[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

With broadcast TV, I meant everything: antenna and cable, i.e. 'programs for which you need to stay home at a specific time.'

No need to do that. Watch and record boxes are almost standard with cable offerings here. The SO has ours set to record shows she watches, which she can view at her convenience.

Most people my age and younger only have a TV for DVD/Blu-Ray, Netflix, and casting the occiasional YouTube video. If they have cable at all, it's because it comes as a package with internet. (Can't have cable internet without basic cable TV with most providers here.)

My thumbnail impression is that things aren't quite so skewed here. Younger folks have and watch TV, though the demographics will determine what they watch. There certainly are folks who only do Netflix, YouTube et al, but I don't think they are a majority of their age bracket.

After I move (again...), I'm going to look into internet without cable TV again, but up until now, the speed wasn't good enough. I don't need huge speeds, but 40-50 MBit (5+ MB/s) would be preferable. Up until now, the price for a 50 MBit DSL/Fiber connection was higher than a 100 MBit cable/TV combo.

It's theoretically possible to get broadband without TV. I used to have it via DSL. These days I have a combo deal with TV, 100mbit Internet, and VOIP phone service through my cable provider. I could get up to 300mbit Internet, but don't have a need that justifies it.

Publishers are asking why people don't read a lot anymore, and lament that book stores are going on the fritz? How could that be?

Well, maybe because reading isn't affordable in the Netherlands?

While doing some christmas shopping, i ended up in a book store.

An average (new) paperback in Dutch, 250 pages long in largish print, costs between €20 and €25. The same books as e-books cost €8-12.

Hell, even The Hobbit (in Dutch), which is also around 250 pages, costs €20 in paperback, and €25 in hardcover.

If you're the least bit technically inclined and/or have some help with ebooks, you can save like 60%-70% right there; The Hobbit in Dutch is about €10, in English it costs around €8). For €25, you can get The Hobbit and all three Lord of the Rings books (in Dutch); if you shop around, they can be cheaper.

(The three paperbacks making up The Lord of the Rings cost €20 a piece in Dutch... in book stores.)

People who think that ebooks are more expensive than paper books are sadly mistaken, at least in the Netherlands. I'm not even taking coupons into account.

I haven't seen anyone who thinks eBooks are more expensive than paper copies. I have seen a lot of folks who don't understand why eBooks are as expensive as they are.

Most of that confusion stems from ignorance of the publishing process. Over 80% of the cost of traditionally publishing a book is incurred before the book reaches actual publication, in eBook or paper format. The print/bind/warehouse/distribute step for paper editions is perhaps 10% of the book's budget. Dropping paper doesn't provide anywhere near the assumed savings, and eBooks are an extra out-of-band step in the process. The usual end result of the publications process is a PDF a printer will use to make plates to print the book. ePub and Mobi aren't part of the standard output from DTP and require separate handling.

Bookstores are dropping because of industry consolidation, and it's been happening for decades. Books are fungible commodities. It's the same book, regardless of where you get it, and buyers chose retailers based on price.

The independent bookstore is an endangered species because the chains can offer better pricing. The chains are in turn under pressure from the warehouse outlets like CostCo. And everybody is under pressure from Amazon. When you can go online, select and pay for the book(s) you want, and have them delivered, why go to a bookstore?

I was at a bookstore in a mall a while back. It was part of a chain, and the store was on two floors. The ground floor was devoted to the cafe, cards, games, calendars, magazines and gifts. Actual books, save for current YA hardcover bestsellers, were upstairs. Prime retail space was devoted to what sold. If the store sold only books, it would be out of business now.

And the Netherlands suffers from being a small market. The costs to produce a book will be the same, regardless of the number of copies printed and sold. To cover costs in a smaller market where you simply can't print and sell that many copies, prices go up. (In a market like the US, economies of scale kick in. When you can print and sell far more copies of a title, the incremental cost per copy drops, and the sales price is lower in consequence.)

And the folks who really suffer are small language market publishers. I'd guess most folks in the Netherlands are reasonably fluent in English. What market is there for books written in Dutch? I saw news items a while back about a conference for small language market publishers in the Baltic, where the total population of a country that spoke a particular language might be 5 million, and the number of adult readers buying books in that language was a fraction of that. They confronted both a small total market for books written in the native language, and that fact that increasing numbers of that market were fluent in English and didn't require books in their birth tongue to be able to read. The small language market publishers were trying to compete with the multi-national outfits publishing in English, and most of what the readers wanted to read had been published in English in the first place.

I have thousands of paper and eBook volumes, and some books in both formats. Things like fiction with linear narratives are tailor made for eBooks. Other things aren't. I'm a former graphic designer and print production guy, and my library includes books on art, art history, architecture, design, production, and typography. Most of those are paper "coffee table" books. The content simply needs a far larger viewing area than any practical eBook viewer device will have. My current viewer device is a 7" Android tablet. I have a variety of things under Calibre on my desktop I don't sync to the tablet. They are things like large PDFs or huge ePub files that either need a much bigger screen or simply take too long to open and view on device.

eBooks are an additional format here, not a replacement for paper.
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Dennis