Lots of people in this thread are talking about this being scary for authors. When I was a kid, I got to read a ton of books any time I wanted. I got them at this place called a "library" where they let people come in and take books home with them to read for free.
People have always had the option to read books without buying them. In those days, going to the library was effectively the same effort as going to a book store. In fact, it was more convenient for my family. We happened to live a few blocks from the library and didn't need to drive across town to the mall to get books in dingy little B. Dalton bookstore.
I will grant that the economics in the eBook situation are dramatically different than with physical books, but I really wonder how different they really are. Local libraries already lend ebooks as well. I'm not sure why more people don't take advantage of that.
I'm a regular user of the local library, but I notice that most people in my "class" (i.e. tech people earning a lot) don't go there. It's easier to buy it on your Kindle for $10-$15 than to make a trip to the library. I'm gonna be a jerk and say that most people also like to hang out in expensive coffee shops with other members of their class, and not in the library where there are lots of poor people.
It's a little bit like grocery stores... you can often get a better deal if you go to another neighborhood. But most people want to hang out with their peers in the nice grocery store. The savings isn't worth the trip either.
I don't think any of these things have anything to do with "hanging out" and "class". When you get a book on your Kindle, you're not hanging out with anyone, you're just getting a book. Also, anecdotes and data notwithstanding, the times I've seen people "hanging out" with people they didn't arrive with at a grocery store in my life can probably be counted on one hand.
When your (cash-rich, time-poor) friends buy books on their Kindles instead of going to the library, it's most likely because they value the convenience of (a) not having to go to the library to get the book (b) not having to consider whether the book is stocked (c) not having to got to the library to return it (d) not having to keep track of when the book must be returned (e) not having to actually carry a physical book around -- more then they value their $10-15.
It's unpopular but I really enjoy reading on my phone. It's small, it's always with me, it's much more convenient than lugging around a physical book(and I love physical books). But that's why I buy ebooks(they're just expensive which sucks).
It's interesting to listen to the cascading excuses when bringing up books with friends. "Why not use a kindle?" "I like holding the physical book." "Oh, then why not go to the library?" "Well, I like owning the book too." "Oh."
I think you're right in that people like the "culture" around reading more than reading itself.
You can save a ton of money using your local library though. I really need to start doing that.
I read mostly technical stuff, mostly online articles, snd few books to begin with... I prefer physical books for diving into something more new to me as I tend to remember better with a physical book. I remember better with roughly where something is in the book. I don't get that with ebooks, I've tried. I don't go to the library as technology books are usually too dated for me.
Happy medium. I use the library for my 'summer reading books', the books you read once, enjoy and never thing about again. I use Kindle for books I really enjoy and want to read again (or for free/cheap summer books that the library doesn't have). I buy physical books for reference or if the library/kindle/nook/ebook provider does not have it available.
I buy physical books because they're cheaper than ebooks. I'll usually pay about $.50 to a buck for them. Sometimes my friends just give me a box of books they're done with. The local thrift store often has bestsellers for a buck.
The usual price for a used book on Amazon is $.01, which with shipping comes out to still far less than the ebook.
I did that once (don't remember what book) but in the end I didn't like it. While I don't like to re-read books it kind of annoys me that the book is gone from my list of stuff I've bought/read. Plus the limitation of 1 per month means you can't switch to reading something else unless I buy that something else.
I don't like losing access to things. If it was "you can download one per month and keep access as long as you're a subscriber" sort of the way Playstation Plus works that would be OK with me.
But the rental program feels more like a cruddy crippled library than a real service.
I'd rather pay the $5-$10 for the eBook and not have to deal with it.
This new service is interesting. I don't read enough for it to be useful, but I could see it saving my dad quite a bit of money (or trips to the library) if they had enough books.
