Segments Pressured By Ebooks

Reference books were pressured by the internet not ereaders. Some reports are coming out that claim the market for ebooks in romance is around 50% of the total. Ya know, the ones with the fleshy covers. I don't read or buy these (Really!) so it doesn't matter to me if they disappear. Does it matter to those who consume them?

Other reports indicate mass market paperbacks are under pressure. Again, I'm not sure if I care if this segment reduces the number of print books. I don't like the ink shedding things.

Hardcover fiction. I do want to own some fiction in hardcover. Not all of my fiction but some of it. Is this segment pressured?

I think hardback books will be around for quite a while if only as status symbols. On a more positive note, I think we might see a return to looking at hardbound books as works of material and literary beauty. Maybe something along the lines of the Kelmscott Press books. Right now, hard cover books as material objects are fairly ugly. "Pretty" editions of paperbacks such as those released by Persephone Press will not hold up well over time. A really good book deserves something more than sloppy production; otherwise, the material portion of the book is junk. In that this case, What does the delivery medium matter? All power to the ebook. Now a lovely, well-produced, and carefully crafted hard cover book, that’s another matter. Bring on such books. And I think they will come as the print market dies.

>2 urania1: I have to say I agree with this, even though I am a fully paid-up member of the Anti-Hardback League. I loathe the size, weight and inflated cost of hardbacks and am totally blind to the mythical link between a pretty look and quality writing. The old adage is right. The only function of a hardback is to endure repeated lending in libraries.

However I see authors whose work I want to read being put out by small presses in limited hardback editions, which get pricier overtime to acquire due to scarcity. I can see DRM'd ebooks taking the place of paperbacks. This will kill my reading :-(

I can see myself eventually replacing all my deadtree books with ebooks, when the paperbacks become too much hassle to read. At that point I'll have some bookshelf space again! And the idea of filling it with a few treasured hardbacks becomes appealing.

Re remoance titles - I wish they'd return to paperback only. I get fed up of over 50% of my search results being sonso's Demon Lover; hot stuff et al.

Yes, ebooks are the future of reading, there is almost no doubt. They are portable, less expensive and they save trees.

Yeah, but by that logic motorcycles are the future of automobiles. :D

And it's not even true on the "save trees" part. At least not in the sense of net tree death. Trees are grown purely for the purposes of pulpwood to make paper. If not for that, they'd never plant the trees to begin with.

You can switch the argument to "save fossil fuels used to grow, harvest, transport and process trees", but then we're going to have to get into some hairy discussions about electricity and e-waste. X)

>6 brightcopy:
I think you meant "bicycles". :-)

I don't think it's possible to answer the "environmental impact of e-books" question yet. Paper books have been around for centuries. We have a pretty good idea of how many of them are actually sold and read, how long those are kept, how many are passed on to someone else, and all the rest. For e-books and e-readers we have very little idea. At the moment e-readers are still sold on a similar basis to other electronic devices, with the idea that they will be obsolescent after a couple of years and unusable after five or six. We can't tell whether the technology will stabilise at a certain point, and if it does, what the environmental impact of those devices will be. Will they be implantable and have a battery that lasts the owner's lifetime? Or will they be assembled by enslaved underage turtles in the Galapagos Islands and use a display that requires a material that can only be extracted from the rain-forests of Borneo?

#7 by thorold> Nope, motorcycles. Bicycles are only substitutable for an auto if you need to travel a very short distance regularly. If you have a 20 mile commute or the grocery story is five miles away, a bicycle just ain't going to cut it. And motorcycles in concept are much greener than autos in that you're not wasting a lot of energy moving a giant hulk of metal around just to transport one body (not to mention the A/C, the backseat TV and the margarita mixer). It also means less freeway needs to be built because more motorcycles can fit in a smaller space. And they do less damage to said roads.

Of course, that's in concept and the reason I said "future" rather than "present". The biggest problem with it at present is that motorcycles have been exempt from emissions standards. So they still pollute too much to offset their much more efficient gas mileage. But that's changing.

