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Originally Posted by J. Strnad
This isn't a football game. There isn't a winner and a loser. Printed books and ebooks can co-exist and people can buy whichever they want.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Maybe, maybe not. Or rather, I suspect that ebooks and the current economic model that drives paper books sales are not compatible. I think paper books will still be around in 10-15 years, but I think there might be very few brick and mortar book stores to buy them in.
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I agree. The print model for books has been flailing for a while now, trying to be profitable while absorbing a 50% waste rate for pbacks, trying to sell new titles quickly in massive numbers despite the fact that reading is slower than movies and slower to spread by word of mouth. Popular titles fall out of print while trash nobody wants fills the shelves. (Also, popular titles are reprinted six times and trash gets a small first-run printing and vanishes; the system does sometimes work.)
The entire publishing industry was designed around economic and communication realities that no longer apply; it needs new methods. Ebooks are going to push it to find those methods--or collapse. I suspect a lot of publishers will go out of business over the next decade or two, as they fail to figure out how to identify and reach their real market, or as they discover their safety net (whatever it is) doesn't actually work.
Print books aren't going to go away, no matter how good ebooks get; print is *useful* tech. Stable for hundreds of years. But publications of leisure/entertainment reading material may drop off incredibly, especially if publishers & authors can sort out a method to allow used ebooks to be given away or sold.