I love ebooks, but they have some real drawbacks: you can't lend them, you can't switch platforms easily, their layouts are usually pretty limited, and they often screw up diagrams, etc.
I wish we could solve the problems associated with ebooks, rather than having weird tribal wars about them.
DRM has turned the e-reader market into winner takes all, so now we are dealing with the natural consequences: market consolidation, lack of innovation, lack of price competition, anti-consumer features. And at the user side, people are now vested on their platforms, and thus want them to be the winner.
To an extent, those drawbacks can be mitigated by software, namely Calibre[0]. There may be alternatives out there, but this is the particular piece of software I use. I'll do my best to address your concerns here. (N.B. I don't develop this software, nor am I paid to advertise it; I just like it and want to demonstrate some of its features here)
While most books that I own are hard-copy, I have an old Kindle Touch from 2012 that I use fairly often. I've received a bunch of gifts in eBook form over the years, and want to be able to read them on my computer and other devices. Calibre natively supports getting eBooks to and from devices such as mine[1], and there's a plugin out there (not too hard to find, but I won't name it here just in case) that automatically strips DRM from files during the import-to-library process. Of course, you can also just import files from your computer, and it will de-DRM those as well. Calibre also has a built-in content server[2] that's pretty configurable and allows you to share with friends; it essentially whips up a website that lets you both read eBooks in browser and download them in whatever formats you have.
You can also have it convert between most eBook formats and more[3]; you can be as granular as you want during the conversion process, or just use a default profile that comes with the software.
Of course, you can also edit any format of eBook that you've imported into your library[4]. I haven't personally tried that feature, but it looks like you'd be able to manage diagrams.
I realize that this is a fair amount of work to do on the consumer side to address the problems you've brought up, but as a multi-device reader (computers big and small, Kindle, phone), it does a great job without much hassle for me.
This is missing the point. Can I expect to always be able to remove DRM from any ebooks I might want to buy in the future, no matter what the platform vendor does? Obviously not - that's not a "trivially easy" operation in any real sense. "Just remove the DRM" is always a band-aid and a last-resort, not a real solution.
eBooks are great but will never entirely kill off books. Personally I find an ebook to be useless for anything that does not contain entirely text, pictures or diagrams are messed up or just hard to appreciate properly. An iPad/tablet is required for anything with images eg. Technical books or graphic novels (usually as PDF). But none of them will offer the feel of a book. My kids could easily have an ebook but I think the value in learning to love an actual book far outweighs any benefit an eresrer would give them.
True, I have no reason to care about DRM for truly throwaway content that I'll never want to backup, format-shift or port across platforms-- like most fiction books. But the thing is... there's plenty of such content on the Web already, available at zero cost! It's exactly the sort of content that plenty of people will happily write for free, or perhaps in exchange for some crowd-funded support on Patreon.
A significant number of ebooks I buy for Kindle seem to be poor OCR jobs, lacking periods and other punctuation and even making incorrect letter substitutions when the font has ligatures. It does not make them unreadable, but makes the experience less enjoyable.
As we have seen Apple (and to a lesser extent its direct competitors) bury its old-fashioned record label competitors, I think the print media industry is due for a similar (if smaller) revolution.
There's probably nobody more frustrated by these sudden book shortages than the books' authors themselves. Being out of stock during the sweet spot of this year too often means the book sale will never be made.
I'm working on a microbindery, which involves ultracheap one-off book runs in tiny distributed shops around the country, the operative idea being that instead of waiting six weeks for the next containerload of today's bestseller/tomorrow's pulp, whatever's out of stock can simply be knocked out in three hours and either picked up or mailed a short distance.
Making a book (a real book) takes more than your $39 Deskjet, but it's not hard, or all that capital- or even labor-intensive.
A single command line argument could convert a PDF to a perfect-bound novel or textbook, indistinguishable from the factories that produce books by the containerload but in massive MOQ's and haphazard sales and proof processes.
