Month: July 2010

From the New York Times:

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, theKindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.

Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.

The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.

This is depressing. Although, it’s just hardbacks, not their entire book stock, which is what I initially thought and hence was completely shocked.

This might have depressed me as well, once, but as with all things in life I’ve come to new conclusions. I began to think about what a book meant to me, and I realized the book (the object) itself means nothing. It was the words within the book, what they said and what they meant, that matter. All those books I began collecting were merely another example of my need to collect objects, and display them, in an attempt to feel like I owned worthwhile things. As much as I enjoyed buying the books and reading them, they eventually just ended up on a shelf where they’d sit and take up space. The books became meaningless trophies.

Aside from this is the question of usability. I have never been able to read a book by scrolling in a browser because it leaves no room for pause, what with the giant wall of text facing me down. It’s quite off-putting. However, the advent of ebooks (or ebook apps for devices such as iPad) allows for digital books that are formatted like a physical book with virtual pages that can be turned at my leisure. I’ve read a few books this way now (mostly older books that are now in the public doman and free to download) and I haven’t seen a drawback outside of the need to eventually stop and charge the device.

Books are ancient. There are many that contain information and stories that might never find their way into an ebook, and for that reason alone they remain an important medium that we cannot do away with. However, it’s important to consider the cost of continuing with the practice of printing books. They use up material and resources that do not necessarily need to be spent to create books and can be saved for other uses, or perhaps spared altogether and left alone in their natural state (of course ebooks also use up resources and energy, but something tells me it’s less than the cost of printing thousands of physical books). I will continue to buy physical books when necessary and ebooks as often as I can because what matters most is the content and the information or stories that the content imparts. It is what mattered in the days of papyrus, straw, and stone; it is what matters in the age of print; and it is what will matter in the age of the digital book.

From the New York Times:

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, theKindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.

Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.

The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.

This is depressing. Although, it’s just hardbacks, not their entire book stock, which is what I initially thought and hence was completely shocked.

This might have depressed me as well, once, but as with all things in life I’ve come to new conclusions. I began to think about what a book meant to me, and I realized the book (the object) itself means nothing. It was the words within the book, what they said and what they meant, that matter. All those books I began collecting were merely another example of my need to collect objects, and display them, in an attempt to feel like I owned worthwhile things. As much as I enjoyed buying the books and reading them, they eventually just ended up on a shelf where they’d sit and take up space. The books became meaningless trophies.

Aside from this is the question of usability. I have never been able to read a book by scrolling in a browser because it leaves no room for pause, what with the giant wall of text facing me down. It’s quite off-putting. However, the advent of ebooks (or ebook apps for devices such as iPad) allows for digital books that are formatted like a physical book with virtual pages that can be turned at my leisure. I’ve read a few books this way now (mostly older books that are now in the public doman and free to download) and I haven’t seen a drawback outside of the need to eventually stop and charge the device.

Books are ancient. There are many that contain information and stories that might never find their way into an ebook, and for that reason alone they remain an important medium that we cannot do away with. However, it’s important to consider the cost of continuing with the practice of printing books. They use up material and resources that do not necessarily need to be spent to create books and can be saved for other uses, or perhaps spared altogether and left alone in their natural state (of course ebooks also use up resources and energy, but something tells me it’s less than the cost of printing thousands of physical books). I will continue to buy physical books when necessary and ebooks as often as I can because what matters most is the content and the information or stories that the content imparts. It is what mattered in the days of papyrus, straw, and stone; it is what matters in the age of print; and it is what will matter in the age of the digital book.