Last time Amazon gave me a free trial of Prime, I tried out the free rental. As best as I could make out, it was only possible to use it by browsing on my Kindle, which was a rather suboptimal experience, allowing only specific search or a paginated list of about 50,000 pages. I couldn't actually find anything I wanted to read.
If you know how to use Amazon's interface it's possible to see the list of books online so you don't have to do all the browsing on the Kindle, but you still have to 'buy' it from the Kindle.
It's sort of a hidden link or a special way of narrowing search results with the criteria on the left side of the page. If you google I'm sure you can find instructions.
Here's the super-secret password for the clubhouse.
In the search box on the main amazon.com page, there's a drop-down list on the left hand side of the text entry. Click that and change it to "Books". Now just hit search (you can leave the text field blank). That will bring up a search results screen with a bunch of filter groups on the left. Scroll down and select "Kindle Edition" under "Format". After the page reloads, scroll down even further and you'll have a checkbox for "Prime Eligible". Select that, and you'll have only the books you can rent with Prime. You can then further refine by genre, search term, whatever.
You can buy it from your phone or computer. Even if it is a Mac. You pick which device you want it sent to. And I totally don't get that y'all are saying ebooks cost more than trad.and "awful" selection? What don't they have?
Oh, that's right, that's what really killed it for me. I'm used to reading on my kindle and picking up my progress on my phone when I'm stuck somewhere with some free time.
Losing the sync ability basically killed the main utility I get from eBooks. If I have to carry the Kindle around, I can carry a library book around.
Kindles are great for books I'll read sequentially, in which I'll never need to consult a specific section, and in which I'll never have to page back-and-forth. So, all fiction and most nonfiction I enjoy having in Kindle format. Textbooks and references I want to own in dead-tree format.
These are all valid reasons. I read a lot of ebooks because I'm travelling a lot but if I move somewhere to stay there permanently I'm going to go back to buying physical books. As much for myself as for my kids to grow with books around.
> You can save a ton of money using your local library though.
I'm quite specific about what I want to read. My local library (that happens to be just round the corner) never has what I want. I often don't even seem to be able to order in what I want. So I gave up and just buy books on a Kindle instead.
There's no catch. You order the book from whichever library has it, and they deliver it within a few days. Plus, the eBook loan program's collection gets bigger all the time. More states should adopt a system like this. The software behind PINES is free and open source: http://evergreen-ils.org/
Yes, not to mention that some of the best books (e.g. by author R.A. Lafferty) are out of print and only available in libraries or for hundreds of dollars on the used market.
There's an entire corpus of literature between 1920 and 2014 that is out-of-print for licensing or estate reasons, rather than quality, much of which can be found in libraries.
I would love to see a national scale project to convert libraries to hackerspaces/coworking spaces.. Digital media should still be available (Kindles, iPads, etc with access to libraries through Amazon for copyright material and Library Of Congress/Internet Archive for public domain material), but its time they evolve.
You don't need a national scale project. You can start with your own, local library. Help make it into the best library around, and others will follow.
Seriously, libraries seem to all recognize the need for hackerspaces, but they don't have hackers to staff them.
They have budgets for things, and space, and a desire, they just need help figuring out where/how to spend things and how to then use the things they've gotten.
You can search around CfA's blogs, their Brigade people, the Sunlight Foundation's blogs, Knight Foundation's blogs, Techpresident's blog, mySociety's blogs, Open Knowledge Foundation's blogs but to me the best example of a great library turned into a makerspace is https://www.fflib.org/make/fab-lab.
Maybe ease into makerspaces like my local library which hosts meetings, and hosts kids events put on by one of the local makerspaces, but isn't technically "The Makerspace" probably because there is zero permanent storage, although makerspace people are there seemingly every day.
Once you're all there all the time anyway, then ease into the "now we want/need/demand permanent storage" And machine tools. And a pony.
The concept of a "Hackerspace-Lite" is interesting. No permanent stuff onsite. Carry in and carry out. The library is already full of meeting and presentation rooms and ours finally caved into to sell coffee and junk food for fundraising.
