Quote:
Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom
What the authors and publishers don't understand is that their most lucrative base-the voracious readers, who bought hardcovers and paid to join frequent buyer clubs at B&N to get discounts on those hardcovers, have moved on. I am so over hardcover books. They are expensive, unwieldy, hard to read in the dark, and dirty if I borrow them from the library. I will not pay $15 for your ebook that I cannot lend to a friend.
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It's really a mixed bag. Unlike you, I do not ever borrow from the library (although I always agree to pay more in taxes to support the library); I prefer to buy for my personal library the books that interest me. And those books I always buy in hardcover, and I buy a lot of books (I spent nearly $500 on hardcovers in July alone).
The ebooks I buy tend to be from indie authors and inexpensive. I consider ebooks read-once-and-throwaway books, so I am not willing to spend much on them. I also pretty much limit ebook buying to fiction. On occasion I will buy both the hardcover and ebook versions of a nonfiction book, but usually I just buy hardcover nonfiction.
My point is that the avid-reader market remains unsettled. Print still outsells ebooks by at least 2:1 and the greatest profit margin for publishers remains hardcovers. Will ebooks dominate? Perhaps someday in some categories, but I doubt it will be soon and doubt it will be very soon in anything but certain fiction categories.
Although some of the "voracious readers" have moved on, many have not. I am one who has not.