Even if it costs $15 instead of $12 to print bestseller copy number n+1, that's still plenty of money left on the table if you're at the mercy of a massive 20th-century pulp mill in a different time zone, who can't be bothered with your last minute business.
That best-seller for the price of $12 is based on thousands of copies, many times printed in china and shipped by container loads. There's no way you can make it for a few dollars more for short run and survive the business.
>it's not hard, or all that capital- or even labor-intensive.
Yes its not difficult but if it is not capital intensive, it will most certainly be labor intensive. Printed through a digital copier, collated, perfect bound and trimmed in one process is not the issue. Having it done "ultra cheap one-off" is and any printer small or large will tell you the same.
The idea seems simple but no one is willing to do this for free or at a loss.
That best-seller for the price of $12 is based on thousands of copies, many times printed in china and shipped by container loads.
I think this is key. I'm quite disappointed that the NYT didn't mention China in the article.
A lot of high volume stuff is printed in China and takes the slow boat here. Domestic printers couldn't compete on price with that. So now they no longer have the onshore capability to print large numbers of books here.
This is Economics 101.
The article literally says “All of the sudden, there’s just no capacity”, and follows with "One large printing company, Edward Brothers Malloy, shut down this summer."
Well, duh. The publishers switched to printing in China. So what the fuck were domestic printers supposed to do?
>I'm working on a microbindery, which involves ultracheap one-off book runs in tiny distributed shops around the country, [...] , whatever's out of stock can simply be knocked out in three hours and either picked up or mailed a short distance.
• Instead of trying to build a robot to do everything, it's still a largely manual process, using low-priced labor (think a trailer out in the boonies with a disabled retiree running the thing content to get paid by the piece, versus a young urbanite who won't stay in the job)
• Doesn't depend on convincing authors to take on a second distribution channel that could compete with their first. BN's business model is predicated on large book runs, so it was always an uphill battle to get their suppliers to get on board. Imagine iTunes could only sell 20% of the music on the market and now imagine you have a bookmaking robot taking up $20/sf floorspace with the same limitation.
• Books produced with the distributed process are indistinguishable from the mass-produced variety, making the choice to switch quite easy for customers, since they can't tell the difference (other than one is in stock and one isn't).
• An "Espresso" machine would be largely for printing titles the store wouldn't stock (there's a reason they don't stock them: they wouldn't sell that well if they did). My approach would be largely for printing titles the store can't keep in stock. BN isn't in the printing business and that's getting to be a larger Achilles heel for their business model.
I'd love to know more about this project.. having worked for a local independent bookshop for a dozen years i've seen a lot of folks impatiently waiting for books to print and ship.
How do you propose to get access to the contents from the publishers? What will convince Penguin Randomhouse to have me have a copy of a bestseller in electronic form on a local device I can use to print copies?!
I know I can access a huge amount of titles that are in the public domain, or even as e-books... which might be convertible and printable on such a device, but that means the reseller needs a better deal on e-books to make money, or charge the client twice for the privilege of owning the book in physical form. Once for the content and once for the printed version.
In the end, the publishers have to exercise that control, by not putting all their eggs in one basket with a print house.
Most authors are so put off by the entire publication process that they won't be bothered by this, even if this takes some of the pain away (because now they'll have to put all their eggs in a basket that supports this approach). But as a few early adopters start realizing the advantages, companies like Penguin RandomHouse or more likely Amazon will acquire/start their own satellite JIT facilities to keep the cream from getting skimmed off their holiday booksales numbers, offering them as an included supplement to their existing print house system.
That doesn't help a bookshop's customers today when a troglodyte writes an out-of-stock bestseller and doesn't have the fortitude to call in the last minute specialist press. For some (thinking the latest fad diet books and political bestsellers in particular), they can wait.
If you want to learn more, email me (it's in my profile).
It would be cool if we could have like a small bookstore that prints out the book for you kind of like an apple store or like a subway. You could watch your book being put together and be printed.
