I can't help it. I love books and have a huge collection. I used to have a really bad habit of buying something almost weekly but have since recovered to only go through buying spurts every 3-6 months. My dream is a house with a massive built-in bookshelf. Sick? Maybe.
At one time I had plans for a 2,000 volume library in the basement. Basically book cases on rails that you could stack all to one side or the other, each capable of holding roughly 200 books. Books are really awesome.
These days I digitize them (or buy them pre-digitized if I can get them without DRM). That is because a large portion of the books I buy and keep are nominally "reference" works rather than fiction. The reading experience is certainly different but with screens not horribly so and everything fits on a couple of flash drives so no risk of having my library burn up or get buried in an earthquake.
I'd love to hear about your digitization workflow. I have an enormous backlog of books that would be much easier to read (more portable and available) if they were digitized.
Not OP, but I digitized several hundred books when I went all digital. 1dollarscan.com if I could live with destructive scanning (sliced, scanned, recycled afterwards), DIY cradle scanning if the book had some value (http://www.diybookscanner.org/).
My entire library is archived in AWS' Glacier, and costs me ~$1.50/month to store.
I have a 30K collection of ebooks, 90% PDF's. Use BRISS[1] to crop to optimize them for the screen space on my 1080p Nook HD+ (jailbroken running CM with "PDF Reader" by Lieo Hi-Dev).
Everyone's definition of "quality" varies, but this has worked well for me for the past 2-odd years; undoubtedly there are better tablets, but the Nook HD+ struck a cost/benefit sweet spot for me. If my Nook HD+ broke tomorrow I'd probably replace it with a 1080p Lenovo Tab2 A10 tablet for 180USD.
Thank you so much. I hadn't kept up with tablets and I didn't think a "retina"-like screen was possible to have under $400. I think I'll get that instead of paper books for now.
I use a hydraulic paper cutter at work to cut the spine off and then feed them through a Fujitsu ScanSnap. It scans double-sided straight to PDF. It takes about 10 minutes/book to create Hi-res color PDF's. The scanner is pretty fast.
My archival format is this hi-res color PDF (sadly, I like the yellowed color of old pages and like to have that retained when reading on an iPad.) These files are quite large (100 meg or so). Lucky enormous hard disks are cheap.
For daily reading, I send the PDF's through an epub converter that turns them to lower res, B&W epubs and then onto a Kindle Paperwhite.
I used to be bothered by the destruction of the book, but now its almost spiritual. The book must go through the ritual and give up its corporeal form so that it can live forever in my digital Valhalla.
I like it. Thanks for sharing, and wish I had access to that setup. I spent years trawling through used bookstores accumulating tons of books. Starting to divest them now, though. Electronic is just so much more compact and easier...
I started using 1dollarscan.com. They have a "platinum" program that for $100/month[1] you can scan 100 "sets" (each set is 100 pages, so a total of 10,000 pages) with the basic enrichments (OCR, tuning to particular devices). On some volumes I ponied up for the color and/or 600dpi options.
Did that for about 6 months and processed a bit more than 60,000 pages. I bought a nice guillotine cutter off Amazon and a ScanSnap 1500 scanner [3]. For a lot of paperback references I could cut the spine off, drop it into the scanner, and it takes less than minute to scan the entire book, both sides of the page. I also scanned a several years of Scientific American, Nature: Materials, and other magazines I've kept for reference. Yes it "destroys" the book, generally though I'm ok with that. If I really want something in book form I'll buy two copies, scan one and keep the other. For reference material it is much more helpful to have things digitized. I've been working on a home grown data management application which catalogs and cross references information from the books. The whole library is less than a terabyte at the moment.
I do the same thing! If there's a book I want to keep, I scan it with my DIY bookscanner and toss the book away.
I, too, used to dream of having a big home library. Now I dream of a home with almost nothing in it. (If it weren't for music scores, which I use at the piano, there wouldn't be any books in the house other than what I'm currently reading and hasn't been scanned yet.)
The local library doesn't really like donations. Most get tossed. A separate charity takes them, tosses most, and conducts sales to raise money for the library with what's left.
