No one buys books, cd's, dvd's, blurays, magazines, comics, games, and many other things that were bought a lot 10-30 years ago. These days everything is online and (usually) subscription based.
Looking at myself, the only things I buy regularly, is food ;)
Surely CDs have become Spotify, tidal. Blu rays have become Netflix, Disney, etc. magazines have become websites, etc.
The content is still there just the medium has changed. Has the same been true for books though? eBooks do exist of course, but did they replace the publishing industry that existed 50 or a hundred years ago?
True for fiction books. But if you think about fiction generally, as the poster said, the medium has changed. People still love fiction, but now it's movies and shows.
It seems obvious that books lost some market share.
People have a limited amount of time for entertainment and have a lot more choice between Netflix, YouTube, Books and thousands of other things than they did back then.
As far as I can tell eBooks aren't significantly more popular than physical books. Surely the publishers cited in the article wouldn't have neglected that topic if it was actually a major revenue stream.
As far as audiobooks go I don't know. Do you have any numbers?
n = 1, but I purchase physical books, comics, references, etc. under two circumstances:
- cannot find an easy way to de-DRM media available on online stores. I want the ability to copy epub files across my devices and read offline.
- the digital version is a poor-quality scan. This frequently happens with comics.
This is embarrassing to discuss normally, but an additional perk of physical comics and light novels is that I can look at the obi and get reminded what I was doing in the past, where I was in the past, what was happening in the past, etc. especially for those which I have finished reading. The subset of my friends with similar interests as me tend to discard the obi, since it becomes bothersome while reading. I have the habit of removing the obi while I am reading something, then add it back when finished reading the entire thing. Things like this can't really be done with digital media, especially subscriptions.
Yep. No money in it short of not just getting optioned for TV or film, but an actual released production. Even then, a hit or two likely won’t pay as much as you’d think. Some pretty damn successful authors have boring day jobs, or stopped after a handful of “successful” books that didn’t make them much money and went back to a normal corporate career.
The other option is to crank out (ha, ha) short romance novels like a machine and market like mad. The money’s in hard work at writing porn, or in big broad-audience grand slams, probably written at a junior high reading level, with a small niche supporting a handful of authors in writing based-on-a-true-story stuff (bonus if “true crime” connection) aimed directly at getting optioned for film or tv (but that one’s very hard to break into, studios have some go-to authors for that stuff and you ain’t one of them)
This is also one of the areas in which the Internet has actually delivered on early promise (though the success has been a long time coming, and remains precarious): the Internet Archive offers access to over 20 million records, and aims to have a web page for every book ever published. Note that this still isn't full access to all material, but it's quite good.
The US Library of Congress has also been expanding its public access, as have other large public libraries (the New York Public Library notably). LoC also have specific programmes aimed at disabled readers such as its NLS BARD programme for the visually- and reading-disabled.
Most libraries that people have access to are more like "Disney+ for books". They have a limited selection of extremely mainstream books. If you're happy to make do with whatever they have on offer then you're fine, but if you want something specific you'll have to go out and buy it.
Back in the DVD days and before everyone broke ranks and tried to start their own service, the thing that made Netflix great was that no matter what you wanted they had it. Having no retail footprint meant they could stock everything without having to compromise. Libraries don't have that advantage.
I gotta admit: I rarely make time for any recent fiction. Too busy catching up on the last 5,000 years. I don’t expect that to change before I die.
Film has a similar problem—there are plausibly low-thousands existing films worth my time, a whole lot of them 30+ years old. I could never watch a film made after 2000 and not run out of good entertainment in my lifetime. They’re damn lucky the Mouse got copyright extended to a century or more.
read "the sarah book" or "crapalachia" by scott mcclananhan if you want to read fiction from a living author that should be included in your reading list for the past 5k years of language arts.
> I will say that it seems entirely possible to relatively quickly see all US animated kids movies
Decent or better ones… maybe.
There’s a deep bench of poor-to-terrible animated kids’ movies that were straight to VHS/DVD/streaming. For god’s sake, there are like nine Land Before Time movies alone.
Video games, too. I live through the 90s yet my backlog includes thousands of hours of reputedly-amazing games from that decade that I didn’t get to at the time.
