On The Bookseller, Martin Latham posts a brief complaint about the production quality of hardcover books these days. Today’s mass-market hardcover books, he notes, tend to be cheaply and poorly made, and will by and large not age into beautiful antiques such as a 1623 Shakespeare folio Latham describes. Latham talks up a £30 (US$46) book on maps that includes removable fold-out maps bundled in pockets, and a few other beautiful books. Of course, e-book fan that I am, I can’t see myself buying any of those, and wonder just how many people in today’s recession, price-sensitive economy would...

In addition to promoting childhood obesity, McDonald’s in the UK is now promoting childhood literacy. Until February 7th, in cooperation with England’s National Literacy Trust, all UK McDonald’s locations will be distributing print copies of the popular UK children’s series Mudpuddle Farm by Michael Morpurgo as a free Happy Meal “toy”. A 2011 survey showed that 33% of British children do not own a book, according to the National Literacy Trust. This program is meant to help remedy that by putting an actual printed book, rather than a cheap plastic toy, in the hands of young would-be readers....

On her LiveJournal, writer Seanan McGuire makes an important point about the nature of the digital divide and how it affects paper versus e-books. People below the poverty line—which at least 15.1% of Americans are, and probably more than that since it goes by an old standard of poverty—can’t afford e-book readers, or e-books to go on them. They can afford paper books, because books are cheap. The problem is that printed books are starting to go away due to the encroachment of e-books. Writes McGuire: [E]very time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably,...

Wired.com’s New York editor, John C. Abell, has posted what at first glance looks like another one of those "why e-books aren't all that great" articles that e-book fans either point and laugh or gnash their teeth at. But actually, Abell explains, he likes e-books himself—he hasn't bought anything in print since getting his iPad. Still, he sees five areas where e-books don't quite live up to their print counterparts. Some of these “problems” are more compelling than others: An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it. You can’t keep your books all in one place. Notes in the margins help you...

On The Bookseller, Damian Horner notes that the rise of e-books means a fall in the prominence of the book cover, and ponders what that will mean for the industry. (We’ve covered this ourselves a time or two.) He points out that, until the e-book era, we were able to see what our fellow passengers in public transportation were reading, and perhaps be moved to investigate the book for ourselves. With so many covered books being replaced by e-readers, that curiosity-satisfying opportunity for passengers—and marketing opportunity for publishers—is vanishing. In the past, the book cover...

Mike Shatzkin, whose posts are always interesting and informative, has a look at how e-book vs. print book sales comparisons can be confusing. When Amazon o rother stores that sell both compare figures, Shatzkin explains, they’re making an apples-to-apples comparison of an e-book sold to a consumer to a print book sold to a consumer. But when publishers make the comparison, they are comparing e-books sold to consumers to shipments of books sold to retailers and wholesalers that consumers might buy or the stores might ship back—apples to oranges. These different comparisons can lead to some strange optical illusions...

Amazon has a press release out (found on Engadget) indicating that it is now selling 105 Kindle e-books (not counting freebie downloads) for every 100 print books it sells in the US. It also reports that the ad-supported Kindle With Special Offers is the current best-selling Kindle device. Meanwhile, FutureBook reports that for every 100 hardback books Amazon has sold in the UK, it has sold 242 Kindle e-books. (There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent comparison to all print titles such as the one on the US press release, however, making it hard to make a comparison.)...

Last week I covered John Blake’s idea of delaying e-books in order to save print bookstores. On FutureBook, Rhian Davies has also responded with an interesting post referencing Theodore Levitt’s paper on “Marketing Myopia”—the source (or at least popularizer) of that anecdote we often hear about railroads thinking they were in the railroad business when they were really in the transportation business. Thirty-six years ago, Levitt pointed out that industries needed to focus on the customer, rather than the product, and some industries still haven’t learned that lesson even today. Today we have the ereader, be it Kindle or other device.  Like...

On The Bookseller blog, John Blake offers what he apparently believes is a novel solution to “saving” bookstores from the encroaching press of e-books: delay selling the e-book until later. He writes: The idea of simultaneously publishing an exciting new title both as a hardback and as an e-book seems totally crazy. If only publishers could publish the book as a hardback initially, then put out the e-book some months later, bookshops would be given a sporting chance to stay in business, and the dizzying decline of book sales could almost certainly be slowed. ...

I found another “death of print” article, like the ones I mentioned here, though this one at least has a fairly novel take on why publishers should be happy that e-books are coming in. In PC Magazine, John Dvorak suggests that e-books will be a key to selling more books overall. First of all, we know from anecdotal evidence that people with an ebook reader often buy hard copies of the books they really want. The ebook reader is a filtering mechanism. It reminds me of the Napster era in the music business. During its heyday,...

In a remarkable coincidence, today Zite gave me four articles in a row about “the future of books” or “the death of print”. I’m not sure what caused so many people to take a look ahead right out of the blue like this, but it seems like a good time to look at the articles and compare notes. On Singularity Hub Aaron Saenz points to the recent Kindle library news, and the rise of e-book sales as printed book sales decline. He suggests that digital downloads could become the majority of the market as early as 2015 or as...

There’s another post from someone on FutureBook wondering, based on their personal experience, whether the e-book is going to “kill” the printed book. There’s nothing particularly special about this post—indeed, it’s only four paragraphs long, and most of what it says has been said before: e-publishing probably won’t end printed books, but might end cheap, mass-produced word containers in favor of printed-to-last objects d’art. But what interests me about this is just how many of these particular posts we’ve been seeing over the last few months. They’ve always been with us, even from the days when the preferred e-book...