[tomsem]

Almost his whole argument is based on his (and his friend’s) made up notion of ‘bookiness’. I’m sure 10 people would have 10 other definitions of what that might mean, and with very little overlap. Which is to say it is a meaningless term.

Then he makes straw man arguments about the type of people that consume ebooks, and what makes them ‘fanatics’, when he obviously has never met such person.

Finally he concludes that the books he himself reads aren’t suitable for electronic consumption (by which he means Kindles), when he hasn’t obviously has not even tried reading these on tablets (which are no heavier than many of the books he reads), where you can have facing pages, you can turn off page animation, easily jump between locations in the book (randomly if you care to by dragging the scroller around). Thus revealing his ignorance.

One reason print best sellers and Kindle best sellers are a different mix is that the genre fiction he claims not to read is a perfect fit for eReaders and linear reading. Those same books are much further down in the print lists. And Amazon includes Kindle Unlimited titles in the best seller lists, but that is just borrows and not sales. Harry Potter gets borrowed a lot, where the print edition can be read and re-read without generating a sale. The comparison is apples and oranges, when it is just ‘sales ranking’ being compared.

He claims ebooks sales are not growing, based on his own belief apparently: he doesn’t make any attempt to quote Pew or any other source of publishing information.

And it’s not really an easy claim to substantiate. Amazon would have sales numbers, and some idea of how many ebooks get read, but they are never going to share that publicly. Print books go into circulation, but there’s no way to know how many of them get read, or how many people read a given book. A book sold is not a book read, whether it is analog or digital.

And nothing he writes merits the term ‘abomination’. However, that could well be something the editor came up with to generate clicks, often the author has nothing to do with it.

I’m happy that he’s happy with his reading. He should do more of that and less time writing articles like this one.