The biggest problem locally is the whole "A library is also a day care, right?" situation. Up to and including police taking abandoned kids into protective custody after a couple hours, which is weird.
Do they tag them with crayons like street parking spaces? Seriously, how does that work - is someone watching for unattended bag.. er kids and then calling police? What's the minimum age requirement for unattended visits to the library?
They have a regular police presence due to historical problems. Not quite an officer stationed there, but pretty close at certain times of day. Helps that there is a police substation next door. Calling wouldn't get an officer there any quicker, when one walks thru or past every ten minutes or so anyway.
There is a big cultural, uh, mismatch where the library requires more police intervention than any of the retail stores or bars or parks... liquor licenses have been lost for consuming far less police budget than the library. The library gets a free pass.
If all the policies were printed out from the web page it would be at least 100 printed pages. It is a very verbose CYA that boils down to anything you do that a librarian doesn't like will get you banned, and being there while banned is a legal trespassing offense, so one strike and you're out. If the librarians like you, you won't be banned no matter what you do. I can photocopy copyrighted materials, take pictures or videos of my kids, talk (whisper) on my phone, hang out for an hour while my kids take a class ... folks of a different race or economic group may have a somewhat different experience when they break any of those rules.
I was unable to find a minimum age, but I think you'd have to be at least upper grade school to survive not violating at least one of the hundreds of rules for more than a minute or two.
I did find that they define loitering as being in an area for longer than 15 minutes other than defined study desks, so no need for crayons or tagging. I've violated that rule a few dozen times, but I'm in no danger of being punished...
Given the sheer workload of homeless people and child day care, the librarians show quite a bit of restraint and can't enforce all the rules.
I was a regular user of the sf library until we found a dead bedbug in a book. It's just not worth the hassle of potentially infesting my apartment. Also, the bathrooms there are foul. I guess it's nice that street people have a bathroom they can use but the only way to describe it is rural western gas station. That killed lingering at the library.
Did you complain to a librarian about the restrooms? That is a cleaning issue, same as a busy airport. The library belongs to all local residents, chip in and help make it the space where you would like to linger. Bathrooms can be cleaned. The rest of the building and books are wonderful.
I regularly have four or five books from my library (one or two tech books, a fiction book and two or three comics) at any one time.
Not to mention the, literally dozens, I get for my kids every month.
I use the library to sample books and because if I bought every book I read, despite my healthy income, I'd be broke. I am an information devourer.
I am pretty sure there are a lot of people like me, at least in the Austin area, because I have to wait on some of the books I'd like to read that I don't think very poor people would be interested in.
YMMV because my library is pretty awesome and well stocked, but I think libraries are a shamefully underutilized resource.
Your local library isn't open weekends? My library's open 9:30 am - 9 pm on weekdays, 9:30 am - 5:30 pm on Saturdays, and 1 pm - 5 pm on Sundays. Those hours definitely don't strongly conflict with 9-5 job hours.
In the Bay Area at least, libraries are where people without computers go to access the Internet. The Internet is the easiest way to perform a lot of basic life tasks, like interacting with the government. People without computers these days are generally lower income, so it's true that there are more poor people in the library.
In some areas, it is definitely significant that libraries have bathrooms and shelter. But the Internet is always a big draw. With more and more of life moving online, libraries are providing an extremely valuable service by making Internet access freely available.
In San Francisco, Portland, and certain places in Los Angeles, there is a significant number of homeless people who make use of the library. I don't begrudge them the access to books, internet, learning, and a quiet place, but there is a small contingent who are mentally ill and/or disruptive and cause problems for other patrons. Cf. “Why we can't have nice things”
This is most likely true of any large city, but I don't have any first-hand experience beyond those three cities.
Except for universities and affluent suburbs I would have to agree with the assessment. Why not? It's warm in the winter, cool in the summer, you won't be hassled to buy something and there is free internet access.
