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Originally Posted by mr ploppy
I have gone back to real books for most of my reading,
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Them's fightin' words... ebooks
are real books.
I will never switch back to paper for casual entertainment reading. I read reference books on paper, and some nonfiction, but the majority of my reading is on a screen, and is going to stay that way unless there are drastic changes in either my life or the technology makeup of my community.
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A lot of that is down to the sheer volume of mistakes in ebooks, but I don't think it is a deliberate decision made by the publishers. I think it's more a case of the market not being large enough for them to allocate resources to it. But unless they at least proof read them, I can't really see that market getting much bigger.
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Baen's books have no notable level of mistakes. (They've got some, but no worse than print. And when they're informed about them, they fix them.) I don't think it's a case of publishers deciding not to allocate the resources--I think they were told that OCR programs work better than they actually do. I think they ran a few test books through a program, and it looked great, and it didn't occur to them that each book would be a bit different.
The market will get bigger. Much bigger. It may, however, leave the Big 6 behind. Small presses are jumping into the ebook marketplace, because they've noticed what Baen noticed a decade ago: no print cost-per-book, no storage and inventory costs, no requirement to invest in materials before you make sales means it doesn't really matter how high your sales levels are, beyond a certain minimum; you can start small and slowly build a core marketplace of loyal readers by providing quality books that they like.