Amazon: e-book purchases push past paper Amazon.com's UK wing claims its British customers are now buying more e-books than printed-on-paper editions. According to the online retailer, for every 100 print books sold in 2012 so far, 114 electronic tomes have been purchased. That, it notes, includes sales of paperbacks and hardbacks that lack an equivalent e-edition. …
By that same line of thinking, then an MP3 isn't really music since....what.... it doesn't feel like, smell, or look like......what, a CD, an LP, an 8 track?
I understand there are pros and cons to having one form of media to another, but for some, it doesn't matter. I have a mass collection of books which is growing larger by the years. No E reading device yet, but they are looking more and more attractive.
Rare that I'll resort to either linking to Twitter or Stephen Fry, but he makes a good point here:
"One technology doesn't replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators."
http://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/1312682218
It means I'm reading more in the very literal sense; as the sort of person that tended to read about half a book and then wander off even when that meant building up a big pile of them, my Kindle has facilitated an even more scattergun approach.
I doubt I'm reading more words but I am definitely dipping into more books.
to grabbing does not equal reading....
Even as someone who reads a lot I can safely say that I have a ridiculous number of e-books that I have not read yet. It is possible that I may never get round to reading some of them as I have the hardback 'realbook'* version of them which I prefer to read but I keep the e-book just in case.
Like most tech-stuff it's horse for courses and while I would never try to take a fortnight's worth of books on a holiday rather than some form of loaded e-reader, I would not take even a Kindle to the beach as dunking a tenner's worth of dead-tree is far less traumatic than watching your e-reader sinking below the waves.
* if 'realbook' isn't trademarked/patented/copyrighted then I claim it, especially in East Texas.
I have thousands of paperbacks, and haven't read hundreds of them; some I will, many I won't, but I don't know which yet, and never will. There is nothing unusual about buying books you never read.
As for piracy, I am sure there are many people with vast libraries of pirated media (book, film, music) that they have never used, and never will.
As a man who has a wife, who started downloading free books on to her Blackberry from Amazon, who also has progressed through the Kindle 3 to the current Fire - I wonder about Amazon's numbers. Every time she d/l's a book, we get an email receipt from Amazon whether it's $0.00 or whatever. Looks like a purchase, smell's like a purchase - not a purchase. Over 3500 ebooks, maybe ten actual purchases, due to Amazon's free one day, charge the next day pricing structure.
"The figure doesn't include freebies, either."
So all of you talking about freebies, go back and read the article.
Personally I think this is fantastic news. More people reading (even if it is trash) is always a good thing. I know that I have read more books this year already than in the last three years combined.
Damn near every ebook Amazon sells has been free one day or another -> so "The figure doesn't include freebies, either." is technically correct. They have the classics, out of copyright books that are always free, but there are 20-30 normally paid ebooks free on a day to day basis, changing day to day, so the numbers would be inflated.
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