Re: p-books persist

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

The Wall Street Journal asks: Are E-Books Worth the Money?
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/110485/are-e-books-worth-the-money?mod=family-love_money

Note that Stieg Larsson gets a mention here.

Also, as a further answer to the person who asked about my 
reading preferences, here is a better answer (from the article):

3. Savvy readers read the classics anyway.

Why? Because they're free. From Aesop to "Zarathustra." From 
"Hamlet"  to "Huckleberry Finn." They won't cost you a penny. 
These books are outside of copyright. Just go to Gutenberg.org 
and download them.  Thousands of them. And they're better than 
most of the stuff published more recently anyway.

Further information on who buys books and why comes from a new 
Bowker report: 
http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/article/new-industry-report-released-consumer-book-buying-behaviors/1

Here are some highlights:

*More than 40 percent of Americans over the age of 13 purchased a 
book in 2009, and the average age of the American book buyer is 
42.

*Women lead men in overall purchases, contributing 64 percent of 
sales. Even among detective and thriller genres, women top 60 
percent of the sales. Fantasy titles are purchased evenly by men 
and women.

*Baby-boomers are the largest purchasing generation, making up 30 
percent of sales. Their elders-matures-contribute 16 percent.

*More income doesn't mean more book purchases. Thirty-two percent 
of the books purchased in 2009 were from households earning less 
than $35,000 annually, and 20 percent of those sales were for 
children's books.

*The top-selling non-fiction genre is biography-autobiography.

Given that the report costs $999, I suspect not many of us are 
going to see more of it than these highlights! :)

And yet another relevant development: 
http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/blog/it-was-bound-happen#utm_source=bb-extra&utm_medium=enewsletter_continue&utm_campaign=2010-08-27

And yet more, here is a fascinating set of reflections on how the 
e-books of the future (if they are still called that) will 
require skills sets to create them that are rather different than 
what were needed to produce p-books.

http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/blog/employee-skill-sets-needed-enhanced-interactive-book-products#utm_source=bb-extra&utm_medium=enewsletter_continue&utm_campaign=2010-08-27