Transplanting a Seattleite

Some time ago, I blogged about PSTN. Here is something I put together to summarize my earlier entries:

https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/1496052.html

There are some subsequent entries as well.

But as I reread some of this, I’m thinking a little more about why I track this kind of discourse, and what causes me to walk away and STOP talking about this kind of discourse. This is all adoption curve stuff (new thing, crazy people use it because crazy, their slightly less crazy friends selectively use it — that would be folks like me — and their somewhat sane kinship network selectively pick from that list until it becomes the New Normal and then the discourse of OMG WE CANNOT DO THIS kicks up and I start ranting, and then I realize, oh, wait, I’m kicking the idiots I should stop that is morally reprehensible and I go off and find something less reprehensible to do and wait them out until someone convinces them to adapt or they die and lather rinse repeat). AND it’s often demographic.

So. How would that apply here? I’m going to speculate in advance of data collection (so, linkfu / expect ETA warnings I guess) that the early folks on e-books were mostly from the smaller birth cohorts (you know, the one everyone leaves out on the list that goes directly from boomer to millennial). Heavy readers from the boomers participated (aging eyes) but plenty of boomers never did, because they were 1 book a month/year readers so the value proposition really was not there.

But the large cohorts younger than my crowd are hitting Aging Eye era. The value proposition IS there even for the 12 book a year crowd because reading on non-dedicated devices is really a thing now.

This is a battle for folks younger than me but still middle-aged. I should probably just find the exit door now, skip additional data collection, and go back to obsessively tracking lead times on ordering furniture.

My friend K. texted me a link. The article is in English, altho the research was done in the Japanese language. It compares reading a couple sentences from two novels on a smart phone vs. on paper. The paper contains this phrase, which is off-putting:

“Although electronic devices have benefited mankind tremendously”

This phrase makes me ask a lot of questions about Nature’s editorial policy. This should have been an easy fix. Also, the rest of the sentence presumes something with a couple of footnotes, which when you click through on, you see that they are previous literature about reading other-than-on-paper, from 2005 and 2009. The 2005 article is about reading on a VDT. I’m not sure how that relates to reading on a cell phone, honestly.

In any event, let us continue to consider this article, which can be found here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0

The article takes as a given that reading comprehension is reduced on “electronic devices”, while not distinguishing between types of screens (see above footnotes). It then documents a reduction in “sigh generation”. While the researchers did take care to identify the distance between the eyes and the paper or screen, they did not give any indication that they controlled for other ergonomic factors of reading.

Look, that’s all fine! But a lot of the existing literature on “sigh generation” involves posture. So, you know, why is that missing? I mean, I _get_ that it is not “posture of readers”, it is sleeping position of infants (SIDS research, sorry, that was depressing, I know). But still! There’s a bunch of literature out there about posture and cell phone usage, and they even reference some of it in the article. Seems like a missed opportunity.

But never mind all that! They’re sexist fucks from Japan who have some kind of weird axe to grind that is probably anti-cell-phone novel, in much the same way that so much of our media is hung up on all kinds of things that Women and/or Kids These Days Do that the Men/Olds don’t really get and/or approve of. This is more of the same, and that’s fine! Culture in science, hardly surprising.

Check out these reading comprehension questions, tho. They apparently had the readers read _two sentences_ and then asked _these questions_;

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-022-05605-0/MediaObjects/41598_2022_5605_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Honestly, I don’t know what readers in Japan do when they are reading, and I don’t know what these science-y people think people do when they are reading, but this is NOT the list of questions I would have expected on a reading comprehension test. The model of the Boeing airplane? In two sentences from _Norwegian Wood_ by Harukami?!?