Run full out, it really depends on the printer, but the printers I employ can do about 20ppm double-sided. But as books are numbered, each sheet of paper ends up becoming 4 pages. So an 800 page book (close to the largest you can print without getting really exotic) thus only takes about 10 minutes of a printer's time. A more conventional 200 page book would be 2 1/2 minutes.
There's additional labor to putting the book together besides babysitting a laser printer, but if you come up with a good process, there's probably more idle capacity than will be needed at all the busiest times of the year. A microbinder might find himself or herself like a uber driver- spending the money on the equipment and renting the space, but waiting for runs, subject to the market.
Replace "PDF"/"Books" with "PNG"/"Photographs", or "MP3"/"Recordings", and you'll see how well that argument went over. One should make the argument via YouTube to double the irony.
A group of hipster book snobs jealously guarding their century-old first editions are welcome to their hobby, but the mass media will blow right past them as soon as the economics are favorable. What's remarkable is how much more sophisticated 35mm film and vinyl are versus the old staid book.
Why now? Consumers are getting fussier (I want what's hot now, not in 8 weeks), and production equipment is getting way cheaper. Laser printing costs (even quasi-consumer-level) have plummeted to the point where equipment manufacturers have to resort to gimmickry to keep their margins positive. While all the paper textbooks you've read to date probably originated roll-to-roll, I see laser (and the flexibility it offers) finally breaking into that market.
Youtube did the job right for sure, I agree with you there but not with a similar jest for PDF/books equivalence. Youtube killed cassettes, CDs and all other offline forms of video: on plastic and also over a format file saved on a disk. PDF is like those .wmp Windows Media Player video files that no one has the time or interest to download and then read on.
Sure it works among techies because a good alternative has not existed but the real market of book doesn't consume PDFs or ePubs. They don't understand those, and don't appear to care because it is bad un-relatable experience to begin with.
The most interesting tidbit from this article: paper sales are up, ebooks are down.
“Publishers’ revenues from hardcover sales rose 3.5 percent in the first 10 months of this year, while revenue from digital books fell 3 percent in the same period, according to the Association of American Publishers.”
Ebooks leveled off at around 30-35% of sales a few years ago and are in slight decline. I work in libraries with ebooks and though our trend is still upward, that's more about unmet demand and the curve has leveled in the past two years. I think the market for ebooks will slowly grow as the technology improves, but it's a long way from overtaking the physical book.
printer of dead-tree books died? that's good news! i sincerely hope we get rid of rotten pulp industry completely. it leads to expensive books unnecessarily, bad legislation and terrible copyright laws and keeps modern America on its knees with its outdated technology.
imo, web should be able to handle distribution and consumption both.
Our brains are wired to treat processing information from a physical unchanging object very differently than from a slab of glass with ephemeral content on it. Words on a printed page do stick in your head better than content flowing past on a screen.
I am so looking forward to the day we have some form of electronic book though! A series of e-paper pages that will make my brain feel like it's holding a 'real' book will be that day I switch.
p.s. I want an electronic paper map I can fold up and stuff in a pocket, that requires little energy and still allows me to do all the pinch/zoom and tap tricks I can do on a tablet.
Any time this phrase appears in an argument it's a good indication that I can ignore the argument.
Our brains are not "wired." They are pretty malleable and adaptable, and while a lot of that happens during childhood, they do remain fairly malleable throughout life.
While there are neural structures that are specialized for certain tasks genetically, it is incredibly unlikely that the form of the book has had any significant evolutionary effect that would lead to some genetic predisposition for a book compared to some other form of conveying written information. Books have only existed for a couple thousand years, but originally were quite expensive to produce and only available to the wealthy; mass market production of books has only happened for a couple hundred years.
There are probably reasons why many people prefer physical books to e-books, but to make a claim that it's based on some kind of "wired" preference in our brains rather than practical factors like battery life, compatibility issues, screen refresh rates, or any of a number of other simple, practical explanations is a bit extreme, and would need to be backed up with some kind of evidence.
