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Old 05-10-2010, 03:40 PM   #6
Elfwreck
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Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy View Post
I have gone back to real books for most of my reading,
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.

Quote:
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.
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.
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