But the fact is, if I'm retaining a copy of the book (with my scan), I can't give the book away. I still have it. That would be stealing. It is really disheartening to see people here on Hacker News who believe that intellectual property should be stolen and/or has no value. That's disturbing.
When I was a kid my allowance started at $0.50 and a paperback was $3-$4. So I could only buy a book every 6-8 weeks. For a little bit the $10 gift certificates to book stores I would get for my birthday dwarfed anything I could manage myself. My allowance went up, but it wasn't until I got a job that books got cheap enough that I could buy them whenever I wanted.
I now have a library in my house (not builtin, but 84" shelves nearly wall-to-wall. It's nice :)
What would the book market look like if there were some way to completely get rid of used books (ignoring rare, collectors, etc books)? Would there be more money in it, or is the market already earning as much as it's going to earn, and the used books have no impact?
There is a rather large subset of society that consists of creatives, and for the most part those cursed with creative passions tend to perform economically poorly. I suspect that this is in part due to the selling of used creative goods (music, books, movies, etc). Most importantly the concept of used books may itself devalue the medium in people's minds. Much like what happened to mobile apps; things that used to be several dollars or more on the desktop are $0.99 on mobile. The idea of a $20 app is offensive to people. The idea of spending full price on a book is also, perhaps, offensive to a large number of people.
All that said, even if getting rid of used books was economically beneficial to those writing the books, there still seems to be no practical way to achieve it. So it's really just a thought experiment driven by hopeful desire to help those around me who are more artistically inclined and suffering as a result.
Perhaps the right solution is to come at it from a different angle. Subscription services seem to be one solution that is working in the sense that it gets those who normally pirate content to pony up for convenience. Though that doesn't seem to translate into greater income for the content creators...
>or is the market already earning as much as it's going to earn, and the used books have no impact?
My guess is--pretty much. It's hard to find good numbers (i.e. some quick searching turned up some fairly old and incomplete data) but the used book market would seem to be something under 10% of the total. And that probably overstates the impact given that the textbook segment is probably significant and that used books effectively target many people who wouldn't be in the market for the new book anyway.
>All that said, even if getting rid of used books was economically beneficial to those writing the books, there still seems to be no practical way to achieve it.
> Would there be more money in it, or is the market already earning as much as it's going to earn, and the used books have no impact?
This would have a pretty huge impact on the publishing industry. Traditional publishers make a ton of money on their backlist – perennial best-sellers like "Catcher in the Rye". These books are great for publishers because production costs are covered and the cost of sale is low (no marketing, book ends, book tours, etc..), and is part of the reason why legacy publishers like Penguin Random House are still such strong companies.
Allowing publishers to completely control the market for these books (no competition from used book sellers) would be hugely beneficial for them; it would make their most lucrative titles even more so.
I'm a little surprised they don't try to do this. They could set up their own used book operation so they can corner the market for their titles.
I feel like this record has been played a lot. Pun intended.
Back in the day, horology went through the "quartz crisis" when quartz watches entered the market. The pendulum swung back, and mechanical watches are magnitudes more expensive and desirable than their quartz cousins.
Audio went through the same thing - digital replaced analog and became exceedingly cheap. Now the good money is in vacuum tube amps; good record players cost thousands, and people pine for the warmth of analog.
I imagine the same will happen here. Maybe not to the same degree... But that penny analog book probably still costs several hundred times for the digital download. E-books are a convenience and the way of the future. But purists will always hold onto books, and rare books will become more and more valuable. The dog-eared copy of Huck Finn that's worth $10 today will be worth magnitudes tomorrow after the pendulum swings back.
Technology disrupts right up until people have a crisis of nostalgia, and realize all isn't inconvenience in an analog world.
This is definitely happening in the collector car world, where the simpler, lighter, manual gas-powered examples are being bid up in price dramatically as porky, computerized, electric cars are introduced.
Way off topic now, but I'm pretty sure that a Tesla's components (basically an electric motor and some batteries) are way simpler than all the shenanigans you need to turn explosions into spinning wheels.
