a lot of books pass me by, even before they've been printed, simply because I couldn't afford them.
Electronic Books for General 'Beginning-to-End', or 'Story-Telling' reading.
In general, though most books can be either paper or electronic depending on personal convenience at the time. It's not a 'Black and White', 'One Thing or the Other' choice. Both formats are as good as the other if need be.
I use both. "Works for Me."
Reading for pleasure on the other hand, I will only do on paper. The physicality of the book, down to the wrinkles and texture of the paper, are part of the enjoyment.
For books I read for work and other knowledge stuff it's either PDF on an iPad or a web page. In some rare cases a physical book, but stuff tends to move so fast paper reference books expire too fast to have any advantage compared to asking a large language model.
If I get the urge to make any notes from this category, they go into Obsidian.
[0] Books that are read from beginning to end with no need to jump around to check stuff you read before. Could be a biography too, which isn't fiction per se.
It can actually be moderately successful for the right type of author.
I’ve always thought the “book collection of webcomics/blogs” has to be moderately predictable as to sales.
That said I bought three books this week, but it's a rare occurrence... and I'm pretty sure they're re-printed by Amazon.
Or do you mean boardgames? Those seem to be doing alright as well though.
Yes, but people also make more games than ever, and this "more" is way bigger.
Looking at myself, the only things I buy regularly, is food ;)
- cannot find an easy way to de-DRM media available on online stores. I want the ability to copy epub files across my devices and read offline.
- the digital version is a poor-quality scan. This frequently happens with comics.
This is embarrassing to discuss normally, but an additional perk of physical comics and light novels is that I can look at the obi and get reminded what I was doing in the past, where I was in the past, what was happening in the past, etc. especially for those which I have finished reading. The subset of my friends with similar interests as me tend to discard the obi, since it becomes bothersome while reading. I have the habit of removing the obi while I am reading something, then add it back when finished reading the entire thing. Things like this can't really be done with digital media, especially subscriptions.
The content is still there just the medium has changed. Has the same been true for books though? eBooks do exist of course, but did they replace the publishing industry that existed 50 or a hundred years ago?
People have a limited amount of time for entertainment and have a lot more choice between Netflix, YouTube, Books and thousands of other things than they did back then.
[edit] JFC I misread your sense of “read”, I think we agree.
As far as audiobooks go I don't know. Do you have any numbers?
Of the 6000, most have bookmarks. I read at least the first 50 pages of most of them. I've finished a couple hundred so far. I found my old business cards make perfect bookmarks.
I guess "No one buys books" isn't strictly true.
I tried to write 4 books. I was told that I'd likely sell less that 1000. Beyond that would be considered a major win. I finished one, published it, and have made about $500. It took me months to write.
I love books. I have a copy of "I, Robot" signed by Asimov. I really like books signed by authors.
I can't precisely quantify the return on investment, but I believe that having the ISBN on my resume has resulted in me getting more work opportunities and/or salary, so it's a pretty good investment. Also people think you're smart for having the stupidity to start writing a book without having the good sense to abandon the project halfway through.
I mean, I've thousands of books in my collection (though I've had to dump a ton of them lately due to space restrictions.. that's sad), and I've read all of them end-to-end. If a book is so bad that I can't finish it.. it does happen with "free" Kindle books, but for my paper book collection I think there are maybe two or three I didn't read all through.
I guarantee any book-length post on substack will get substantially LESS views than that.
This person discovered what any aspiring writer who cares already knows: Publishing like music runs on proven revenue generating content and gambles on the next big hit. Same as it ever was, and Amazon changes nothing about that fact.
Maybe publishing consolidates and changes, companies boom or bust but the business itself has always been like this.
But in the last couple years, there's been a near complete collapse in it. The racks of scifi have abruptly dwindled to a handful of lonely books. The entire book section has dramatically shrunk as well. This is across thrift stores, not just one.
Is it:
1. nobody buys physical books anymore
2. nobody donates physical books anymore
3. donations seem to be driven by estate sales. Maybe the book lovers have already all died out and their estates are liquidated
I don't know. But I'm glad I bought the books when I could.
