Quote:
Originally Posted by bookwerm
I think we just settle on a difference of opinions, then. You seem to be under the impression that ebooks are to paper books what digital music is to CDs. I'm of the mindset that the relationship is more like that of Blu-ray to standard def - there's room in the market for both to exist without one annihilating the other.
I stand on the reasoning that eBooks have been around for several years, and if they were going to cannibalize paper book sales (the way digital music did to CDs), it would be more apparent and prevalent than it is today. The recording industry saw double digit percentage drops in CD sales; I'm no expert, but I don't think we've yet seen a similar behavior in eBooks. Yes, many people will immediately cite the format wars and lack of standardization as contributing factors to the slow growth of the eBook market (and it's all true, of course). Simply put, there was a much higher demand for digital music before the industry regulated and standardized itself (hence the high rate of pirated music) than there comparatively is for ebooks vs. paper books.
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Considering music piracy took off because of compression and acceptable (quasi-transparent) playback possibilities on multiple devices, it seems unsurprising at best that ebook demand didn't take off before there were devices to comfortably read them on. While I have at times read books on my CRT/TFT before I got my iLiad, it wasn't something I felt like doing often. So in that sense the fact that book piracy hasn't become quite the menace the music industry lost to doesn't tell you very much about whether or not this won't also happen later (that is, now) in the book industry.
However, it was a lot easier to digitize CDs than it is to digitize books (though that's becoming less of an issue now that more retail ebooks are becoming available). That said, the only sold ebooks in which the question of formatting is taken seriously seem to be academic titles sold as PDFs, but let's not go there
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