As much as we would like it to not be true, in the real world free services attract the lowest financial class of people. Libraries are awesome, and I spent a significant portion of my life in them, but as soon as I could afford to not use them, I quit going to them.
Depends if the "real world" is the US, Sweden or, for example, Bulgaria.
In the US, this might be the case. In Sweden, mostly you'll find kids, moms and people studying (depending on the city, if it has a university or not). A very small subset is there for computer access, but it's certainly not a majority.
In Bulgaria, no one seems to go to the library. They check your ID when you go in and it's not really a place to hang out.
The libraries in my city just reflect the people in the community around them. In poorer areas, they are mostly poorer people, in the city centre there are mostly students and workers, in richer areas there are lots of middle class families and older folks.
I use my local library for a quiet co working space, but never borrow books because their inventory is horribly outdated. In my town many of the libraries are also where the homeless go to hangout, since air conditioning is key here in the south. I rarely see any other tech people at the library, but do see tons at the coffee shop a block away.
I live in chile and since i got my hands on kindle books i got access to tittles that don't even exist anymore in my country
So any easy access to kindle books is well come,
I don't think it has much to do with "class" (I don't see many poor people in our library). The library is OK for fiction but poor for things like up-to-date technical books.
When I was a kid I got books from the library too. Then, like most people who enjoy reading, I began buying books of my own. Libraries are fine when you just want to find some books you haven't read before but owning your own books has significant advantages, which I hope need not be restated here.
How this goes for authors depends on how Amazon are purchasing the rights to the ebooks. Having seen what streaming has done to music revenue I can't say I'm too optimistic about this. Some authors will do fantastically well, of course, but the much larger number of people who make a modest income from writing may well see it shrink drastically. The problem is that this doesn't necessarily improve things for consumers. Super-successful authors are often producers of lowest-common-denominator material. If high quality writers who appeal to a much smaller audience are no longer able to support themselves by writing, then they either move downmarket or take up another line of work, which results is a loss of quality for consumers.
The problem with streaming is that proponents treat creative output like a commodity and then point to the laws of supply and demand to justify economic upheaval. But pure supply and demand only applies in cases of perfect competition, where commodity goods are actually perfect substitutes; I have no particular reason to buy oil/ gravel/ corn from supplier X if supplier Y can deliver identical goods at a lower price. This is not the case for creative works.
PS I don't mean this as a dig against Amazon in particular, but there is a potential monopsony problem. I worry about this a bit less with Netflix because the economics of film production and distribution are enormously different than for other media, and Netflix is more like a peer among distributors.
> owning your own books has significant advantages, which I hope need not be restated here.
I had to get rid of several hundred of my books years ago when I went traveling. It was tough since I had a lot of attachment to my physical books, but upon examination I realized there were few advantages and in my case many disadvantages. Exceptions are books you habitually reread or reference, but most novels fail that test.
I have several thousand books. Many I've cut & scanned into pdf's. It is just marvelous to be able to take with me that library when I travel - I never lack for something to browse. I no longer have to read those wretched in-flight magazines.
My bookshelves are still crammed with books, but they've all got a date with the slicer! Mua-ha-ha-ha-haaaa!
BTW, for examples of books I've cut & scanned, see http://www.generalatomic.com (yes, I either acquired permission to post them or they are public domain).
That's basically what I ended up doing. After I got rid of the books, I imposed a rule on myself that except for rare cases where the book itself is an extraordinary artifact I would only buy books to cut and scan. My previous books were either replaced by ebooks or for the rarer books by buying new or used copies and cutting and scanning them. I was lucky enough that my employer at the time had an industrial-strength paper guillotine and high-volume scanner.
The paper guillotine was impossibly heavy to carry around and terrifying to operate.
I'm curious about this, I've got a bunch of books I don't want to throw away, but I'm tired of the space they occupy. Seems like scanning them would be a huge hassle though. Any special techniques that you use to do this? How long does a single book take to process?