It's partially number one but definitely this for me, insofar as thrift stores go. The two thrift stores around me that take books are Goodwill and the Salvation Army and I won't donate anything to them any more.
My book donations go to the neighborhood independent bookstore for them to price and resell and keep their employees paid.
The large chain bookstore near me still has several shelves of science fiction, new release and perennial favorites, so I think at least some are still being made and sold. Hopefully you can find what you seek.
Same with music, movies and video games. I want to be able to “run” stuff offline. Electricity is still a big dependency (i’m looking into solar panels)
It can work for books too, kinda. You can check "J-Novel Club" for an existing example. Chapters are translated in parts, and each part is released ASAP to subscribers, before the whole thing is translated (though they're clear that it's still a WIP).
It's also extremely common for... uh... "gray-zone indie translators" to translate web novels from Japanese into English, and release the translations first to Patreon supporters, and a week later to everyone else.
Granted, everything I'm saying is very specific to the niche of JP novels.
Reading a great book has great value, I think most people would agree, but to even get to the cognitive state where we could even consider doing this, we have to reduce our enormous load of text that is not work-related. I started doing this a few years back and I got back into reading in my spare time and I will never regret it.
Also, publishers are absolutely in it for the money. But the quotes and analysis of this article suggest that publishing houses are too big and a victim of their own size. It seems like they can't "run lean" and are big enough that they are trying to find books that can sell millions of copies.
Other questions I had while reading the article: - Is there any Hollywood accounting in the book industry?
- Do writer's advances still make sense? What if advances were smaller but royalties are bigger?
- These companies are looking for books that can sell millions of copies, but they could also a) raise the price, or b) have supplemental products + content for avid readers and fans.
yaawn..this useless stat again? The author erroneously mixes fiction with non-fiction. Of course, non-fiction from a boutique or niche publishing house will have smaller sales and thus depress the average. This includes such books as "trail guides in California" and so on, or science books. These non-fiction books are never expected to sell many copies and are marketed for a small or specific audience in mind, and there is minimal or no marketing push. So if you include these non-fiction books by tiny publishing houses, of course, most books sell few copies.
Fiction books by major publishing houses marketed to a general audience and with a significant marketing push are expected to sell a lot of copies, and do. Hence the large advances commonly seen for authors who write these type of books.
Also I find that it adds character. Like if someone comes into my house they can see what type of stuff I’m into via my “analog” music movies and books.
What is interesting is that the cultural mores around this vestigial organ have persisted to such a great degree. Harry Potter Books are a psycho-social mechanism of self-construction more than an actual work of fiction. The phenomenon of "I am a bookish person who reads Harry Potter" as a psychological thing that people do is larger and more significant than the actual story of Harry the young wizard. Likewise, the phenomenon of "I am a successful luminary who has written a book" is more important than the actual content of the book itself. Celebrities paying ghostwriters to write books and going to book signings to sign a book for people who will never actually read the book. A perfectly airtight simulacra.
"I don't read books, and I assume nobody else does too.
People who read fun stories have ulterior motives besides enjoying the stories. (As opposed to the honest motives of people who enjoy movies or music, or other media)
People who write books have ulterior, egotistical motives to do so.
Celebrities sometimes write memoirs. See, this proves something!
The above points show that books are a "vestigial organ" and a "simulacra." "
Did I miss anything?
Most people never, ever, ever read paper or e-reader books. They struggle mightily in school to read the things they are _forced_ to read, and then say "never again" for life when they graduate. This is true even for intelligent people who have "good jobs" with disposable income and time set aside that they could conceivably spend reading paper or e-reader books. Seriously, if half of your friends have read a single paper or e-reader book in the last year, you are in a very very small minority.
Media that people regularly consume: Cable TV, Streaming Services, Instagram and TikTok, Movies, Sports, Reddit/Twitter/the news (CNN, etc), paper or e-reader books. What is your intuition about how large each of these categories is compared to the others? If you say "books" is even 5%, you are off by an order of magnitude.