Kindle says I am 13% of the way into this thing, and I’m really questioning how much further I’m going to go. Adoption curves of ebooks have been presented in terms of revenue to trad publishers without any reference to the hub-and-spoke lawsuit and subsequent impacts. Discussion of which books do better as ebooks vs pbooks is predictable (and predictably ignores all kinds of things and for obvious reasons includes zero data from the last year and a half). A senior trade publisher, named “Jane”, first name only which in this book _I think_ means anonymized, but of course it is so tempting to assume it is Jane Friedman (that had better be incorrect!). Anyway, “Jane” describes coffee table / zoom background books vs. books that are actually read (does not characterize it that way), and summarizes that under the term “possession value”. Here it is in all its glory:

“What I mean by this is that some books are the kind of books that a reader wants to have in order to consume the content [me: some books are actually read], and once the content has been consumed the book itself is redundant: the reader has no particular desire to hold on to the book for the sake of it. [Apparently rereading is not a thing?] Jane, a senior trade publisher, described this as “disposable fiction” — the kind of book that “you don’t need to put on your shelf”. On the other hand, there are some books that readers want to own, keep, put on their shelf, return to at a later date, perhaps even display in their living room as a signifier, a symbolic token of who they are and the kinds of books they like and value (or would like others to think that they like and value) [finally, some indication of perspective, hopelessly inadequate tho it feels]. These books have a much higher possession value for the reader. For books with a low possession value, the ebook is ideal: once the content has been consumed, the ebook can be deleted — or simply kept in a digitial collection where it takes up no physical space, only a small amount of memory.”

It goes on to talk about how paper books will last forever even if technology changes, and then display value and so forth.

People really tell you so much about themselves when they talk about other people’s behavior. I’m sure I do, too! And I hope everyone is paying a lot of attention, and that what is coming through is the contempt. Because that is definitely what I am trying to communicate here! I am trying to communicate clearly my contempt for All Of This.

I will say this. _Book Wars_ is definitely the kind of book that once I am done with it, I will delete.

In the meantime!

I often describe pbook lovers as “book huffers”, because the smell experience of books is often one of the first / primary things mentioned that ebooks cannot reproduce. Anyone forced to buy and read musty aged pbooks in order to get at the content that is otherwise unavailable (either because it was the 1980s, or because it hasn’t been made available as an ebook yet) has a lot of opinions about smell-o-vision, and they are not positive.

“…they have a set of aesthetic traits — a beautiful cover, a well-designed interior, a sensuous materiality — that constitute the printed book as something more than simply a conveyor of content, that constitute it as an aesthetic object that is value both for its content and for the material form in which that content is conveyed. “So the real question is going to be: which books do you need to own and which ones can you simply delete”, continued Jane, “and the real trick is going to be figuring out the distinction between the disposable books and the ones you want to keep on your shelf.”

Or, you know, you could buy and frame prints of the covers, or buy actual sculptures as art, or maybe have a plant.

Or, if you’re me, you can buy a lot of lego with the newly freed up space.

It’s so weird that this author chose to use Andy Weir and _The Martian_ for the change in how fiction got published in the transition to Our New World of self pub / ebooks. The dates on first self-pub and movie release for _The Martian_ and _Fifty Shades of Grey_ are super comparable, and while the box on _The Martian_ is bigger, the box on the Grey series is bigger (and the budget on the first movie enough lower than box - budget is a bigger number on the Grey series). I doubt anyone who is familiar with _The Martian_ has failed to hear of Grey, and the reverse is _absolutely not the case_. It’s an open question about the name recognition of James vs. Weir.

And when I say “weird”, I mean, relentlessly sexist. The author repeatedly returns to the thesis that ebooks were expected initially to be primarily read by “businessmen [sec] reading business books on their digital devices”.

And the treatment of romance as a category with the largest turnover is dismissive, to say the least. I’ve already included plenty of quotes that display in vivid detail the attitude towards popular fiction (and the total failure to appreciate how common rereading is in popular fiction). What I haven’t necessarily been able to show clearly is how _every_ _single_ _time_ there is an opportunity to choose between a woman author and a man author, or between romance and literally any other genre, this moron makes the wrong choice. But you know, all I really needed to do was turn another page:

“When subscription libraries did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by men reading collections of sermons in their bookrooms, and more by ladies reading gothic novels in their closets.”

Oh, wait, time machine settings wrong there. Let’s try that again.