To be fair the awesomeness of many blockbuster games could be condensed way down with little harm to the game (e.g., Final Fantasy without all the random battles).
There are gems coming out today that will be considered great works by our descendants.
By avoiding current authors or media you miss out on the cultural story and critique/commentary that influences all our media. Sure, the last 5000 years are interesting, but isn't right now pretty amazing too? You might accidently read the best book ever written but you won't know until history plays out. But I think it's important to see how recent history has shaped the narrative of the worlds authors in today's world.
Weve lived through a lot of major events. Everyone does. But these are our events.
I’m not avoiding them, but “rando probably-just-ok new thing” versus any of hundreds of major classics I haven’t made it to yet… it’s tough to pick the new thing very often.
[edit] or, hell, not even major. Odds that a recommended-by-people-online got-some-hype-in-review-rags new book is gonna make me happier to have read it than, say, a 2nd-tier Maugham or Faulkner or something? Not great.
Yeah, if you like sorting garbage. Which of the 1.5 million books published this year will you read? People routinely hide money in mattresses, so why not head to the landfill and start looking?
I sometimes read/watch/play something if a friend recommends it. But I've no time/interest in sorting through the random deluge of media in the hope of finding diamonds. I'll let someone else find the diamond and tell me about it.
I'm trying to think back over "new releases" that I've read, and ... all of them have been by authors that I had already enjoyed reading some of their works.
It would have to be a technical book on a subject I'm interested in (and even then moderately rare) or something that someone I know well personally strongly recommended.
This is the argument I bring up whenever people start ranting about how widespread torrenting means we will never have new music or movies. Who cares? I have multiple lifetimes of good stuff to enjoy already.
There are some dedicated publishers that make bibles (most any Christian publishing house will have a bible of some sort) but the big names on Amazon or the bookstore are from the big houses (often under an imprint, mind you).
So, I usually think in terms of longevity. I do own some books, because in case computers don’t work anymore, well I can still read good stuff. I have plenty of PDFs/epubs in my laptop because the internet may not work anymore anytime. I do have some stuff in the cloud, but just for convenience (I don’t care if those files disappear).
Same with music,
movies and video games. I want to be able to “run” stuff offline. Electricity is still a big dependency (i’m looking into solar panels)
I'm the same way, and also: I want to not have to pay a subscription fee forever. Once I have what I want, then that's it! I'm don't need to spend another dime. But if I use Spotify or whatever, I have to keep paying forever. It is a much worse deal.
The difference between music and books is time investment. New music comes out all the time, and I'm always discovering old music. A subscription works great for music because I can listen to so many songs. Books not so much, and I consider myself a reader.
And even with books it becomes much easier to say “I’ll reread the lord of the rings on this flight” than it is to take a wild risk on an unknown book and author.
> A subscription works great for music because I can listen to so many songs. Books not so much, and I consider myself a reader.
It can work for books too, kinda. You can check "J-Novel Club" for an existing example. Chapters are translated in parts, and each part is released ASAP to subscribers, before the whole thing is translated (though they're clear that it's still a WIP).
It's also extremely common for... uh... "gray-zone indie translators" to translate web novels from Japanese into English, and release the translations first to Patreon supporters, and a week later to everyone else.
Granted, everything I'm saying is very specific to the niche of JP novels.
Yeah, if you're frequently getting new music then a subscription makes sense. My music library is pretty much static. I don't like the vast majority of new music, and I've already gotten the vast majority of old music that I care about. My music purchases are something like $30 (at most, usually much less) per year, which is way cheaper than Spotify.
I pay for streaming 90% because my wife wants to, and 10% because it's the only way I can legally watch things in some cases. So I would say yes, in that I would rather ditch those too, but no in that they have uses I can't replace at this time.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadLooking at myself, the only things I buy regularly, is food ;)
The content is still there just the medium has changed. Has the same been true for books though? eBooks do exist of course, but did they replace the publishing industry that existed 50 or a hundred years ago?
[edit] JFC I misread your sense of “read”, I think we agree.
People have a limited amount of time for entertainment and have a lot more choice between Netflix, YouTube, Books and thousands of other things than they did back then.
As far as audiobooks go I don't know. Do you have any numbers?
- cannot find an easy way to de-DRM media available on online stores. I want the ability to copy epub files across my devices and read offline.
