Quote:
Originally Posted by Dutchbook
Yet how many people read those?
I worked at a very large european publishing house for a couple of months, and I was told during training that it comes from the fact that for the price of the book, it doesnt really matter if something is physically printed or not. Printing costs are a negligible factor in the costs of books and magazines.
Yet the reader doesnt know or understand it, so they expect a lower price from ebooks.
Also, reader research at that publisher determined that people have an emotional tie to paper; they prefer physical over digital because of the feeling, the smell, the appearance of the printing, etc...
Also, ereader sales have been in the drain for years, and ebook sales didnt show the same figures because they were compensated by the growth in tablets. Perhaps people dont enjoy reading on tablets? If so, I can understand why.
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It also might be a matter of the status quo. The copernicus theory of the solar system didn't get accepted because it was right, but because the old guard who put the earth at the center died off. Much the same may happen with ebooks. For several centuries we've been reading books on paper and people are slow to change once they have a set way of doing things. As our society becomes more digital in nature (in part due to improvements in digital paper technology) the ereader will become more ubiquitous as a part of our culture and though paper won't vanish entirely people will be more at home reading on a screen I think. And you can't expect two different media to react exactly the same as far as development of the trend. We used horse and cart for many centuries with tiny improvements along the way and then boom! Suddenly we had the automobile forcing the horse and cart off the road (save for groups like the Amish) within 2-3 generations. They say that history repeats itself in cycles as well but it never quite seems to repeat itself exactly the same. So I don't think you can really apply what works in traditional publishing to digital either. Granted there are some similarities between the two but there is a world of difference between having a warehouse stuffed with paperback books for example and a small computer database with links to other databases (stores) where you can pick up a copy of an ebook.