"E-Book Sales Slip & Print Far From Dead"
E-sales of 99¢ and self-pub fiction are doing just fine -- still the best selling content on amazilla.
It seems that once publishers won back the right to set prices for their own e-versions of books -- instead of amazilla selling them for 99¢ -- people went back to buying the print version, since the price difference between them wasn't as great as the $1.99 or $2.99 price the online controller made it previously.
Additionally people are preferring to read e-versions on their phones not on dedicated amazilla readers, which means they don't have to buy everything from amazilla, but can get the content from libraries and so on as well.
Yet it is heartening that print book and mortar stores are doing so much better.
Now, if libraries, particularly research libraries, would only understand this, and put books back on the shelves. The other day we were in Bobst and the entire American history section was gone. Among other thing this means all the collections of Founding Fathers' papers are offsite -- everything! Thank goodness we finished TASC before they ripped out the heart of the history collections.
It seems to me that when libraries went digital, depending on the pay digital databases and for downloading pdfs of many, many books, access to information was severely curtailed. They guard access to those pay digital services more severely than the Secret Service guards entry to the White House. Only those privileged in some way -- often in several ways -- now have access to information that demands serious research. This includes public libraries as much as research libraries.
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