1dollarscan will cut&scan for $1 per 100 pages, they destroy the book afterwards. You can also ship to them directly from Amazon, etc. It's a way to buy electronic versions of older books which may never be on Kindle. Just cutting the spine from a book costs $2 at Staples.
I bought what's called a "stack slicer" used on ebay for about $300. It'll neatly slice the spine off and your finger! Man it's sharp, I found out the hard way. I do enough that it's worth the cost. You'll be sorry if you scrimp on this piece of equipment.
You'll also need a sheet feeding scanner with a hopper on it, that'll scan both sides at the same time. Otherwise, it takes far too long. The software with the scanner will OCR it automagically and create a PDF. I scan at 400 dpi, which looks real sweet on a retina screen. There are a lot of settings to tweak on the scanner, some experimenting will get you the best results. Make sure you turn the double feed detection on.
Use some denatured alcohol to regularly clean the window and rollers, I also use a solder sucker to blow the paper dust out of it.
And lastly, you'll never get 100% of a book to go through cleanly. Just rescan the screw-ups, and assemble the result using pdftk (a marvelous tool). I also like to scan the covers separately in color and fold them in.
Times vary, but I can scan an average paperback in 5 minutes. Turning the sheets sideways makes it go much faster.
Just like the music industry, I think more writers are going to become acclimated to the book-signing aspect of the industry in order to support their themselves financially. Subscription based models and piracy that originated from the disruptive nature of new technology sounds like it would discencetivize writers from creating new works, but I think if you model the economics of future distributions, it will eventually favor the writers that create quality work. The best example I can think of is the existing state of stand-up comedy. Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, Joey Diaz can release a $5 special DRM free with low capital expenditures, and still make a significant payout. This model cuts out most of the pre-existing middlemen, and all that's left is artist and the audience.
Well known artists with a fanbase I'm sure are ok with charging $5, but authors spending years researching need that upfront money, and hopefully 25.99$ hardcover sales, followed by 7$ paperback sales. If they want to do this for a living I should say.
I started getting into startups around when Lean Startup was the hottest thing out, led by Eric Ries. He was signing books after a talk and I asked him to sign my iPad case.
For many, libraries just aren't convenient. Even if the location itself is convenient, navigating the the eBook collection might not be. Even if navigating the eBook collection is convenient, there is often (in my admittedly limited experience) a wait time for the books I'm interested in. Perhaps there are some who would admonish me for sticking almost exclusively to eBooks, or for my laser focus on What I Want rather than other available options. Whatever, let them. The point is that time and convenience are worth money to me, and many others.
If my Library let me donate $120 to them annually with the ability to borrow from an eBook collection of 500,000+ without having to go to a local branch or waiting for someone to "return" the digital file then I'd write the check tomorrow. I just get so tired of everyone on social media so smugly pointing out that libraries exist and have books you can borrow for free. Yeah, we get it, but many libraries don't provide the service I'm (and others, it seems) looking for. I have the means to be flexible in my selection of service/product providers, and I choose to spend money on those that match my habits and preferences.
>If my Library let me donate $120 to them annually with the ability to borrow from an eBook collection of 500,000+ without having to go to a local branch or waiting for someone to "return" the digital file then I'd write the check tomorrow.
My university's library sometimes has this feature. In my experience it's more delimited by the availability of ebooks beyond PDFs (especially scientific publishers only hand out PDFs, no mobis/ePubs at all) and a good measure of paranoia.
Currently, I can read the uni-library's ebooks only using Adobe's 'Digital Editions', which doesn't have a Linux client, and doesn't want to communicate with my Kindle, even if the file in question is an ePub.
(Of course with the right plugin Calibre can remove the DRM making the whole security theatre completely unnecessary)
Well, even if you don't pay anything for a library card up front, most people pay taxes that support their local libraries, so it isn't necessarily free.