What I am saying is that this holds true, even for a fandom like Harry Potter, which is ostensibly based around reading a book!
Only blockbuster authors get serious marketing support. For everyone else, big publishers want authors to shoulder marketing and publicity costs and responsibilities. Many lower tier authors are shocked to find they get zero marketing support:
I’d hate for readers to think this happens to every author who signs with a traditional publisher. I have worked with several “Big 5” publishers, and never got even a hint of marketing.
https://janefriedman.com/marketing-support-big-5/#comment-24...
Further, most authors are not experts in publicity or promotion, or have the expertise to run paid marketing campaigns.
This goes a long way to explaining why many books published by the Big 5 sell so poorly.
Nice numbers from a self-published LitRPG success: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/1c2a3x4...
Other authors and people on Kindle Unlimited: https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/comments/15o4f5d/ku_payouts_...
https://www.patreon.com/Sleyca
Really happy for them, the story is great.
I've seen no data to suggest this is true at least in the sense it's some sort of major revenue shift. "Traditional" - so non-web novel - type e-books make up about 20% of sales of traditional books, and this has been very slow to change in recent years.
As far as I can tell - and this might well be way off, so I'm happy to see better numbers, the web novel market might maybe be somewhere between 3%-5% of the size of the traditional book market. Both likely can make up substantially more of indie authors earnings - it's certainly far easier for me to sell to Kindle users than getting my books into bookstores, and so paper sales largely come from Amazon too.
The webnovel market is really hard to justify spending time on unless you write in a very specific set of genres, and is prepared to death-march until you get traction. That's fine - some people want to do that.
But KU etc. does not pay well either for most. They pay well for a similarly minuscule fraction of writers, and next to nothing for most. For my part, I'm considering pulling my stuff from there, as it prevents you from putting up your ebooks elsewhere.
This isn't really surprising, sure - it's a market where it's now trivial to enter but still hard to get both good and find a product market fit. So you have a flood of people churning out vast volumes, most of which isn't very good, some of which is good but just up against a deluge of amazing work.
I don't know about the US, but I know there was a survey in the UK a couple of years back that showed that in the UK the average full-time writer, irrespective of platform, earns well below minimum wage, and the vast majority of writers are not full-time. Most full-time writers in the UK at least depend on the income of a partner to be able to afford to write full-time. And that average is pulled significantly up by the top end of the market.
Some people do better on KU or serialized venues than traditional books, sure.
With respect to the click-bait headline, it's not so much that all that much has changed, but that this is the most we've seen the publishing industry numbers laid bare.
And "no one" really do buy books in the sense that reading "books" be they traditional, or webnovel.com or other serial formats, is something most people just don't do very often.
I think web novel and similar channel revenue is hard to estimate, since Patreon revenue and so on flies below the radar.
It is of course still a niche, but I don't think it will stay that way. And I assume publishers see the effects already in consumer behavior. Just look at the Chinese web novel market.
It's against their terms to buy reviews, but you still trivially can (and risk getting banned if Amazon suddenly decides to enforce their rules - it's not worth the risk), and plenty of "grey hat" review services exist that costs money and where the provider will "gift" the readers copies bought off Amazon, but where the readers aren't paid, and are at least in theory given instructions that somewhat tries to comply (or pretend to comply) with Amazon's rules. Wouldn't use that either.
If the reviews aren't verified, then ARC (advance reader copies) are also common and accepted by Amazon w/caveats (you need to be very careful about wording, and for KU it's against the terms for you to send the book out while it's exclusive to KU, but you can do it before, or pause KU), and a fairly large percentage who receive ARCs will leave reviews. ARCs is the norm in the publishing industry, and so anyone remotely decently prepared will line up reviewers that have no direct link to sales, and someone with a following somewhere can sometime line up fairly chunky numbers of reviews right off the bat.
But this means the ratio can be far lower. It's likely a lot of the early reviews will have come from free giveaways and early efforts that did not earn the author a single cent and might even have had a net cost.
Without knowing how the author in question promoted their book, it's a guess that could easily be off by a factor of ten. But it could also be better.