- the digital version is a poor-quality scan. This frequently happens with comics.
This is embarrassing to discuss normally, but an additional perk of physical comics and light novels is that I can look at the obi and get reminded what I was doing in the past, where I was in the past, what was happening in the past, etc. especially for those which I have finished reading. The subset of my friends with similar interests as me tend to discard the obi, since it becomes bothersome while reading. I have the habit of removing the obi while I am reading something, then add it back when finished reading the entire thing. Things like this can't really be done with digital media, especially subscriptions.
The other option is to crank out (ha, ha) short romance novels like a machine and market like mad. The money’s in hard work at writing porn, or in big broad-audience grand slams, probably written at a junior high reading level, with a small niche supporting a handful of authors in writing based-on-a-true-story stuff (bonus if “true crime” connection) aimed directly at getting optioned for film or tv (but that one’s very hard to break into, studios have some go-to authors for that stuff and you ain’t one of them)
$94 for a used copy /s
This is also one of the areas in which the Internet has actually delivered on early promise (though the success has been a long time coming, and remains precarious): the Internet Archive offers access to over 20 million records, and aims to have a web page for every book ever published. Note that this still isn't full access to all material, but it's quite good.
<https://openlibrary.org/about>
The US Library of Congress has also been expanding its public access, as have other large public libraries (the New York Public Library notably). LoC also have specific programmes aimed at disabled readers such as its NLS BARD programme for the visually- and reading-disabled.
<https://federalnewsnetwork.com/open-datatransparency/2022/02...>
<https://www.loc.gov/nls/how-to-enroll/sign-up-for-bard-and-b...>
Back in the DVD days and before everyone broke ranks and tried to start their own service, the thing that made Netflix great was that no matter what you wanted they had it. Having no retail footprint meant they could stock everything without having to compromise. Libraries don't have that advantage.
Seems almost poetic, somehow.
welcome our overlords.
Film has a similar problem—there are plausibly low-thousands existing films worth my time, a whole lot of them 30+ years old. I could never watch a film made after 2000 and not run out of good entertainment in my lifetime. They’re damn lucky the Mouse got copyright extended to a century or more.
I will say that it seems entirely possible to relatively quickly see all US animated kids movies …
Decent or better ones… maybe.
There’s a deep bench of poor-to-terrible animated kids’ movies that were straight to VHS/DVD/streaming. For god’s sake, there are like nine Land Before Time movies alone.
It's hard to even find a list; and some are pretty decent, for what they are.
By avoiding current authors or media you miss out on the cultural story and critique/commentary that influences all our media. Sure, the last 5000 years are interesting, but isn't right now pretty amazing too? You might accidently read the best book ever written but you won't know until history plays out. But I think it's important to see how recent history has shaped the narrative of the worlds authors in today's world.
Weve lived through a lot of major events. Everyone does. But these are our events.
[edit] or, hell, not even major. Odds that a recommended-by-people-online got-some-hype-in-review-rags new book is gonna make me happier to have read it than, say, a 2nd-tier Maugham or Faulkner or something? Not great.
Wow. Can't wait for the next Harry Potter / Avatar / Celebrity book / Spiderman movie !!!!11!!!1! Great works!
> but isn't right now pretty amazing too?
No.
I sometimes read/watch/play something if a friend recommends it. But I've no time/interest in sorting through the random deluge of media in the hope of finding diamonds. I'll let someone else find the diamond and tell me about it.
It would have to be a technical book on a subject I'm interested in (and even then moderately rare) or something that someone I know well personally strongly recommended.
Have to say I'm kind of surprised about the bibles part. Aren't those usually printed by smaller church-associated publishers?
Same with music, movies and video games. I want to be able to “run” stuff offline. Electricity is still a big dependency (i’m looking into solar panels)
It can work for books too, kinda. You can check "J-Novel Club" for an existing example. Chapters are translated in parts, and each part is released ASAP to subscribers, before the whole thing is translated (though they're clear that it's still a WIP).
It's also extremely common for... uh... "gray-zone indie translators" to translate web novels from Japanese into English, and release the translations first to Patreon supporters, and a week later to everyone else.
Granted, everything I'm saying is very specific to the niche of JP novels.