Now, on to e-readers. I have to say I don't have much hope in this department about stability leading to less waste. It's just not within the nature of the consumer electronics industry. I have an electric toothbrush. It's the second electric toothbrush I had. The other one in no way became obsolete; the battery just would no longer hold a charge. So I had to buy the exact same one again. Same thing with my electric shaver. I have old iPods that are perfectly fine except for the battery issue.

And manufacturers have absolutely zero motivation to change this. It keeps a steady stream of dollars coming in for their products, even though there's no real innovation that demands new purchases.

You might say "well, a lot of e-readers can have their batteries replaced if you know how, so a vibrant business will develop to do so." This is true, but it is also true for other electric devices. For example, those toothbrush batteries could be replace but doing so requires de/re-soldering the circuit board to the batteries. What percentage of these do you think are thrown away each year rather than go through this? Do you see a lot of "toothbrush repairmen" around?

And we haven't even gotten into trying to order you replacement batteries (from one of hundreds of companies that sell Chinese-made batteries on places like amazon), in which you sometimes have to roll the dice and hope you don't get a completely different product than advertised. Or you get the same product, but find out it's substandard and has about 1/10th the lifespan of the previous battery. Or it's just DOA. Even now knowing about the toothbrush thing above and being okay with a soldering iron - not good just okay - I'm still not going to do it. It's not worth it in terms of time or stress.

And this is without companies even going that much out of the way to make their batteries difficult to replace. If a non-trivial percentage of devices got repaired instead of replaced, you might find that now the circuit board is mounted in such a way that you have to break parts A, B and C to take it out.

Without government intervention, I don't see us winning the race against the manufacturers to end the planned obsolescence.

I hope you disposed of that toothbrush as toxic waste.

#9 by jjwilson61> I don't know about "toxic waste", but yes, I threw it in the bin for devices with rechargeable batteries just like I always do with that stuff. I can even tie my own shoes now, too.

ETA: Though that does go back to the point I was making about e-waste earlier. There will be plenty of people that through ignorance or through malice - there are a group of people who will actually do the opposite when told they need to dispose of products in some way other than in the trash - will put e-waste in the trash, further reduces it being "better for the environment."

I've never seen a bin for devices with rechargable batteries. There's a bin at the library for batteries, but I've never seen toothbrushes in it. When we need to dispose of stuff like that we need to hold onto it until some entity has an e-waste roundup and use gas to take it there.

#11 by jjwilson61> Many states have state laws that ANY store that sells a rechargeable battery has to provide recycling bins for it. Both here in the twin cities and when I lived in Houston, most major retailers have bins for them. Best Buy, Office Depot, Target, Wal-Mart Home Depot, Sears, etc.

Some of them are operated through this site: http://www.call2recycle.org/locator/
Looking at it, I can see that in your listed town, there are plenty of places like the above mentioned retailers that take them.

If the battery is removable, you toss it in. If it's sealed and you want to be nice, you crack open the device and take the batteries out. Though that's sometimes risky as batteries will leak/corrode and you might wind up with an unpleasant mess on your hands.

I'd suggest looking around next time you go. It may surprise you.

11-12: I've been taking the batteries out of devices for years, and while I've very occasionally had a corroded one, it's hasn't been enough to make me stop. I just keep a large plastic container around (like a used cottage cheese container) to put any batteries (or broken open devices with corroded messes inside them) in so nothing else gets corrodes.

Note: safety glasses should be worn whenever deconstructing something. Flying bits of anything, corroded or not, are not good for your eyes.

As for the OPs remarks, when I can have tabs open on my ebook with the table of contents, text open to the page I left off at, text open to a random page I can select, and the bibliography plus pop-ups for the footnotes and my personal notes, not to mention obtain books in whatever format it happens to be available in, I'll start thinking that maybe the reader will replace the physical book. Otherwise, it's a nice way to carry a dozen fiction books on a trip, but not much more.

>12 brightcopy: Oddly enough, my Office Depot in southern California had a battery recycle box, but my one in northern California does not. And the company wide e-waste recycle program (buy a box, put in any tech stuff you want, that'll fit in it) doesn't take batteries unless they're part of the device.

#13 by aulsmith> The only times I've ran into corroded/leaking ones have generally been where a device has gotten shoved away somewhere and forgotten for a few years.