The Book Conundrum

[penk]

So I'm in the final 18 hours or so of Arisia, and spent a little time this afternoon in the dealers room (after my duties at Registration were over). I noticed a couple paperbacks on sale that I was interested in. One is Glen Cook's A Passage at Arms, certianly one of the best books I've ever read, and one I had thought was out of print. My copy of the book has long since disintegrated, so finding it available again is a win.

Except.. I have no interest in purchasing paperbacks - or even hardbacks for that matter.

I used to collect books like crazy, and had quite a pile stored up. Since I've been reading more and more on my iPhone, my interest in picking up chunks of dead tree (and the hassle inherent therein) is diminishing.

But alas, publishers haven't figured out that selling a book digitally is a simple and effective way to make money with virtually no overhead. They already have the book printed and in digital form. Making it available for download is a minor step.

I firmly believe that digital books are the next step in written media. I just wish the publishers would catch up and let me buy books that I want to read, when i want to read them, and not simply offer the latest Stephen King novel at a stupidly inflated price.

I foresee a thriving black market for digital books until the publishers get their collective heads out of their asses and start putting their libraries out at reasonable prices.

Comments

[penk.livejournal.com]

I've torrented a few books and found the offerings... sketchy at best. HTML documents with little or no formatting, poor TOC management and chapter breaks that are arbitrary at best.

However, I'm an openminded fellow. If a birdie were to whisper the torrent URL or send said torrent along, I might be willing to give it a second glance.

In the name of science, of course.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Quality of the pirated ebooks varies pretty widely, but I've been pretty impressed by some of what I've found.

I don't think you're on the site in question, but ping me in realtime...

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

i imagine it would take many publishers more effort than "virtually no overhead" implies to put out ebooks in other than the crappy format you're describing here.

Fact is, when there's a format change, a lot of the pre-change stuff doesnt make it over. I used to be dragged around to garage sales and have seen a lot of 78s with music that got left way behind when things started spinning more slowly. The most popular N% of recent stuff will make it over to ereader format in the next 10 years, the percentage of less recent stuff that makes it over will be less. There may be a Googleish force that tries to grab everything over at some point when copyright law or The Invisible Hand Of The Free Market makes that possible, but in our lifetimes, there will remain big gaps in stuff from our lifetimes.

IMHO.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, a lot of spaces that were big gaps just a few years ago are already being filled by Amazon, with delivery format being your choice of Kindle or print-on-demand dead-tree. Plenty of little publishers have already gone this route, lots of books that were hard to find just 3-4 years ago can now be bought now, and more and more will follow.