I personally don't consume much in e-book form, but the reasons are because of DRM, ecosystem lock-in, poor formatting in e-books, and the like. I actually consume a lot more content electronically than I do in dead-tree form, but it happens to be web pages and DRM-free PDFs.
> While there are neural structures that are specialized for certain tasks genetically, it is incredibly unlikely that the form of the book has had any significant evolutionary effect that would lead to some genetic predisposition for a book compared to some other form of conveying written information
It's the other way around. The book isn't better because we evolved for the book. The book is better because it evolved for us.
The key difference between books and e-books is that books are 3D objects giving us a sense of location for the information contained therein that varies in a consistent, logical manner as we progress through the information. This allows us to use our spatial memory, which yes, we are hard-wired to have, to help remember the information in the book. We evolved for this kind of memorization and are good at it.
> It's the other way around. The book isn't better because we evolved for the book. The book is better because it evolved for us.
But computer interfaces are evolving for us as well.
I'm not arguing that they are currently better; just that there isn't much about the form of the book that we are "hard wired" to prefer, but rather some inadequacies in both human interface as well as some other practical issues of e-book distribution.
The first paper you link is the only one that I would say really supports your point, but it only compares one way of reading on a screen (a PDF) against paper for a short document, and it doesn't probe very deeply into why reading comprehension was worse on the screen than paper. Is it the spatial location, is it the fact that you can spread out pages and see more at once on paper, is it the reduced eye strain from reflective vs. backlit presentation?
These are all things that could be relatively easily compared; provide paper with a scrolling interface rather than letting you turn the pages by hand, provide a paginated interface for the screen, use an e-ink display rather than LCD for the e-book case.
The second is about spatial memory of information on paper, but doesn't compare with a computer screen, and you can have a memorable spatial arrangement on a computer as well.
The third one compares paper to screen for proofreadig, but is from the 1983 and using white on black text on an Apple II. I think the differences in screen technology and UI design, along with the subjects having to learn a special purpose UI for copyediting on the screen, make that not all that relevant simply for the comparison of reading a book.
So anyhow, while there is some research on a screen being not as good as paper, it doesn't look like it goes into very much depth as to the reason for the difference, and whether it's based on spatial memory, deficiencies in UI on the computer, eye strain due to backlighting, or some combination.
EDIT: Apparently the book thing linked isn't actually made with the book thing? I am confused and feel like an asshole now.
I strongly dislike your book thing.
Why?
* Animations manage to drop frames on my brand-new flagship Android phone.
* Pageflip animation (subjectively) doesn't even look very good.
* Can only imagine how much battery power is getting used drawing that animation.
* Gesture recognition is a bit dodgy, occasionally had to swipe several times
* Hijacked back button, meaning I had to search through my history to go back and find this comment to complain
* Wastes a hilarious amount of previous screen real estate on negative space, especially combined with browser chrome; and because it doesn't scroll, the browser chrome is never hidden. https://postimg.cc/cg6JvZGh/12615d74
Honestly really sorry to be so harsh- but at least on mobile, for me, this is perhaps the worst reading experience I could imagine- well, at least there aren't any ads.
I understand that you've probably worked quite hard on this, but in its current state, for mobile, at least on my device, it's bad.
I looked at the metrics on my dashboard. You were trying to flip through multiple pages quickly-- as in you went in with an intent to 'surf the web capriciously' and not with an intent of really reading the book. I'm sorry that initial mindset to glance through headlines quickly will have a significant impact on your overall reading experience when it comes to books.
The back button isn't hijacked either. It remembers the page you're on exactly as it is, as you progress through the book from one webpage to another. Other things like animations and page flipping etc. can be turned off, so those things are customizable but on battery thing I'll check again even I remember that the pagination interface with full animations run on 60 FPS or higher. There are probably some areas on the renderer where we can improve or may be use Houdini instead to achieve native level of performance but I'm yet to explore those paths.
