M & M's
Lord help me, I can't stop. I have to do just one more, and one more and...
Right now you can order a first edition hardcover version of Scott Turow's sequel to Presumed Innocent, called simply Innocent. The book will cost you $15.11.
Or, you could order the Kindle version, for the strange price of $14.99.
Not only can you save yourself twelve cents, but you won't have to deal with a pesky book laying around when you're through reading it.
Twelve cents.
I know Amazon is long-chaining the hardcover version, but still, this is why e-books scare me. There's no reason to think they aren't here to stay, and that's fine. But there shouldn't be any reason that print books disappear, either. Are we seeing the creation of a purposeful marketing strategy that dovetails with the "this is the future, it may suck, but print is dead because electronic gadgets are always better than anything"?
No good can come of this, whatever this is.
What's my point, you say? What is the problem? I'm not sure, other than to say that books are generally too expensive and worthwhile books are too few. Is there really an industry-wide trend to steer readers away from print to e-books by depending on the power of the technophile? And is that really bad?
I don't have an answer. I think it's bad because it feels bad, and I like books. I think the iPad will sink in the marketplace (no, really--a cool toy that's too big, has no keyboard, no stand, with a glossy backlit screen, all for eight hundred bucks (if I want to connect to the internet away from home)) but there seem to be a lot of people announcing it will kill the Kindle.
Apparently the number of books printed last year was down, but revenues were up. This seems an obvious manifestation of higher prices, but possibly the significant number is the nearly 23 billion dollar size of the market. If we can sell books, e-books, Kindles, Sony Readers, Nooks, book displaying apps for our smart phones, even in-between devices like an iPad, is reading really a dying activity? Really?
Something is definitely off here and like politics and the New York Yankees, a million people can have a million opinions on what may be going on. I guess I'm not convinced publishers are giving readers, real readers, what they want. The answer may not be the mass market paperback, but one never knows.
Right now you can order a first edition hardcover version of Scott Turow's sequel to Presumed Innocent, called simply Innocent. The book will cost you $15.11.
Or, you could order the Kindle version, for the strange price of $14.99.
Not only can you save yourself twelve cents, but you won't have to deal with a pesky book laying around when you're through reading it.
Twelve cents.
I know Amazon is long-chaining the hardcover version, but still, this is why e-books scare me. There's no reason to think they aren't here to stay, and that's fine. But there shouldn't be any reason that print books disappear, either. Are we seeing the creation of a purposeful marketing strategy that dovetails with the "this is the future, it may suck, but print is dead because electronic gadgets are always better than anything"?
No good can come of this, whatever this is.
What's my point, you say? What is the problem? I'm not sure, other than to say that books are generally too expensive and worthwhile books are too few. Is there really an industry-wide trend to steer readers away from print to e-books by depending on the power of the technophile? And is that really bad?
I don't have an answer. I think it's bad because it feels bad, and I like books. I think the iPad will sink in the marketplace (no, really--a cool toy that's too big, has no keyboard, no stand, with a glossy backlit screen, all for eight hundred bucks (if I want to connect to the internet away from home)) but there seem to be a lot of people announcing it will kill the Kindle.
Apparently the number of books printed last year was down, but revenues were up. This seems an obvious manifestation of higher prices, but possibly the significant number is the nearly 23 billion dollar size of the market. If we can sell books, e-books, Kindles, Sony Readers, Nooks, book displaying apps for our smart phones, even in-between devices like an iPad, is reading really a dying activity? Really?
Something is definitely off here and like politics and the New York Yankees, a million people can have a million opinions on what may be going on. I guess I'm not convinced publishers are giving readers, real readers, what they want. The answer may not be the mass market paperback, but one never knows.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 10:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home