Amazon distorted the curve for a good reason — to create the market. But there are long-term anchoring effects. There is also the effect of e-ink technology. Much less eyestrain than LCD, but limited in quality of digital experience.
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Having factored out unit economics, distortion and tech effects, the rest of market behavior is cultural. Oddly enough it’s younger people (damn trad Millennials™ ) driving the weird continued dominance of print. Mix of domestic cozy, reactionary aesthetics, and good eyesight.
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There’s an identity signaling element too. All young nerds but only a fraction of older people use books for signaling (though Zoom backdrops may change that).
My own bias: I VASTLY prefer ebooks. Like to an unbelievable degree — I won’t even read some books on paper.
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This is 100% ergonomics (weight, reading in bed with backlight, adjustable font size for comfort).
I will only go print if I can’t find ebook OR there are lots of rich visuals that ebooks handle poorly, since I can’t read books on phone/iPad comfortably.
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There is a whole line of bullshit rationalization of paper books that I just don’t buy. Tactile feel, warm glow of ownership, supposed better retention of paper books, etc etc. It’s a whole reactionary bs cottage industry. So what’s really going on?
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Only legit reasons for print: DRM/SaaS means it can be yanked and not shared easily.
Acceptable subjective reasons: aesthetics, sentiment, collectibility, experience design.
Bullshit reasons: vague “better for cognition” rationalizations based on utterly shoddy research.
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Mic-drop reason for ebooks being better if you believe in climate change. No-brainer vastly better for the environment. Print is worse than Bitcoin 🤣
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5 big things that need to happen:
1. Tech: E-readers that combine the comfort of e-ink with the rich full-color graphics and layout of tablets. Will blow print out of the water.
2. Legal: Sort out DRM/shareability for print parity or better
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3. End of price distortion now that market has been made.
4. Jewelryfication of print (like wristwatches) for the remaining sentiment/aesthetics print market, with carbon priced in.
5. Emergence of truly rich media (think Diamond Age primer) to set evolutionary path.
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Once we hit these 5 milestones, we’ll enter endgame.
Today’s book market:
1. Cheap paperbacks (bad for environment, needs to die)
2. Archival quality hardcover (bad but redeemable to good with right pricing)
3. Ebooks: best for environment, but technologically only 50% there
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Future, post-transition market:
1. Jeweryfied collectibles (think $50+ hardcovers on acid-free paper, stable version)
2. Basic ebooks
3. Rich ebooks descended from static websites, roam research, interactive widgets, Seymour Papert/Bret Victor type clever shit, etc.
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Can’t predict timing or details but that’s where things are headed. And when we’re there ebooks will dominate both revenue and unit sales.
Think of the fraction of ALL clock technologies (including clock chips in every digital device) vs jewelry wristwatches.
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The ebook of the future may not even be distinguishable as such. Your top 3 clocks today are: phone, microwave, stove. But it won’t be generic atomized content online either. It will be a designed and published experience.
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Here’s a thread I did on Friday on my own experiences
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Just did an analysis of 10 years of half-assed self-publishing. Executive summary:
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For the future, I’m considering doing the following:
- Quality ebooks + pricey ($30+) higher-quality print books with carbon priced in somehow
- No cheap print.
- Experiments with rich books (based on roam+gatsby content garden with paywall perhaps)
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I didn’t even discuss a big topic — affordances: highlights/search/notes vs free-form marginalia. It’s a subjective toss-up but ebook wins hands-down for me. Search and exportable highlights way more important than doodling in margins.
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And fwiw, doodling in margins is getting there. Try LiquidText with PDFs on iPad+pencil. Somebody will figure it out. It’s purely a compute problem. Capturing real-time handwritten annotations on vector files with low-enough latency and non-janky retrieval is just better silicon.
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Oh, and on the buying side, my book consumption is currently:
70% ebooks checked out from library
20% ebooks I buy
10% print and hate it except with larger format comic books and technical (with diagrams)
Sold/gave away about half my collection in the last decade
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Of what I have left, I’d say it’s 25% sentiment and aesthetics, 75% special case books not available in ebook or not worth selling/rebuying. Also wife won’t jet me get rid of more. She’s Xennial.
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On writing — 90% on computer, 5% paper notebooks, 5% whiteboard.
But stuff that I write on paper/whiteboard (and often photograph for archival) is hard to do even on better iPad-pencil apps like Notability. The UX is there, but file management/backup/review workflows are poor.
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