Originally Posted by MattW
Well, there is a difference between using a screen to facebook & play games and using it to read a book.
And high prices have certainly contributed to the decline in ebook sales - to argue otherwise runs against everything we know about how supply & demand work.
But what the last few years have shown, quite convincingly, is that, for the time being, there seems to be a limit in how far ebooks will penetrate the book market. We can argue back and forth about why a substantial number of people prefer paper books over ebooks and if that dynamic will change (and other what circumstances), but the fact remains, that for a significant number of consumers, reading an ebook is simply not preferable.
Taking myself as a rather atypical example, I've owned ebook readers since the Sony PRS-505 came out (the PRS 505, the PRS-650, the T1, T2, the Kindle Paperwhite 2 & 3, the Kindle Oasis and the new Oasis 2 is on pre-order), but I buy all books I REALLY look forward to, as a hardcover. And I read a lot, so yeah, space is a problem. I've recently converted all bookshelves to floor-to-ceiling (and my rooms are quite high, this being a very old European pre-WW1 apartment building).
It's just a personal preference, and I don't think I could make a convincing argument for any more ebook-enthusiastic MobileRead member, but if you talk to people in the book-selling business (and not necessarily the publishers), there seems to be a large segment of buyers for whom ebooks are simply not a viable option.
KU and Overdrive don't really compete with regular "sales", they compete with libraries or used-book-sales, so whether or not they have any impact on ebook sales deosn't really matter for the sake of comparing pure sales figures.
To which I say: yeah, if ebook prices were lower, sure, the sales would increase, but what's so bad if pbooks and ebooks co-exist?
Why does one have to "win" in order for nayone to feel vindicated?
Isn't the freedom of being able to buy in whatever format you choose the best possible solution enayway?
Matt
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