$200k is certainly possible. Just rare.
To do well on KU, people also usually focus on maximising page count. That means writing series, and pushing out "box sets" to encourage. It's a very different game from writing standalone novels, and one probably better suited to people already used to the webnovel/serials on Patreon game.
With respect to the Chinese web novel market, my son spends a fortune on it, but it's still a tiny sliver of overall publishing. I suspect it's likely to outpace the growth in the rest of the e-book market though.
I don't think that's right. It's just too good. Imagine that you are an author and maybe you pay one line editor and get beta-readers for free, maybe you do your own cover, and you don't print a large batch of your book and because you are the author, you can't pay yourself an advance. That kind of resourcefulness that a trad publisher can't afford would allow that same 35/100, maybe a little higher, or maybe a little lower, depending on how you do with self-promotion. Still, it means that if you are not a terrible writer, or one who consistently writes stuff nobody wants to read, you will make money with one book out of three. Which I think is too good.
But yes of course no one buys most of the books that are published, I don't suppose that Lorrain and Corson sold more than a few thousand copies of Electromagnetic fields and waves (one of the books I sold) and I doubt that they made enough money to pay for the work it must have cost them.
It must be even worse for academic textbook authors nor that many university courses don't even use textbooks any more because they have switched to modular online instruction.
Yet we still buy a few books, and I bet that if we made an inventory of the books we currently own that are in the house, it would number in the hundreds. But... most were purchased secondhand. I take my daughter to the bookstore every few months; it is always busy. While she is browsing, I also look around. I'd buy half a dozen or more books on each visit if it weren't for the price. At retail price, books aren't a good deal. Even buying a paper copy of a public domain book will run $15-20. Why?
US book prices seem weirdly expensive. I just sampled the prices from the best sellers here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/
https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/bestsellers/books/
The US prices averages out to ~$15, while the Japanese prices average out to $10. You might say most of that is due to the current exchange rate (1 USD = 154 JPY), but then most books listed on Amazon Japan's "novels" best sellers seemed to be priced around ~$6 USD (~900 JPY), compared to the $18-22 in Amazon.com's "literature and fiction" list.
We can try the same exercise with
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books/
and the average comes out to ~$11 USD (~£9 GBP)
Because many light novels come in series that are spread over several volumes, it's arguable that it costs more money to finish a story because you have to read all these volumes instead of one monolithic tome. I buy the volumes one by one as they are released and don't feel that the individual books are that expensive, but someone catching up on an old series might feel different.
If you mean physical size, the average English books does seem physically larger than the average Japanese book.
Everybody needs to get paid, and everybody needs to make a profit.
The folks that store the books (think Wholesale), the movers/couriers, the retail that has to pay rent/employees/etc _and_ make a profit.
The consider that (depending on the country) there is a VAT on that book. It slowly adds up.
I remember in Brighton back in the 90s I had found a second hand bookstore, that had 5x the books per sqm comparing to the Barnes & Noble in the center of London. B&N had wide corridors, the shelves on the perimeter were all the way to the ceiling, but the non-walled ones were 1.5m high. And considering that they wanted the books to look cool, they were nicely spaced.
Now when you compare this to the second hand bookstore, where presentation is not 'a thing'.. you got many-many more books per sqm, and the authors/publishers don't need to get paid again. But still.. a second hand book will always been 1/3 to 1/4 of a new book (from own experience).
EDIT: I sometimes think that if my life takes a very dark turn, and for whatever reason I end up poor and alone, I will find the smallest/cheapest possible village that has a public library back to my country of origin, and I will be spending max amount of hours in that library.. free wifi, free heating/cooling, and ALL the books I can read(hey, my name is Henry Bemis after all!!)
Sometimes I miss being young and poor. I'm not sure I'd enjoy spending a day like that anymore, and I'm not sure why.
I have no love for textbook publishers AND authors. They could all crash and burn for all I care.
The best real analysis textbook I've seen recently by Jay Cummings sells on Amazon for $16. So it is possible to (self)publish books that people can and would buy. Granted that the author probably doesn't live on this book's income, it points out that more affordable solutions can at least exist.
