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02-15-2012, 05:50 PM | #16 |
Philosopher
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What you or I might want isn't very important. If I like a TV show, it is almost certain to be canceled, the market looks at a broader picture than my tastes. I'm not against using a web browser to read books. I am just saying that reading books on the computer is a small part of the e-book market. Reading books on the computer is a supplement to reading on e-readers and tablets.
You can read your Kindle books on the web with Firefox and Chrome. You have to install a browser app, I don't know if your computer policies allow that or not. Last edited by QuantumIguana; 02-15-2012 at 07:52 PM. |
02-15-2012, 05:50 PM | #17 |
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PDF is only a small percentage of the book market, it is mostly used for technical documents. It is useful for when a page has to look a certain way, but it isn't very good at all for resizing.
Last edited by QuantumIguana; 02-15-2012 at 07:41 PM. |
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02-15-2012, 05:54 PM | #18 | |
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02-15-2012, 08:40 PM | #19 |
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I think you'll find it's not as small a segment as you might think. Not only do technical people read PDFs, but older PC users are very accustomed to reading PDF books, many before ebooks became popular.
Last edited by Steven Lyle Jordan; 02-15-2012 at 08:43 PM. |
02-16-2012, 05:16 AM | #20 | ||
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However you do bring a good point. The reason why browser reading didn't take off in the 90's was probably linked to the limited internet access. |
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02-16-2012, 09:35 AM | #21 | |
Chasing Butterflies
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I think people have, will, and continue to read on a wide variety of formats. I do think that browser reading will become more popular in the future for a variety of technical reasons. |
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02-16-2012, 10:16 AM | #22 |
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02-16-2012, 10:39 AM | #23 |
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It all comes down to whether ad-supported books becomes a viable option. People are not going to give up their limited screen space on their devices for nothing. Local storage is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time, even the smallest devices can hold many books.
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02-16-2012, 12:31 PM | #24 |
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Books don't have to be ad-supported to be browser-accessible; they merely have to be paid for (and as I said before, an issue the article really doesn't address).
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02-16-2012, 12:44 PM | #25 | |
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The article does address it:
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The article is not about web accessibility for books. |
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02-16-2012, 12:48 PM | #26 |
Chasing Butterflies
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Not necessarily. If I sell 20 books at $1 in one month, I've made $20. If I put that same book online for "free" but with ads on the page and I make $30 in one month, I've made more with the "free" version of my book than I did with the paid version. I may not have made the same per reader, but that's something that each author will have to deal with on their own terms.
And a lot of those web-readers may buy the paid version so that they can have a nicely-formatted off-line version for their eReader. None of that presupposes ads IN the book. |
02-16-2012, 01:02 PM | #27 |
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With web comics it's either the print version that you can buy, or make donations to receive a signed poster, or cards, or they sell an unrelated story by the same author. Beside that you have t-shirts, plushies, etc.
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02-16-2012, 01:08 PM | #28 |
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And I WISH the web comics had an ebook version to buy. I can either compile all the free strips manually myself or buy an ebook collection -- I'd rather pay the money. But things like, say, Order of the Stick, don't have ebooks. It's so sad. I have to buy the paper copies and ship them off to 1DollarScan.
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02-16-2012, 01:32 PM | #29 |
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I have read books on my computer for many many years. I am probably in the minority though. I think the reason it didn’t really take off in the past was the portability issue. Not so easy to drag a workstation around with you. Once laptops finally became smaller, lighter, and had acceptable battery life, I think computer reading picked up somewhat. Then along came netbooks and even more people got it in on it. Now we have a smorgasbord of portable reading devices with lots of local storage.
I personally wouldn’t read an ad-supported ebook myself. I would rather just pay a fair price for the ebook and read it how I want, where I want, when I want, in whatever format I want, on whatever device I want. For me the huge difference between the web and an ebook is: The web requires connectivity, an ebook does not. I would never purchase an ebook that required a network connect to read, those should be stored locally. I have seen an attempt at the opposite, the offline Wikipedia device called the WikiReader. To me this was backwards. Content that is ever changing and requires constant updates needs to stay connected. Content that is static (like books) should be stored locally, there is just no reason to require a network connection for static content. In summary: Web = dynamic content ebook = static content Two different animals. Last edited by CyGuy; 02-16-2012 at 01:57 PM. |
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