That's true but the profit margin grew for publishers. We don't see the same comparative price reduction in electronic books. And this reminds me of what happened with CDs, they were easier to physically produce than tapes or vinyl and yet they went up in price.
One good thing is we do have free e-books, thing that was not physically possible with paper books, the production had to be paid by someone at some point. On the other, electronic books are ephemeral, are locked into whatever platform/device and are bound to render useless as time goes by.
Not in the sense of epub which is great btw. More ephemeral in the sense that it’s harder to hold onto bits than a phisical book. Take for instance a collection of books that is stored on a storage device that is encrypted when the owner dies. In the case of paper books they might end up re-sold somewhere, at least some might escape the dumpster. I have 15 harddrives of different formats from the last 15 years that I didn’t make the effort of transfering them to newer storage and the more im postponing the harder it gets. Take for example SCSI, IDE and older SATA HDs. I need to invest in convertors at some point. Anyway, you could argue the oppsite, if one is very organized and responsible with their archive of bits, one can have the potential to hold onto everything they ever interacted with in some form or another, but at the same time the ocean of information makes it overwhelming. A paper book on the shelf is there after 100 years in an attic, a basement or a shelf, albeit a bit dusty, but ready to be consumed.