They're not new, but that's a feature not a bug. The books are more affordable, you're consuming sustainably, and who really cares if a book has been read before?
This distribution is pretty common in artistic professions and professional sport. A tiny fraction takes most of the pot.
As they say around here, that's a feature and not a bug. In art, people tend to do stuff not because they are looking to earn an income, but they have something to prove or say or show.
Hardly a life changer but I've managed to keep the bottom line compensation to $6 per copy, give or take, the entire time so dinner money ;)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2019/07/28/us-publish...
Despite the narrative that copyright holders in every industry like to push, a pirated copy is not equal to a lost sale. Their actual losses are likely a small fraction of that number.
Writing is an effective way to convey your thoughts and ideas. Writing a book has the added benefit of forcing you to plan, prioritize, and edit at a much larger scale. With it comes a greater feeling of achievement. Selling a few copies is a nice cherry on top.
For me, the gain and street cred I will receive from having completed a book is invaluable to me personally.
I'm writing this book in Dutch, so I really don't expect any sales. Okay, maybe a few if there was another bull-run and frenzy, but that's not why I am writing this book.
I suppose it is constituted by the same substance found in books that people buy, never read, and proudly display nevertheless.
I consider that to be a win-win situation.
People trade or loan me books. I get electronic ones via many means too.
Many people I know buy books.
Who does not buy books?
This is insane. To be fair, it’s a fun book. But 19 years?!
Once publishing dies, who will set the quality bar? University presses? Stripe press?
The majority of the revenue of the Big 5 publishers may come from celebrities and repeat best-sellers. But the majority of the profit comes from the un-anticipated best sellers: books that the publishers offer low advances but end up going on to vastly out-sell expectations. While some of those books may have ended up in the "anticipated top selling books" category identified in the trial, the point is that their eventual sales are vastly greater than anticipated, for whatever level was offered.
This means that the rest of their publishing business is absolutely not a "vanity project": it is the business of publishing itself. The reason why these publishers have a backlist (older books that earn a profit long after release) is because of the unanticipated best-sellers. The trial data makes it very clear that publishers (and authors) are actually better at pricing the very high-end books and therefore the profits are typically less (because authors have more leverage to get a fair price in their initial negotiations).
So TL;DR: publishers hope to find promising, but under-rated, authors who may potentially go on to become best-sellers. They continue to fund the books of such authors (despite generally not making a profit) because the few that do fund the rest of the business. But (ironically) once such authors are actually established as best-selling franchise authors, those very same authors' ability to negotiate drives profit margins down, which drives the endless search for fresh talent in the publishing industry.
I feel like I finally need to complete my own analysis of the trial results, because I don't think this is well understood.
People who love reading (I count myself here) will continue to and books will be viable to them. But the vast majority of people only ever read because there wasn't an alternative.
This is a really weird thing to say. It seems to assume that people are indifferent to the quality of the writing in the books they read.
But the fact that one of two profitable genres is "franchise authors" suggests the opposite. Franchise authors become franchise authors by producing high-quality writing.
Lottery winners are famous. It's easy to forget that most lottery tickets don't win.
It's really easy to get disillusioned and give up.
No.
I prefer ebooks for many reasons, and I have purchased thousands of them over the past two decades.
Sometimes a printed book is better for dense technical material. But I'm starting to see textbooks that seem to have been designed as web pages: large x-height, clumsy justification and hyphenation.
No proprietary apps to read a book, please.
There are small publishers. There are also print shops. You can design and sell a book yourself. I buy physical books. I bought Greg Egan’s self-published books.
There does exist a real threat to the book market, and that’s LLMs, but as of 2024 the market is far from dead.
They basically make money scumming celebrity crap on the market and riding the 150 years (and counting) copyright window.
With AI floods the editors and reviewers do become more important. But like music labels, one of the biggest exploiters of art and talent, the technical aspects of media delivery and production aren't held by labels or publishing houses.
They are just middlemen.