Though I guess you're more referencing ICEs with more computerized control systems..
> Ever since a university gave me a literature degree certifying that I have read Chaucer in the original Middle English, my taste in books has reverted to very specific, lowbrow stuff.
This implies Chaucer isn't lowbrow...
Edit - Anyhow, as for the rest of the article, it's an interesting look into the trade of used books. I'm glad that people are given a chance to give these books a second life and spare the landfill, and there definitely is something comforting about reading from an actual paper book (I definitely prefer them to digital). Maybe it's the sense of permanence, vs. bytes which are all too easy to delete?
Indeed, there's pretty much nothing bawdier in English literature than "The Miller's Tale" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miller%27s_Tale).
Some Shakespeare comes close, though. Which kind of proves your point.
This is an under-appreciated strength of ebooks: they can't be resold.
With print books, publishers risk undermining their own inventory. The more print books they sell, the more they fuel the used market, which drives down prices. This is countervailing force to the typical upward price pressure of high demand.
Not so with ebooks. Plus you don't have to cut down trees, stamp them with poisonous dyes, and move them around with oil-sucking cargo ships, frieghtliners, forklifts and such.
Right. If I want to steal 5,400 different physical books, I'm going to need a truck and some criminal intent and probably a half dozen or more bookstores to get them all from. eBooks, on the other hand....
This is true. My point was more about how publishers should value print as opposed to ebooks. The value of a print sale is diminished to some extent by it's fueling of the used market. So whatever a publisher values a print sale should be discounted to some degree. The same is not true for ebooks. An additional sale of an ebook does not discount the general price of ebooks.
I buy used books on Amazon frequently (about 5/month)--when the Kindle version's price is too high or isn't available. It's a great deal and I've rarely been disappointed.
37 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 71.9 ms ] threadThese days I digitize them (or buy them pre-digitized if I can get them without DRM). That is because a large portion of the books I buy and keep are nominally "reference" works rather than fiction. The reading experience is certainly different but with screens not horribly so and everything fits on a couple of flash drives so no risk of having my library burn up or get buried in an earthquake.
My entire library is archived in AWS' Glacier, and costs me ~$1.50/month to store.
I was thinking getting an iPad so that the resolution is tolerable vs actual books.
[1] http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solu...
Everyone's definition of "quality" varies, but this has worked well for me for the past 2-odd years; undoubtedly there are better tablets, but the Nook HD+ struck a cost/benefit sweet spot for me. If my Nook HD+ broke tomorrow I'd probably replace it with a 1080p Lenovo Tab2 A10 tablet for 180USD.
[1] http://briss.sourceforge.net/
My archival format is this hi-res color PDF (sadly, I like the yellowed color of old pages and like to have that retained when reading on an iPad.) These files are quite large (100 meg or so). Lucky enormous hard disks are cheap.
For daily reading, I send the PDF's through an epub converter that turns them to lower res, B&W epubs and then onto a Kindle Paperwhite.
I used to be bothered by the destruction of the book, but now its almost spiritual. The book must go through the ritual and give up its corporeal form so that it can live forever in my digital Valhalla.
Did that for about 6 months and processed a bit more than 60,000 pages. I bought a nice guillotine cutter off Amazon and a ScanSnap 1500 scanner [3]. For a lot of paperback references I could cut the spine off, drop it into the scanner, and it takes less than minute to scan the entire book, both sides of the page. I also scanned a several years of Scientific American, Nature: Materials, and other magazines I've kept for reference. Yes it "destroys" the book, generally though I'm ok with that. If I really want something in book form I'll buy two copies, scan one and keep the other. For reference material it is much more helpful to have things digitized. I've been working on a home grown data management application which catalogs and cross references information from the books. The whole library is less than a terabyte at the moment.
[1] 1dollarscan platinum membership -- http://1dollarscan.com/membership.php
[2] Stack S12 guillotine cutter -- http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000YI5P76/
[3] ScanSnap 1500 scanner (current model iX500) -- http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scan...