“When ebooks did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by businessmen reading business books in airport lounges and more by women reading romance novels on their Kindles (most romance readers are women).”

That’s fine. We know what happened to the collections of sermons. In this author’s world, those collections of sermons were read like this:

“Many business and economics books are not the kind of books that you would typically read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience: they are more likely to be books that you would read more slowly and even discontinuously, where you may want to move back and forth in the text in order to remind yourself of the information provided or points made earlier in the text. They are also books that you may want to come back to at a later point, consult again and use more like a reference work than a book that could be quickly read and then discarded. These features would suggest that business and economics books would perform more like self-help books and family and relationship books than fiction, and this is indeed what has happened.”

There’s an _entire_ _market_ in summaries of business books so that people don’t need to read the business book at all. The number of book buyers and readers who consume business and economics books in the manner described is not large enough to inspire hope in a publishing industry that intends to stay large. Also, I’ve read a lot of business and economics books, and generally speaking, I read them in a pretty linear fashion, primarily interrupted by liveblogging hatereading. And if there is one thing that doing that has exposed, it is that people read books by people like Piketty roughly like they read books by Pynchon, which is to say, not past page 35 or 50 or so. Piketty is a gold bug, and you don’t have to read much of Capital in the whatever the fuck to realize that, and it’s a _pretty fucking salient feature_ of PIketty. And yet nowhere does anyone ever talk about that, from which I conclude that everyone would rather display the book and drop the name than actually engage with the ideas in his books.

I am not entirely certain how anyone thinks it makes them look clever to signify with this type of book display that they are the sort of person who displays books without having any basic idea of the contents, but I will note that it makes it super easy to spot them.

Things do improve a bit later: “Self-publishing is the submerged continent that could, if we were ever to know its true extent, put all of our calculations so far in a very different light.” So, you know, that’s a _degree_ of backing away from the hubristic, large trad pub data focus. He even finally acknowledges United States vs Apple (which was conspicuously _NOT_ acknowledged in the adoption curve data):

“When this requirement expired in 2014, all the large trade publishers moved to full agency agreements, which meant that they set the prices of ebooks within agreed bands and retailers were no longer allowed to discount. This meant that new ebooks from the large trade publishers were — especially from 2014 on — typically selling at much higher prices than self-published ebooks.”

Even more: “Indeed, it could be that some of the decline we see in traditional publishers’ ebook sales in certain categories, like romance and mystery, attests not to an overall decline in ebook sales but rather to a revenue flight from traditional publishers to self-publishers, as readers migrate from higher-priced ebooks published by traditional publishers…” He says he’s gonna come back to this; I’m not sure I’ll be there for it.

There is just one helluva story about the person who developed Byliner:

“John was also a heavy reader, but many of the books he bought and stacked up on his nightstand were books that he never read: reading a book was a seven- or eight- or ten-day commitment, and he simply didn’t have the time to read them all.”

No. No. No. John is not a heavy reader. John _thinks_ he is a heavy reader. Maybe the author of this book agrees. John is not a heavy reader. John is a middle-range reader. He’s reading on the order of 50 books a year. A _heavy_ reader is a 1-2 book a day reader.

Come on, people. What is wrong with you. This is your business. Shouldn’t you know it better than this?

*sigh* He just called Laura Hazard Owen Laura Owen, and quoted her saying she “purred”.

I’d better never meet this author in person.

The Atavist Books description has some interesting observations. First, that they could not get book reviewers to look at anything that did not have a print edition. That has been observed by tons of self-pubbed authors over the years, but typically attributed to being authors who have not yet made a name for themselves with trad pub and/or other than lit fic authors. But this happened _with_ lit fic, name authors. Basically, the reason book discovery is so hard for ebooks is because the lit fic review community wouldn’t / wont? Touch it. Interesting! I think those fuckers are uniformly evil anyway, so I don’t really care.

Second, the authors they were approaching were death on ebook first print later for anything. _Really_ interesting! I had not anticipated that.

