Already posted it in Random Talking, but thought this would make for a nice bump:

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Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles There is talk about that the old dead tree book is headed quickly for obsolescence, what with the increasing sophistication and readability of e-readers and tablet devices, and the economic advantages of not having to kill all the trees in the first place, turn them into paper, send the paper to a printer, store the resulting books in warehouses, ship the books to physical stores, and so on. Do you read books of any sort, whether print or digital? Do you think that thirty years from now people will still read paper books in any large numbers, or will that just be the activity of a few hobbyists and aging holdouts?

Book sales will gradually decline but it will take 50 or so years befor common use fades.

A lot of money is made on academic books in school settings - and until readers are standard (eg. cell phone PDA/ mini computers are standard for everyone as a school item - and publishers publish those etc.. --- but then you need to look at the costs of electricity overlifespan of use. The whole - my reader died --- or my battery faded - what do I do for the rest of the day etc..

there are problems with this... books rarely stop working.

It is true though that the medium will fade, but there are some drawbacks that can't be handled 10-20 years there will be substantial reductions, but if it is only paper --- well how can it be duplicated for less than buying it. It is a copy protection.

30 years from now the medium will be nonconsequential.. with 2 Terrabit SD cards today people can sore a lifetime of books in 1 quarter sized piece of plastic.

Technology itself is near end though so it is mostly redundant to talk about it. WOrld crisis and technological insignifigance is within 40 years.

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E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future. Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books. In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition. The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site. Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions. The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement. Still, the hardcover book is far from extinct. Industrywide sales are up 22 percent this year, according to the American Publishers Association. The figures do not include free Kindle books, of which there are 1.8 million originally published before 1923 (they are in the public domain because their copyright has expired). Amazon does not specify how paperback sales compare with e-book sales, but paperback sales are thought to still outnumber e-books. The big surprise, Mr. Shatzkin said, was that the day came during the first period that the Kindle faced a serious competitive threat. The Apple iPad, which started sales in April, is marketed as a leisure device for reading, and it has its own e-book store. Yet sales of the Kindle also grew each month during the quarter, Amazon said. Amazon is being helped by an explosion in e-book sales across the board. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales have quadrupled this year through May. Amazon said its sales exceeded that growth rate. One reason Kindle book sales have held their own is that owners of iPads and other mobile reading devices buy Kindle books, which they can read on computers, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and Android phones. But, except for the free uncopyrighted books, Kindle owners must buy or download content via Amazon. “Every time they sell a Kindle, they lock up a customer,” Mr. Shatzkin said. Some industry analysts say that many people do not consider the iPad to be a reading device the way the Kindle is, and see a need to own both. Amazon’s latest sales figures are “clearly an indication that the iPad is complementary to the Kindle, not a replacement,” said Youssef H. Squali, managing director at Jefferies & Company in charge of Internet and new media research. The growth rate of Kindle sales tripled after Amazon lowered the price of the device in late June to $189 from $259, Amazon said. That was moments after Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its Nook e-reader to $199 from $259. During roughly the same period, Apple sold three million iPads, it said. Analysts said Amazon’s announcement could assuage investors’ concerns that the iPad threatens Kindle sales. Amazon’s stock price is down about 16 percent in the last three months, in part because of those fears. “The sentiment’s turned a little more negative on the stock because of iPad issues and concern that Amazon would lose market share in the book segment,” said Aaron Kessler, director of Internet and digital media equity research at ThinkEquity.

[New York Times]

This is hardly surprising, I guess. Though I buy an average of 5 or 6 books a month, probably just one book every two months is a hardcover.

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The cost of an e-book copy will not be that much lower than a physical copy. Of all the costs of making a book, printing is not all that much. Manpower in getting a title ready to publish would be the greatest cost.

Some books are so cheap to produce when they go back to the warehouse they are thrown in the pulp bin for recycling, it's cheaper to print a new copy than to walk to the shelf and return it.

The fastest change will be in out of copyright books. No cost there to get a saleable text, just the creation of the digital format. So anyone with a method to convert and distribute can start selling those titles and we may see some competitive pricing. After all, this is how penguin/pearson started, making cheap paperbacks of out of copyright titles.