Unused real estate -- I agree with you here. The new iPhones are significantly longer than the previous generations, and this exacerbates the problem. But I think it's not unfixable, thanks for the feedback!
> You were trying to flip through multiple pages quickly-- as in you went in with an intent to 'surf the web capriciously' and not with an intent of really reading the book. I'm sorry that initial mindset to glance through headlines quickly will have a significant impact on your overall reading experience when it comes to books.
If you are going to design e-readers, you should read Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. Leafing through a book and jumping back in forth is a very important part starting to get into a book, and it is the only way to accurately decide whether you actually want to read a book or not.
I think part of my impression was just a bad choice of book to link- I was checking it out as a reader, and so, to read a book which opens with installation instructions... yeah, i'm going to flip through that quite quickly! That probably hurt your animation performance- do you, like, render the next page to a canvas for the pagination animation, so when I was flipping through quickly, scanning it, the rendering couldn't keep up- going through it more slowly, does seem to drop less frames, though it does occasionally stutter- not nearly as problematic, though.
The hijacking I referred to...
Okay, I get linked from HN, read a few pages. I press back- it goes back a page. In the book. After tens of back button presses, I got irritated, and just searched my browser history for your comment.
I think the issue I ran into is mostly that you have made a PWA eBook reader, and I expected a book as a website. When I read 20 3-paragraph chunks of text, I very much do not want to press Back 20 times.
Now, if I bought a book, and installed this as a native app- probably helping performance too- I'd be alright with this- if the perf and screen space issues were fixed, I would be happy.
But as a website to read text on, it's not great in its current form, at least on mobile.
If you want to show other folks this, I might suggest linking to the home page and letting them select a book. This might get them in the mindset of "I am opening a book in an app", and not "I am visiting a link to a website with a book on it.". And please make sure the book itself opens in a new tab- so that, if they read a few dozen pages, they don't need to press the back button dozens of times to return to the page that linked them to the web app!
The settings for animations, etc- again, going to find settings is something i'd do in the context of an eBook reader app, but not something I'd really consider for a website.
Sorry for being so harsh- I just had a really terrible experience, likely largely because of my incorrect expectations (perf and whitespace aside), and wanted to make sure that came across properly. I assume most of the interesting stuff you've done has been on the "how do I lay out a book for (such and such a device and context), with diagrams, code blocks, inline images, etc, get reflow working nicely..." and not "having laid out a book into pages, how do I let a user flip through those pages"- but the latter has to be at least alright for me to be able to pay attention to the former!
I work with ereaders and every so often a member of the press or community stakeholder will ask me when the book will die. My half joking response is: eventually, but not before I retire. I also have a prepared half-joke where I ask the person to think about the book like they might review a piece of technology. It's inexpensive, lightweight, durable, has a UI we've spent our whole life learning, is browsable and though not searchable, they've come up with some clever workarounds to make searching possible. It's also got a great screen resolution and the battery life is excellent. The book has a lot going for it compared to the ereader and it has a long life ahead of it.
Although on my parent comment I did not say e-books changed copyright law but assuming good-faith:
Experience of gaming has been great. Experience of watching TV or movies is great. Experience of listening to music is great. Any high-end software on web has been great.
But, e-books? Nope. Let's give them silly pesky files instead. Or let them buy hardware that's off the web. This is understandable because if I were on the lobbying side, I'll want to keep things like this only and send the market to believe and buy physical books instead.
books go native on web => ability to publish and update book on your own site just like a blog => my readers engage with me => meh copyright laws held by middlemen. ;-)
I love ebooks, but they have some real drawbacks: you can't lend them, you can't switch platforms easily, their layouts are usually pretty limited, and they often screw up diagrams, etc.
I wish we could solve the problems associated with ebooks, rather than having weird tribal wars about them.