The interaction between the Byliner story (Very short books for full-length ebook prices! Who wouldn’t want to pay for that.) and the Atavist story is also interesting for this quote, “You’re doing these little books and people think they shouldn’t be paying anything for them.”

I often run into people whose theory of pricing is different than mine (basically: everyone). Mine is simple: the correct price is the price agreed upon by a willing buyer and a willing seller. Sellers usually think that it should be the price they think it should be. Buyers, usually think that it should be the price they think it should be. Since you need both for a transaction, I feel like wherever they meet is The Price. Doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me, however, no one likes it. This quote is a perfect, Seller Price Theory perspective on the problem.

The discussion of book-as-app is interesting, and it is interesting to think about game publishing, app publishing, book publishing ultimately all winding up in similar space, with similar structures. The author thinks that book schedules / review community / wtf is special, but game publishing has parallel structures. I don’t really know which one is more exploitative and chaotic — they both have a lot more people who want to work in them than there are slots, thus pushing salaries down across the board, which can be helpful in terms of cost containment.

Nice, detailed profile of Touch Press / The Elements and subsequent failure to commodify that initial success. If this entire book were like this profile, it wouldn’t be much of a book, but it wouldn’t be irritating.

Nate over at TDR included this in the post formerly known as Morning Coffee, but
now known as Daily Brief:

https://thebookishclothesehorse.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/acknowledging-the-artifact-how-we-privilege-physical-books-and-undermine-reading/

In which the blogger has this to say about themself:

"When you look in our apartment from the sidewalk, you see the bookshelves (and a John Coltrane poster.) There is no TV in the living room…there’s no TV in the apartment. I like what that says to passers-by. Those books, not just owned but possessed by me (and Zac…but the lion’s share of those shelves belongs to me) are as much about me as their owner as they are about their contents and literal use function. Our book collections—lined up, color-coordinated, and Instagrammed when the lighting is right—tell the viewer who we are as people."

Yup. Those books say a lot about you as people. Your summary in the blog really brings it home, in case we missed the point.

This, dear reader, is Someone Who Owns Books. As opposed to a person who actually enjoys reading and does a lot of it. And they are starting to get an inkling that maybe being pretentious might NOT be quite as much fun as actually _doing_ the thing they have fetishized as an identity.

Seriously. Real readers recognize they have a Problem. If you feel like you need to do this:

"I’m not advocating that we forgo this connection to our physical books or stop taking pictures of whatever we are reading laid out next to a latte on a blond wood table. I take that picture a lot. I love that picture."

You probably believe those surveys that position book-a-month people as "heavy readers". And that 50 book challenge thing? It never occurred to you _how fucking hard_ it would be to drive your reading that low.

Nate over at The Digital Reader/Ink, Bits & Pixels points out that Better World Books will sell you some of their used pbooks as individually scanned ebooks instead. Think of it as 1DollarScan tacked on top of BWB.

http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/03/20/better-world-books-will-sell-you-a-used-book-or-a-scanned-copy-for-2-more/

Japanese P-to-E book services pre-dated 1DollarScan, and they had less formally connected AmazonDirect to their service back in 2012.

http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/07/japanese-style-print-to-e-book-scanning-catching-on-in-the-us/

Nakano of 1DollarScan said: "One interesting option we offer in both countries is Amazon Direct. A customer might buy a book on Amazon that isn’t available in an electronic format, and have it delivered directly to us. We scan it and then the customer receives the e-book. This is a good service since many books are not available as e-books, especially older books. The usage for Amazon Direct is really high."

For those with copyright questions, Nakano said earlier in that piece: "We also have a copyright management system on our website for authors and publishers. If publishers do not want us to scan their content, they can register with us. We are open and cooperative, and so far nobody has registered."

I've seen a variety of comments on the Hachette/Amazon ongoing negotiation woes. Obvs, a bunch of people say intemperate things like, "Hachette should quit selling its product on Amazon" or "Amazon should refuse to carry Hachette's products"!

I never took these things very seriously, partly because of the Macmillan buy button thing being so short-lived, but mostly because I've heard of "Refusal to Deal".

