E-book sales decline: Do people not want to read books on tablets?

Why Don't People Want to Read E-books on Tablets?

By Robert Rosenberger

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Posted Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013, at 11:38 AM

Jeff Bezos shows off a new Kindle Fire.
Photo by JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GettyImages

We’ve been living through an e-book boomtime. Two years ago, Amazon turned heads by announcing that sales of digital books had eclipsed those of hardcovers, and the trend has only continued. But a recent pair of reports shows that a plateau may be coming. The Association of American Publishers claims that this year’s first quarter saw only a 5 percent increase in e-book sales, which is strikingly low compared with previous quarters. Nielsen reports that e-book sales actually fell in April, if only slightly, compared with same period last year. This is significant because it marks the first-ever decline in the market. If the current numbers hold, then e-books will maintain 25 percent of the overall book market.

Nicholas Carr reflects on these data on his Rough Type blog, and he brainstorms a list of potential culprits. His suggestions include the possibility that we’ve run out of readers willing to make the jump from print to e-reading; that readers are no longer purchasing e-books simply for novelty’s sake; and that the e-book format may be proving conducive only to limited kinds of reading, such as travel reading.* Read more...

Has the e-book bubble burst? - latimes.com

Has the e-book bubble burst? - latimes.com

The print book isn't going away. (Milvets Library)

 

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic

January 11, 2013, 2:23 p.m.

I like Nicholas Carr. His 2008 Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (expanded two years later into “The Shallows,” a 2010 Pulitzer finalist) helped catalyze a key idea: the distracting nature of digital culture, which encourages us to read widely but not necessarily deeply, flitting from concept to concept, piece to piece, like mosquitoes on a pond.

For Carr, this is both a social and a biological problem; among the most interesting parts of “The Shallows” are those dealing with the brain. Computers, Carr argues — or, more to the point, our use of them — are literally rewiring our brain chemistry, causing us to think differently than we did in an analog world.

Given all that, it’s perhaps not surprising that Carr should emerge last week with a Wall Street Journal piece arguing the e-book bubble may have burst. Read more...

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Magazine - The Atlantic

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Magazine - The Atlantic

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