In Britain and especially abroad, ebooks are booming

ctg

ctg

weaver of the unseen
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Over the past year, more and more people have been reading ebooks. Hardly a surprise, but after years of hand-waving by enthusiasts and detractors, we're finally getting to the point where we can actually measure what's going on. We can see, for example, that in 2013, Russia overtook the UK to become the world's third largest ebook market after the US and China – largely thanks to a site called LitRes, which was founded in 2006 with a stated mission to fight book piracy. Before LitRes, the only ebook market in Russia was the black market. Today, LitRes is the only serious seller on the market. A similar effect can be seen occurring in Brazil and China and elsewhere.


As ebooks find more and more readers overseas, they might at first seem to have slipped a bit over here – an industry report last summer showed growth apparently slowing. But the analysts Nielsen attributed that to the extraordinarily high sales of the previous year – aka the Fifty Shades effect. Discounting that bubble, they predicted that 2014 would be the year when fiction ebooks overtook sales of fiction paperbacks – not least because sales of hardback and paperback novels are falling even faster than sales of fiction ebooks are rising.


Finally, book comparison site Luzme, which allows consumers to search across multiple bookstores for the title they want – a kind of literary Comparethemarket – revealed that British ebook buyers are more parsimonious than their US counterparts, overwhelmingly preferring books for less than £1 and almost nothing over £5. Not surprising when you've got the likes of Sainsbury's offering hundreds of books for 99p – but the fact that British readers are buying ebooks in droves from supermarkets implies a pretty healthy market,
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In Britain and especially abroad, ebooks are booming | Books | The Observer
 
I believe large retailers offer ebook downloads, or at least they do over in North America (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, big sellers like that).

There are also self-publishing sites for ebooks, which are a bit like heading to your local thrift store- sometimes hits, but often just as many or more misses. I've self-published short stories for fun on the website Smashwords, and while I mention it to people sometimes, I don't tell them it's a great place to find new works by new authors because 99% of the stuff published there is utter garbage.

I've randomly found some good books- I mean, there are so many titles that even 1% of them being good is actually quite a number of books. However, people seem to get drunk with power when faced with no restrictions and it's amazing to me what they think is an acceptable ebook to put out there.

Because I retain rights to my work published via Smashwords, I simply use the site as a way to distribute my stories to friends and family (I make coupons so they can download for free). Someday if I get an agent I'll broach the topic of an anthology, if I can write enough stories to fill one, and then hopefully my professionally produced ebook can be listed on websites of large retailers.
 
The ebook will overtake the paperback and hardback as Britons' preferred format for reading their favourite novels by 2018, according to a report. The UK consumer ebook market – which excludes professional and educational books – is forecast to almost triple from £380m to £1bn over the next four years.


Over the same period, accounting group PwC predicts that sales of printed editions will fall by more than a third to £912m as the UK population's reading habits become dominated by tablets, with 50% of the country expected to own an iPad, Kindle or a similar device by 2018.
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Ebooks on course to outsell printed editions in UK by 2018 | Books | The Guardian
 
They might, ctg. I certainly don't see why deleting a 99p download would give me qualms if it wasn't holding me. However, spending £5 + on a hardcopy - I'm more inclined to give it a second chance. There is the "luxury" element, the bragging rights of a coffee table filled with books people never read. You just can't have the awe impact of "wow" with an ereader/tablet/phone/pad. ;) Ebooks have their place, so do the paper things.
 
Plus, a hard copy is a much better gift than a data file containing a book.

I also prefer hard copies for history, which tend to have maps and sometimes photos which show up less well on my e-reader.
 
On an individual basis, I prefer physical copies (but I do tend to buy Kindle books if I can).

Hmm. If a book's up on Smashwords they could download a mobi version and e-mail it to you.
 
Depends on the price. I have noticed that sometimes a paperback of an older book is cheaper than the ebook.

I like, "real books". I like to, if I have chance get them signed.
 
thaddeus6th said:
On an individual basis, I prefer physical copies (but I do tend to buy Kindle books if I can).

Hmm. If a book's up on Smashwords they could download a mobi version and e-mail it to you.
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I use the Kindle for PC app, to look more closely at the phrasing authors use. Tends to be only big names, though.
 
I must admit, I was very, very, very anti Kindle at first, now I own a Kindle Paperwhite and I love the thing. I want to read everything on it now.
 
It's my experience that most people who collect books loath, hate and despise ebooks.

Whilst people who read books love them.

The ebook won't fully replace paperbacks, but it can certainly work well alongside. If they took scanning and transcribing more seriously and if they worked with the ebook makers for things like front covers (come on Amazon get with the game and stop giving me boring default covers of your choice and let me put the book I'm reading on the front) then I can only see the ebook growing.

Plus I suspect that like many digital cool things to own they've introduced the idea of reading in itself to a LOT more people who might otherwise have thought books boring/stuffy/for that geekyperson etc....

Hopefully hand in hand with the rise of the ebook we'll see a rise in the quality of print books - make it an exclusive and prized item worth owning even more than it is now to help drive sales.
 
The kobo has certainly made reading around my two children more convenient. I've backed more Kickstarters because of it, and read four times as many books this year already than in the last five.
But you don't get shiny spines, or gorgeous epic covers with scrumptious embossed work and gold lettering.
 
I'm about to invest in an e-reader because I've run out of shelf space and I've realised that, like it or not, e-books are the practical option when you're on the move.

Google Play Books is actually a pretty nifty e-reading app despite what others might think, so I'll be buying an Android tablet. Plus, Amazon doesn't make it easy to buy e-books from them in my part of the world and Google Play does, so...
 
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Blue you might want to look into other e-readers. There's a big difference in reading from an e-reader over reading from a tablet device. The e-ink is totally different and akin to reading from real paper with no screen glare - even things like Amazon's Kindle White with its backlight is still much less glaring than an LCD screen as used in most tablet devices.
 
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