Over on Jon Konrath's blog, Lee Child is quoted saying:

"I said I think Amazon overestimates the value of Hachette’s catalog to Amazon. My point was quite clear – Amazon won’t dump Hachette because Amazon’s own internal credo is built on being the everything store. Which dilutes its negotiating power. All negotiations are built on a willingness to walk away. Amazon isn’t willing."

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2014/09/lee-child-responds.html

So this is really interesting. Hachette was part of the settlement. When they work in concert with other large publishers in setting prices, they are exploiting market power in a Not Legal Way. The publishers have been arguing all along that Amazon has market power. Well, here is what the FTC has to say about corporations which have market power and engage in "refusal to deal", which is what we call it when someone refuses to buy from or sell to.

http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/refusal-deal

"But courts have, in some circumstances, found antitrust liability when a firm with market power refused to do business with a competitor. For instance, if the monopolist refuses to sell a product or service to a competitor that it makes available to others, or if the monopolist has done business with the competitor and then stops, the monopolist needs a legitimate business reason for its policies. Courts will continue to develop the law in this area."

These are companies, this is a business relationship that has already run afoul of antitrust law. Jeff Bezos is not a stupid man (ha ha ha -- that's weaponized understatement. In any situation where you disagree with Bezos for business reasons, you're wrong. You might legitimately have a difference of values or politics, but on a business question? Ha ha ha ha ha.). Jeff Bezos does not want the expense or other problems associated with being the company which develops this undeveloped part of antitrust law.

If Hachette is smart, they won't be that company, either.

ETA: Also, Lee Childs is wrong about negotiations being built on a willingness to walk away. They are technically based on BATNA, which is the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Which is exactly the relationship which Amazon and Hachette currently have, and it does not require refusal to deal.

ETAYA: If you think Hachette and Amazon are not competitors you have failed to pay attention.

ETA post comments: Someone has been anonymously posting in response to this post, mostly to argue about my assertion that Hachette and Amazon are not competitors. I've tried to be fair and unscreen comments to respond, but while they are nominally on topic, they are not of a very high quality. When I worked at Amazon, one of the proposed lines of business was for Amazon to start selling reprints of public domain titles (the same kind of publishing which Barnes & Noble engaged in at the time). At the time (and I left in the fall of 1998, so this would have been before that), the idea was nixed, IIRC, largely because it would put Amazon in the position of competing with its suppliers (that is, Amazon as publisher would be in competition with the publishers it bought published works from). The idea that Hachette and Amazon, now that Amazon has well and truly become a publisher, are not competitors simply because THEY ARE ALSO in business as supplier/retailer, does not need to be belabored further. Two companies can have any number of relationships with each other, and when commerce regulators get involved, they look at all of them. If you post comments on this, I'm not unscreening them if they just argue this point further.

ETA Still more: http://lawstreetmedia.com/news/headlines/hachette-win-lawsuit-amazon/

This presents an Amazon as monopsony + Amazon is refusing to deal already argument. The author recognizes that this is weak, because Amazon hasn't entirely cut off Hachette, and courts are picky (my word) about the definition of refusal to deal.

The idea that Amazon would be approaching dangerous territory by cutting off Hachette entirely, but can stay in the clear by maintaining the same terms for Hachette that it offers to all comers, and by encouraging their customers to purchase Hachette products from competitors -- a bunch of people thought that was weird. I just assumed it was ass covering in the event of legal trouble. It's hardly "anti-competitive" if you suggest your customers might enjoy shopping from Barnes & Noble amirite being the theory at play here.

Barnes & Noble _has_ reduced its purchases and presentation of publishers from time to time in the course of business negotiations (Hugh Howey has written about how this affected him), but just like Amazon, they didn't entirely terminate the relationship. Just reduced orders, no end caps, no promotion, etc.

ETA Final: Comments are about to be closed. There was only the one commenter and they became abusive.

I previously blogged about the Hachette Amazon Thing.

http://walkitout.livejournal.com/1129808.html

I asserted: "The group of publishers did not have precisely the same time frame when they could begin to demand that retailers accept the agency model -- Hachette came up first and this is likely to be the cause of the current, ongoing dispute with Amazon."