The reason why publishing has so many returns is that the product has to be in front of the public to sell. Not that many titles are sought out specifically by a someone already set on buying it. Hence the retailer has to stock it to have a chance to sell, and so the publisher/distributor takes the majority of the risk by allowing unsold product to be returned.
Most sites have a policy that limits returns to 3-12 months from date of sale, so the stock sitting in stores for years is not the publishers issue.
However, most warehouses have problems getting permission to write off stock that hasn't left in years. Warehouse complains it is out of space and it costs $X to store this product every year. Product manager doesn't want to admit they miscalculated demand and that stuff is worth $Y (which it isn't if it cannot sell), so it sits there and gets dusty.

Print on demand is already available for some backlist titles and is surprisingly cost effective, only a couple of dollars more than a unit from a decent print run. For slow moving titles this is certainly an option.

Also remember that not all titles are suitable for readers. Kids books, coffee table books etc.

Digital will certainly change the industry, but print copies will be around for a long time. I'd estimate that eventually it will settle to a 50/50 split or thereabouts.

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Originally posted by Adamo it will die...our childrens children will only see screens and holographic images.

by then we'll all be linked together, our consciousnesseseseses will all be part of one singularity. the experience of one will be transferred to all.

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Biggest U.S. Book Chain Up for Sale In what might be the latest sign of trouble for brick-and-mortar bookstores, the mega-chain Barnes & Noble announced on Tuesday that its board was putting the company up for sale. The news surprised analysts and alarmed publishers, who have watched as the book business has increasingly shifted to online retailers and e-book sales, leaving both chains and independent sellers struggling. Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest book chain with 720 stores, said that its board believed the stock was “significantly undervalued” and that it had set up a special committee to review its options. “Barnes & Noble has an iconic brand and unique competitive advantages we believe will position the company to succeed over time in a rapidly changing market,” the board said in a statement. “The board is confident in Barnes & Noble’s strategy and fully supportive of the senior management team, which is delivering explosive growth in our fast-developing digital business.” The board has enlisted Lazard as its financial adviser and Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell as its legal adviser. One possible bidder could be Leonard Riggio, the company’s founder, working with private equity, according to a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Riggio, 69, is the largest stockholder in Barnes & Noble, owning nearly 30 percent of the company. “Regardless of whether I participate in an investment group that buys the company, I, as well as the entire senior management team, am willing and eager to remain with the company and see it through the challenging years ahead,” Mr. Riggio said in a statement. Mr. Riggio has been under pressure recently from the billionaire investor Ronald W. Burkle, who last year increased his ownership stake in the company to about 18 percent. Mr. Burkle has argued for changes in Barnes & Noble’s corporate governance and has said that his Yucaipa Companies should be allowed to buy up to 30 percent of Barnes & Noble stock, though Mr. Burkle testified in court last month that he did not want to buy the company. For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s. “There’s been a long series of pressures,” said David Schick, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore. “The market has not been kind to bookstores, and it’s for new reasons like competition with Apple and Amazon, and it’s for old reasons, like what we believe has been a decline in reading for the last 20 years. Americans have devoted less of what we call media time to books.” But Barnes & Noble has made efforts to adapt to the changing landscape. Last year, it announced that it had acquired Fictionwise, an online e-book retailer. In March, the company promoted William Lynch, then the head of its Web division, to chief executive, signaling that it was pouring its efforts into the growing digital side of the business. It has tried to compete with Amazon and Apple in the e-reader market by opening its own e-bookstore last summer, and by introducing its own device, the Nook, with versions selling for $149 and $199, as an alternative to the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad. In September, it will open 1,000-square-foot boutiques within its stores to promote the Nook. One analyst said that consumers had been moving away from physical bookstores in favor of buying books online or at other retail outlets. “They might pick up a book when they’re buying hand sanitizer or Band-Aids, rather than actually seeking out a bookstore as a destination and then buying a book at that point,” said Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, which provides research and advice to publishers. “A lot of independents are figuring it out one bookstore at a time, and that’s what the Barnes & Nobles of the world have to do.”

[Source]

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Next generation Kindles that will be released in a couple of days are just $139. I'm really tempted to get one.

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