By Gloria Quintanilla 2012 felt like a decisive year for print. E-Book sales surpassed print book sales on Amazon for the first time, and widely-read publications like Newsweek decided to give up on print media altogether, and instead to transition fully into digital publishing. All the while, pundits are still debating if there is a future for print in a world dominated by digital formats. Similar discussions are going on between book lovers and authors, who are worried about the publishing industry being ill equipped to respond to their demands. So here's the question: Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? Can...

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 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...

Here we have yet another story on why print rules and e-books drool, by 26-year-old Emma Silvers who posits the thesis that she is somehow nobly fighting against the tide of her generation, rejecting conformity and marching to the beat of a different drummer and all that. It ends up coming across as smug and smacks more than a little of entitlement. Silvers writes of encountering a woman reading a book on the Kindle and being annoyed because instead of seeing a book cover to give away what the person was reading, she saw the “smooth metallic back...

On Publishing Perspectives, I’ve noticed an editorial by Deborah Willis that reads almost like a response to our recent post by C. A. Bridges on print vs. paper books (though of course they were written completely independently of each other). Bridges admits that a number of things can be done with the physical artifacts that are paper books that can’t be done with e-books, as a reader he finds he prefers the electronic version. Deborah Willis, on the other hand, is concerned about the essential nature of printed books becoming diluted or vanishing as a result of migration...

Over at Gadget Lab, Tim Carmody has an interesting look at why e-book readers are the size they are. It has to do with sheep. More specifically, the sheepskins that were used to make parchment back in medieval days. Folding the parchment a different number of times before cutting produced a different number of parchment sheets of different sizes, which rapidly became the standard sizes of the printing industry. Even after printing moved from parchment to paper, the sizes were preserved out of habit—they were already set up for working with those sizes and there was no compelling...

You know that “print vs. e-books” debate we’re always covering here? The New York Times has an interesting article looking at it from a novel new angle: what happens in households where one person favors print and the other prefers e-books. In looking at these little “toilet seat up or down” style disputes, the article is often rather amusing. “[My wife] talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium....

The Bookseller reports on author Jeanette Winterson expressing dismay over the march of digitization (or “digitisation” as they spell it on that side of the Atlantic). At an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of her novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, she said: "What worries me is that a load of s**** has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that the Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves." She brings up the browser’s dilemma: if you can...

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb has written a pair of articles considering the advantages that e-books and printed books have over each other. E-books get the nod for social highlighting, notes, look-up of words, ability to tweet and Facebook quotes, and search; paper books get it for feel, packaging, sharing, keeping, and second-hand books. I can’t help but find both of these lists a little lame. The e-books list seems to place an undue emphasis on social networking (the ability to tweet and Facebook quotes? Really? Something that only the Kindle has, and even it only got...

The Literary Platform has an editorial by Matt Young, the founder of a small publishing house called InPrint Books. InPrint has a couple of gimmicks—it creates books with colored covers made entirely from different colors of paper, with no ink involved, produces them in lots of only 1,000 numbered copies, and it doesn’t do e-books. (The editorial is prefaced by a rather smug commercial on YouTube doing the whole “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” thing with a book and an e-book.) Looking at the site, this publisher seems to be going heavily into the idea of books...

Amazon still has not reached an e-book price agreement with Penguin, whose contract with Amazon expired (like so many others) on April 1 when agency pricing took effect. Penguin is the only one of the “agency pricing five” not to have come to an agreement yet, and so after thirty days, Penguin’s e-books still are not available via Amazon. Of course, the whole reason for the kerfuffle over e-book pricing to begin with was Amazon’s $9.99 price point for e-books, in which it was buying the books for standard half-hardcover price and then marking them down to increase...

A little over three years ago, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller began writing a Liaden Universe side-story novel, Fledgling—which soon expanded into a sequel book, Saltation. These books were written as crowdfunded “Storyteller’s Bowl” projects: The drafts were posted to the web one chapter per week in return for reader donations, with the promise of a professionally-edited-and-revised hardcover book sent to donors of a specific level at the end of the project. Subsequently, the novels were picked up by Baen along with the rest of the Liaden Universe series, with Lee & Miller to receive part of their...