Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
And ebooks are in fact a full replacement for print books; unlike compressed music downloads that offer slightly lower quality that their CD incarnations, ebooks are lossless conversions of the original material.
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If only that were true...
As CazMar noted:
Quote:
Originally Posted by CazMar
He probably left out one big reason why sales may not reach intended figures - the appallingly bad formatting of some DRM'd books on sale (particularly in EPUB). The books on this site, Gutenberg and other free sites are just so much better. As EPUB requires some expertise with HTML (hardly a new technology) this seems to have left publishers floundering around and trying to pass off shoddy product as a digital book.
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The general state of ebooks has a long way to go before it reaches the standard of quality people have come to expect even from MMPBs. I have to say, I've seen some atrocious ePubs on Gutenberg, though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
7% by dollar value; Amazon sells more ebook units than paper, but a lot of those ebooks are .99 each.
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I don't have access to the BISG report, but
Publishers Weekly says, "The BISG study found that e-books accounted for 8% of
unit fiction sales in the fourth quarter of 2010" (emphasis added), which looks like they were counting individual units rather than a dollar value.
It's certainly interesting that the BISG report differs so markedly from Amazon's. BISG certainly has no animus against ebooks (they sell a hefty bundle of survey reports about ebook use), though of course Amazon has a big stake in them. The only way I can think of to reconcile the two sets of numbers is to suggest that Amazon has lost market-share in physical book sales. But frankly it's impossible to say without having a closer look at the data used to come up with these numbers.
But back to the original article: I think it's a realistic perspective - ebooks will end up dominant, it's just not going to happen overnight (it's taken over a decade to get this far). I still think the device problem is a major issue at present, though - only 15% of the market has a smartphone, and ereader prices need to come down more.