One of my longstanding beliefs about e-books was that their affordability and portability would eventually win out, no matter how much nostalgia people may have for their paper books, which would retain a niche place in the system. E-books and print books, I thought, would eventually go the way of streaming and vinyl, respectively.
Here’s what I didn’t see coming: Publishers keeping e-book prices as high as possible to protect print ecosystems. A.I. slop rendering books from a certain online bookselling behemoth suspicious (verging on useless).
Whatever the factors, and the readership of this blog is one of them, the brief surge of e-book interest during the pandemic has been erased, and print has opened up its biggest lead over e-books since 2017.
After a period of relative stasis, do we now have a trend? What do you make of these results?
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I do read ebooks, when I need something in a hurry or when I am traveling, but I’ve always preferred paper. I think you’re seeing this trend because we all spend so much time on screens that being able to escape them and read a paper book feels more immersive and relaxing.
I haven’t bought a physical book since 2010, but I do not patronize publishers when they’re greedy. First, publishers (and indie authors) steeply discount ebooks from time to time. I wait for those windows. Second, 90% of my 500+ kindle books are bought through bookbub dot com, all for under $3 — both fiction and nonfiction. Third, the classics I’ve been reading lately are often very cheap in ebook form even without special discounts. I picked up Thackery’s Vanity Faire for $0.99!
I had switched completely to e-books by about 2013, at which time I was 63. By about age 68, I found that reading with my eyeballs made me drowsy, severely shortening my reading sessions. So I completely switched to audio books using nice Bose headphones. By 73, I’d gotten hearing aids. Now I feel like the readers of my audio selections are reading to me from a rocking chair by a cozy fire in the middle of my brain. I still buy physical hardcovers, but only for the purpose of getting them signed by the authors. Aren’t they lucky that I also acquire the audio version for my listening enjoyment? No author has ever complained about my double dipping.
I purchase ebooks exclusively, or borrow them from the library. It’s not that I don’t love print books (I write them and sell them!), but I don’t have the space for them, and more importantly, my eyes prefer reading on a Kindle, where I can enlarge the font if necessary.
Cold dead fingers! But seriously, I always recognised that print books are unique in not requiring any machine to read and enjoy them. I always said that, if print books did not exists, now would be a very good time to invent them. Nostalgia was not a factor. Most of my reading is actually online and therefore electronic, but free. I’ve never bought an e-book. Yet.
I read a lot of ebooks when I was feeding babies because I could read on my phone. Otherwise, I mainly listen to audiobooks or read print books. We move a lot (military family) and are currently living in a teeny tiny house in Japan, so I almost exclusively read from the library. The one exception is YA/MG books for my classroom library that get packed up and moved from place to place.
As a former bookstore owner, I still have room in my heart for both, but – am leaning more and more to e-books / audio books, just due to downsizing needs and aging eyes. While paper books never run out of battery at a pivotal point, I do love being able to poke a new word and look it up straightaway. Or to highlight those meaningful phrases without defacing the pages. Also, trees…