Over at Publishers Lunch, this idea is debunked (h/t Nate, over at The Digital Reader):

http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2014/06/getting-things-straight-two-wonky-important-hachettesettlement-things-people-get-wrong/

The settlement to which I pointed in my earlier post, http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f286800/286808.pdf, does not mention anything about staggered anything, so I agree that was an error in what I wrote.

However, Michael Cader introduces a new error:

"To review, the court did not approve the settlements with the first three publishers until September 6, 2012 -- so those conditions apply at least until September, 2014. The exact expiration depends on contractual processes under the settlement that have not been confirmed publicly. Based on when each publisher moved to Agency Lite pricing in the marketplace, the working expectation is that Harper will be the first to come out of the restrictions, in early September, following by Hachette and then Simon & Schuster, both in early December. The separate settlements for Macmillan and Penguin Random House specifically indicate those two companies are free of the agency restrictions on December 18, 2014."

In the DOJ settlement to which I link above and in my original piece, the language is unambiguous. "For two years after the _filing_ of the Complaint, Settling Defendants shall not enter into any agreement with any E-book Retailer that restricts, limits, or impedes the E-book Retailer from setting, altering, or reducing the Retail Price of one or more E-books, or from offering price discounts or any other form of promotions to encourage consumers to Purchase one or more E-books."

My emphasis on _filing_ of the Complaint, NOT date of the settlement -- Cader made that mistake when he asserted the two years would run from the approval of the settlement plus two years. He is correct in noting that the exact expiration is subject to the contract between the publisher and the retailer -- we don't know what dates that covered; one would expect the publisher to be smart enough to have it run out right when they could earliest restrict the retailers from controlling the price, but, you know *shrug*.

On the one hand, I'm being picky about someone who noticed an error that I, along with many other people, made (I'm sure Cader has no mortal clue who I am -- he's responding to other coverage). On the other hand, this date error (two years after the settlement vs. two years from the filing of the complaint) does have an impact on his conclusion, which is the whole point of his piece:

"So any idea that HBG is trying to "force" Amazon back to full agency now, which also appears in various articles and blogs, must be wrong. They are not currently permitted to do that under the consent decree."

Ooops. All in all, I'm pretty sure this is a more serious error than thinking the publishers are staggered.

ETA: from the beginning of the Final Judgment As To Defendants Hachette, Harpercollins, and Simon & Schuster, the date the complaint was filed is given as April 11, 2012, so that plus two years yields April 11, 2014.

ETAYA: Oh, actually, there is a staggering on the page before what I quoted. The publishers get to each pick separately the start date on a separate 2 year period and they have a choice.

"For two years, Settling Defendants shall not restrict, limit, or impede an E-Book Retailer's ability to set, alter, or reduce the Retail Price of any E-book or to offer price discounts or any other form of promotions to encourage consumers to purchase one or more E-books, such two year period to run separately for each E-book Retailer, at the option of the Settling Defendant, from either: 1. the termination of an agreement between the Settling Defendant and the E-book Retailer that restricts, limits, or impedes the E-book Retailer's ability to set, alter, or reduce the Retail Price of any E-book or to offer price discounts or any other form of promotions to encourage consumers to Purchase one or more E-books; or 2. the date on which the Settling Defendant notifies the E-book Retailer in writing that the Settling Defendant will not enforce any term(s) in its agreement with the E-book Retailer that restrict, limit, or impede the E-book Retailer from setting, altering, or reducing the Retail Price of one or more E-books, or from offering price discounts or any other form of promotions to encourage consumers to Purchase one or more E-books."

I don't think we can know with certainty when Hachette (or any of the other publishers) sent such a letter, which is presumably what they decided to do. Earlier versions of the Final Judgment started to appear with the filing of the original complaint, and contained the same language (two years, starts from the agreement ending/the letter being sent); it is reasonable to believe that the publishers would have sent this letter not any later than this, because it was pretty clearly going to be Part of the Deal and doing it sooner started the clock sooner.