I, too, used to dream of having a big home library. Now I dream of a home with almost nothing in it. (If it weren't for music scores, which I use at the piano, there wouldn't be any books in the house other than what I'm currently reading and hasn't been scanned yet.)
But the fact is, if I'm retaining a copy of the book (with my scan), I can't give the book away. I still have it. That would be stealing. It is really disheartening to see people here on Hacker News who believe that intellectual property should be stolen and/or has no value. That's disturbing.
I now have a library in my house (not builtin, but 84" shelves nearly wall-to-wall. It's nice :)
There is a rather large subset of society that consists of creatives, and for the most part those cursed with creative passions tend to perform economically poorly. I suspect that this is in part due to the selling of used creative goods (music, books, movies, etc). Most importantly the concept of used books may itself devalue the medium in people's minds. Much like what happened to mobile apps; things that used to be several dollars or more on the desktop are $0.99 on mobile. The idea of a $20 app is offensive to people. The idea of spending full price on a book is also, perhaps, offensive to a large number of people.
All that said, even if getting rid of used books was economically beneficial to those writing the books, there still seems to be no practical way to achieve it. So it's really just a thought experiment driven by hopeful desire to help those around me who are more artistically inclined and suffering as a result.
Perhaps the right solution is to come at it from a different angle. Subscription services seem to be one solution that is working in the sense that it gets those who normally pirate content to pony up for convenience. Though that doesn't seem to translate into greater income for the content creators...
My guess is--pretty much. It's hard to find good numbers (i.e. some quick searching turned up some fairly old and incomplete data) but the used book market would seem to be something under 10% of the total. And that probably overstates the impact given that the textbook segment is probably significant and that used books effectively target many people who wouldn't be in the market for the new book anyway.
>All that said, even if getting rid of used books was economically beneficial to those writing the books, there still seems to be no practical way to achieve it.
No there isn't. First sale doctrine.
This would have a pretty huge impact on the publishing industry. Traditional publishers make a ton of money on their backlist – perennial best-sellers like "Catcher in the Rye". These books are great for publishers because production costs are covered and the cost of sale is low (no marketing, book ends, book tours, etc..), and is part of the reason why legacy publishers like Penguin Random House are still such strong companies.
Allowing publishers to completely control the market for these books (no competition from used book sellers) would be hugely beneficial for them; it would make their most lucrative titles even more so.
I'm a little surprised they don't try to do this. They could set up their own used book operation so they can corner the market for their titles.
Back in the day, horology went through the "quartz crisis" when quartz watches entered the market. The pendulum swung back, and mechanical watches are magnitudes more expensive and desirable than their quartz cousins.
Audio went through the same thing - digital replaced analog and became exceedingly cheap. Now the good money is in vacuum tube amps; good record players cost thousands, and people pine for the warmth of analog.
I imagine the same will happen here. Maybe not to the same degree... But that penny analog book probably still costs several hundred times for the digital download. E-books are a convenience and the way of the future. But purists will always hold onto books, and rare books will become more and more valuable. The dog-eared copy of Huck Finn that's worth $10 today will be worth magnitudes tomorrow after the pendulum swings back.
Technology disrupts right up until people have a crisis of nostalgia, and realize all isn't inconvenience in an analog world.
Though I guess you're more referencing ICEs with more computerized control systems..
This implies Chaucer isn't lowbrow...
Edit - Anyhow, as for the rest of the article, it's an interesting look into the trade of used books. I'm glad that people are given a chance to give these books a second life and spare the landfill, and there definitely is something comforting about reading from an actual paper book (I definitely prefer them to digital). Maybe it's the sense of permanence, vs. bytes which are all too easy to delete?
With print books, publishers risk undermining their own inventory. The more print books they sell, the more they fuel the used market, which drives down prices. This is countervailing force to the typical upward price pressure of high demand.
Not so with ebooks. Plus you don't have to cut down trees, stamp them with poisonous dyes, and move them around with oil-sucking cargo ships, frieghtliners, forklifts and such.
If only ebooks didn't suck so bad...
Estimating the U.S. population at 320 million, that's about 8.4 books per person per year -- higher than I would have expected.