You might be surprised to hear that some libraries have an ebook section. My hometown has a "digital library" that it shares with other libraries in the region.
It works the same as a regular book (only one person per copy) but you can pick it up on your Kindle or other appropriate device.
[Going to a library] was more convenient for my family. We happened to live a few blocks from the library and didn't need to drive across town to the mall to get books in dingy little B. Dalton bookstore.
Yup. Remember that well. "Bookstores" were tiny places with fewer books than we had at home. If you really wanted a selection, you'd go to the library. Then came B&N, Borders, etc with vast holdings on par with the local library (or bigger), and - better yet - newer content: everything was new & content turnover was frequent, as contrasted with the library which was pretty much stuck with what well-thumbed old volumes they had. In-store coffeeshops just clinched the attraction.
Local libraries already lend ebooks as well. I'm not sure why more people don't take advantage of that.
Mostly that it's just a new option that hasn't normalized yet. 'til recently, the process was obnoxious enough that physical media and/or a CC# made it much easier to get what you wanted. I'm using Hoopla a lot now; it's improving fast but hasn't quite reached the UX needed for normalization.
Have you ever tried that? Limited selection and weird rules like only certain devices and complicated account creation and then you only get to "keep" the ebook for 2 weeks or whatever.
I can get "free" audiobooks the same way. Its sadly easier to borrow the physical CDs and rip them.
Authors can make money by people who get gifts, and are in a hurry, or want reference tomes. I can read Stross's new novel after waiting in line just four or so months from now for free at my local library... Ah, who cares, its like an expensive lunch to just buy the ebook so I'll do that instead and downloaded it on release date. Another method is gifts. Nobody I know goes to bookstores anymore other than to buy gifts. We don't buy books for ourselves; we do buy gifts which happen to be books. Like the hallmark holiday card business, I don't buy myself Christmas cards, and thats OK, buy some and send them to other people.
If you're not in the "gift" "reference" or "trendy in a hurry" markets, you're in big trouble.
> Local libraries already lend ebooks as well. I'm not sure why more people don't take advantage of that.
One would think that since ebooks are digital, any number of people could borrow the same book at once from a library. Alas, that is not the case. Just like libraries might only have one or two physical copies of a book, they might only have one or two copies of an ebook available to lend as well. If you want to borrow a new release, you might end up on a lengthy wait list. Additionally, if you borrow from a library, you miss out on a ton of books (especially self-published books).
As a reader, I'm excited about the prospect of Kindle Unlimited. As an author who self-publishes on Amazon, I am apprehensive (though the compensation for my books that have been borrowed with Prime has seemed fair so far).
This is exactly right. Also, the selection of ebooks at my local library is terrible. I always look for an ebook first, but I've never yet found an ebook version of a book I actually wanted to read in my library's catalog.
I rather have lots of people reading my book, getting less royalty per person, than having less people reading my book getting more royalties.
I write because I want to share my ideas and point of views, not because I care about the money. It's nice though when someone pays the 5 EUR it costs, that keeps me awake with the coffee I can buy for the money.
The biggest concern for me actually is that in making this move, amazon is putting itself in direct competition with libraries' ebook/audiobook lending services. Many of those even use the kindle network!
Will amazon continue to allow books to reach those services as soon after release? Do they have the power to stop it in the first place? I think it will be interesting to see how the company, which it is clear has a lot of leverage in the book publishing community, handles competing with a free alternative.
People have always had the option to read books without buying them. In those days, going to the library was effectively the same effort as going to a book store. In fact, it was more convenient for my family. We happened to live a few blocks from the library and didn't need to drive across town to the mall to get books in dingy little B. Dalton bookstore.
I will grant that the economics in the eBook situation are dramatically different than with physical books, but I really wonder how different they really are. Local libraries already lend ebooks as well. I'm not sure why more people don't take advantage of that.