Again, we don't really _know_ because we don't know what the publishers actually did. Cader's attempt to use this agreement to prove that full agency cannot currently be on the table fails. But he _is_ right about the lack of explicit staggering in this agreement.

For what seemed forever, but was probably less than two years, there was a strain of commentary in newsmedia about how wonderful printed books are to hold in the hand and to smell. After spending a lot of time openly mocking this kind of blog post/article in this blog, I took to calling that particular refrain "book huffing", and the perpetrators "book huffers". I need a new term, however, because I new refrain is popping, at least in my perception. The idea of books as physical decoration, things to look at with desire, affection, etc.

Here is today's instantiation, courtesy Nate Hoffelder over at The Digital Reader

http://johnguillen.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/print-vs-e-book-which-side-are-you-on/

"Because a printed book is a physical object that I can forever admire on my shelf. I can’t admire a file on a smartphone or tablet. I personally have more than 160 printed books and less than 20 on my Kindle." (Actually, I sort of feel like I'm being trolled right at the moment.) Then a picture of some art on the writer's arm is displayed as further evidence of the author's need to commit to the p-form.

Also, I _wish_ I could say with a straight face that I have more than 160 printed books. I mean, I _do_, but it would be a deceptive statement.

R. wants to call this a book fetish, but I don't think that's quite right. Something about the loving gaze directed at the object of one's affection is more appropriate. Fetish sounds too, er, hands on.

ETA: I cannot believe I forgot this. I distracted myself by wondering if I was being trolled with this piece. "The print vs. e-book question had never once been asked prior to the 2000s." I had an hours long argument with a very nice young Seventh Day Adventist man (well, we were young then; it was the early 1990s. We're middle aged now.) who firmly believed that within a very short period of time, everyone would be reading exclusively e-books. I argued that I was basically the only person I knew who had read more than one book all the way through on a computer and it was a miserable experience. If I couldn't tolerate it yet, there was no way The Masses were going to switch (remember how expensive PCs were then? And people think iPads cost so much now!) any time soon. In any event, the question was definitely asked long before the 2000s. Also, people reading books in mobi format on various PDA devices.

www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/02/future-bookstore

I liked this bit the best:

"Digital and hybrid readers should have the option of buying e-books in-store, and budding authors should have access to self-printing book machines. The latter have been slower to take off in Britain, but in America bookstores are finding them to be an important source of revenue."

I'm sure there are at least two bookstores in the USA that find Espresso Book Machines to be an important source of revenue, so the statement is not _strictly speaking_ fictional. Sort of flirting, making eyes at fictional, without being willing to commit. A little playing with the hair, etc.

I had completely forgotten how hilarious articles like this could be.

ETA: I _thought_ I had spotted a big gap in what I had ordered; in the event, it appears to have been exactly one missed children's book. Further edits throughout the post to correct numbers

The subject line is a true statement, however, I wonder what, if any, solace it could provide for a publisher of new books?

In 2012, I bought 36 pbooks. Of that number, 7 were gifts (all bought new), and two were books for my children (this is an embarrassingly low number). One book was bought used for book group and immediately donated to a library thereafter, which intended to include it in the book group bag. I bought 1 audio book, which I am counting as a p for physical, rather than p for paper book. It was a gift. 20 were bought used; 16 were new.

Here is the list of 9 books I bought new for myself and my family over the course of the year (about 5 of them are exclusively for me, 2 are children's books and the history of atlases and the book about gays in Canada were bought as part of an ongoing effort to puzzle out some genealogy questions that my husband and I have):

An annotated bibliography of the sociology of Canadian Mennonites and related groups
Drummer Hoff (children's book)
Urville (book of drawings by an autistic person)
If you give a Mouse a Cookie (collected kids books)
a history of atlases (genealogy and just plain cool)
_Long Term Care for the Elderly_, which was fantastic and
_The Cultural Context of Aging_, which I haven't read yet
Bartlett's quotations
_Persecuting Homosexuals_ (haven't read -- dual interest LGBT and genealogy for the area)

I knew I had cut back on buying books for the kids; I'm a little stunned that I cut back to two. I may need to work on that.

In 2012, I bought 98 ebooks. I was careful not to count games, free books or kindle guides and so forth in this list. Of those, about 13 were bought for someone else who reads books on my kindle. About 5 of them were shorts (short stories or a novella or whatever). Obviously, none of them were bought used.

For reference purposes, over the course of the year, I bought 2 e-ink readers and 1 of the larger kindle fires (I kept one of the e-ink readers for myself; the other two were for other people).

If it gives you solace that I bought one new pbook for every 6ish ebooks I bought, or, 5ish new pbooks for every reading device I bought over the course of the year, then you are a person who is very good at seeing the silver lining.

ETA: In August, I went to a bookstore on Cape Cod. At this bookstore, I bought my children three books. I also bought my nieces a whole bunch of books -- probably a couple dozen, maybe more. None of those books are included in this count. If they had been included in this count, the analysis would have to be modified as follows: MORE new p-books than used p-books overall. 12 new books purchased for me/my family. While the total count of p-books vs. e-books would continue to favor e-books, it would be approximately a 2 pbooks for 3 e-books ratio. While it is possible there were additional book purchases during the course of the year which I have forgotten, it seems unlikely, as I don't even go into bookstores any more, except in unusual cases such as the August purchase of birthday gifts for my nieces while we vacationed together. We also went to a Toys R Us on that trip where I bought them a ton of Calico Critters stuff and assorted other plastic crap. I'm fairly certain I spent more at Toys R Us than at the bookstore and other charges associated with the trip completely swamped those shopping expeditions.

You may consider this a response to this:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323874204578219563353697002.html

Or not, as pleases you.

Appendix for the excessively curious: so what were those 20 used books?

In December, I paid over $250 for a copy of Hiebert's volume about CGCM (Holdeman), and $24 for the thin and largely useless Penner history of the CGCM.

In November, I bought a copy of _Houseworks_ used. While it was only $6, it was probably still a waste of money, as the website is better.

In October, I bought a book written by the wife of a former coworker of my husband (I think former -- a little unclear on that) about advice given to poor families in the Victorian and Edwardian years. The (distant) personal connection in conjunction with this being an area of interest for me (swear!) overcame my ongoing reluctance to buy things published by Palgrave Macmillan. While I feel guilty that the author did not receive money from this, I don't feel bad about stiffing Macmillan -- and I enjoy giving Midtown Scholar money. I also bought GTD used for $8, which was absolutely not a waste of money, even tho I don't actually do GTD and could have got it from the library.

In September, I was in the throes of my divorce project (collecting the decrees and whatever else I could find for my maternal grandmother and my father's maternal grandfather -- she had three and he had two divorces so it seemed interesting). I bought Riley's Divorce in America (which I had owned in the past but either loaned and lost or sold), _Living in Sin_ and _Putting Asunder_. I had attempted to avoid paying almost $70 for _Putting Asunder_, but had to return it to the library because of a request so I broke down and bought my own copy. I also bought some scholarly thing about moral panics (your guess is as good as mine) and _Escape from Hunger_, which took a major turn for the worse halfway through.

In August, I bought the Zippy memoir, read it for book group and donated it at the end of the discussion.

In July, I bought no physical books.

In June, I bought the 3rd edition, second printing of Kanner's Child Psychiatry, and a copy of Kenneth Davis' problematic but worth reading _Two Bit Culture_.

In May, I bought no physical books.

In April, all the books I bought were new and for other people.

In March, I bought a book about 7-11 in Japan, _Frisians to America_, _Drowned Landscape_, _Atlas Maior_ and a book about Frisian linguistics. You can sort of see a trend there, with the exception of the 7-11 books, which was really worthwhile altho a bit dated.

In February, I bought a genealogy of Delps in America for over $50 that proved not particularly relevant to the Delps I was researching.

In January, I bought a copy of _Apart and Together_, which is about Mennonites.

[An earlier version of this post miscounted how many I had described and left out GTD.]