OT - End of an era Borders Closes

[Schanilec]

Damn!!! Got caught on that one. Jeez, we even did the electrical design.
 
What Town does live? Belgrade, Manhatten?
 
Also Bozeman doesn't have an airport. That is located in Belgrade.
 
Though it has five gates. We only have two. Of which only one is ever used since only five flights come in per day. Yup every now and then in fly over counrty we manage to shoot one down for a forced landing.[:D]

[darbycmcd]

bullwinkle, you are right that the marginals on mass production are better, but that is offset by the contracts smaller booksellers must accept. they still have to front money for inventory, which is a larger cost than the lost marginal revenue on smaller print run, even considering labor (which is not that great).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_Book_Machine

is a possible machine. the economics of it are actually very good from a small bookstore perspective, IF the electronics rights issues can be worked out.

but i totally agree, as an avid kindle user, that ebooks are the way to go.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Schanilec

Damn!!! Got caught on that one. Jeez, we even did the electrical design.

What Town does live? Belgrade, Manhatten?

Also Bozeman doesn't have an airport. That is located in Belgrade.

Though it has five gates. We only have two. Of which only one is ever used since only five flights come in per day. Yup every now and then in fly over counrty we manage to shoot one down for a forced landing.[:D]

Bozeman/Belgrade only has an airport because of Big Sky skiing, more or less. Grow yourselves an 11,000 ft. mountain and those three gates will grow in overnight!

[Mynok]

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

ORIGINAL: Schanilec

Mr. Moose,

Oops on my last post. The telegraph went array.[;)] One good thing on being behind the times...No Olive Garden, amongst others.

BTW: What was in Bozeman. I have friends over there. That is usually where I go for vacation. Did you guys manage to go to Chico Hot Springs. We always make it a point to spent a night or two there. It's a great place. No telephones or televisions in any of the rooms. Gets me to thinking that I'm due for another trip out there.

Yeah, but you probably have a Space Aliens. Fine dining!

My dad lives west of Bozeman in a town nobody ever heard of, so I usually say Bozeman. We went to Butte for the day, but mostly hung around the ranchette fixing fences and playing with the animals. Also, eating steak. A . . . lot . . . of . . . steak.

Which one? Half my ancestors are buried in Manhattan.

[Canoerebel]

I'd be surprised if there isn't always a place for "real" books.  A certain percentage of the population puts a premium on honest-to-goodness print publications, so you'll always find them - newspapers, magazines and books.
 
It might be the same thing with games.  They've gone predominantly electronic, but companies still sell alot of the old-fashioned kind - from Monopoly to Trivail Pursuit to Scruples.
 
The "old-fashioned" might become a niche market, but I think it will be a sizeable niche.  I'll be one of the people populating the niche.  I still read all three the old-fashioned way and will do so as long as they are available.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: darbymcd

bullwinkle, you are right that the marginals on mass production are better, but that is offset by the contracts smaller booksellers must accept. they still have to front money for inventory, which is a larger cost than the lost marginal revenue on smaller print run, even considering labor (which is not that great).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_Book_Machine

is a possible machine. the economics of it are actually very good from a small bookstore perspective, IF the electronics rights issues can be worked out.

but i totally agree, as an avid kindle user, that ebooks are the way to go.

Interesting. I also looked at the external link with the video of the machine.

However, I still find myself thinking of the last very high-tech, flexible, long-lasting buggy whips. Despite the high initial capital outlay (($90,000+ before a printer), maintenance concerns, training costs, the need to have in-store labor sufficient to man the register and sales floor plus go into a back room to run this machine, I still ask myself "why?" From a consumer perspective I mean. It adds an unnecessary margin to the channel. It requires a trip to a store. It requires a store, but one where I still can't see, touch, or flip through the book until I've bought it. From the consumer perspective, why not just order from Lightning Source from home, on-line, in jammies, and get the book delivered to the front door? (And in my state, with no sales tax included?)

This device also requires major publishers to use PDF formats (I don't know if they do or not now), and to trust local bookstores to honestly report royalties. As you say, the digital rights controls would need to be ironclad.

I was very involved in on-line debates about e-books in the late 90s, when I was a believer and authors I conversed with were pretty much universally laughing at the idea. Back then it was the coming Microsoft Reader software suite, to be used on a laptop, with yes, another proprietary format. It never caught on. Everybody still being tied to 28.8 baud modems at home didn't help. Back then good laptops were $4000 or so, fragile, and heavy. The Kindle broke the cost wall, and the Kindle with WiFi hit the sweet spot. I took my book down from $8.00 on the MS Reader platform to $.99 on Kindle because I wanted a guy sitting at the gate waiting for his flight to be able to get my book for less than an airport candy bar. That's the sweet spot. (Pun intended.)

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

I'd be surprised if there isn't always a place for "real" books.  A certain percentage of the population puts a premium on honest-to-goodness print publications, so you'll always find them - newspapers, magazines and books.

It might be the same thing with games.  They've gone predominantly electronic, but companies still sell alot of the old-fashioned kind - from Monopoly to Trivail Pursuit to Scruples.

The "old-fashioned" might become a niche market, but I think it will be a sizeable niche.  I'll be one of the people populating the niche.  I still read all three the old-fashioned way and will do so as long as they are available.

After Guttenberg some fossils read the old-fashioned monk-made vellum, until they died off. (Monks and fossils both.) There will be specialized "coffee table" books for the rest of our lives, as well as some long-run titles where the plates are fuly amortized and there's a market. But increasingly the price difference between e-books and paper will widen, libraries will shift over to e-books, schools to e-textbooks (happening now), and there will be a generation with no patience for waiting more than seconds to have a book in front of themselves. I predict there will still be paper books, but not necessarily a lot of bookstores. The economics are just terrible versus bandwidth.

A really good offshoot of the coming book world is that authors, who make the whole machine go, will finally get out from under techinical chains and reap a higher percentage of the retail dollar for their efforts. A new structure for segregating the wheat from the chaff will be needed once NYC editors aren't the gatekeepers, but I think we'll manage.

[Sredni]

I like owning books, so I hope the final demise of the printed word comes after my passing heh. I like browsing through shelves, I'm unable to pass by a bookstore without going in to look around. I find browsing online ebooks to be a morass of identical uninformative print. The e-book stores all seem like the front area of a book store where you're bombarded endlessly with twilight, harry potter, and john grisham novels. Good luck trying to work your way to your own area's of interest.

I've been tempted of late to buy some sort of e-reader, but I think I'll wait till something with a viewable screen the size of a magazine at least comes out. All the ones I've seen around like the kindle are barely paperback sized.

A better interface would be nice too. I want to be able to swipe to turn pages, crinkle the corners to bookmark, and be able to organize my digital bookshelves however I want in an easy and clear manner. All the e-readers I've seen were clunky and poorly thought out.

And as someone already mentioned I wont be bothering if there's anything at all proprietary about the e-books. I still own books I bought as a child, I had better be able to still use my e-books 40 years from now.

I suppose the ipad would let me do most of that, but I'll confess I'm not really prepared to pay 800 dollars for an e-pad. Knock the 500 dollars the apple logo adds to that and I might think about it.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Sredni

I've been tempted of late to buy some sort of e-reader, but I think I'll wait till something with a viewable screen the size of a magazine at least comes out. All the ones I've seen around like the kindle are barely paperback sized.

A better interface would be nice too. I want to be able to swipe to turn pages, crinkle the corners to bookmark, and be able to organize my digital bookshelves however I want in an easy and clear manner. All the e-readers I've seen were clunky and poorly thought out.

And as someone already mentioned I wont be bothering if there's anything at all proprietary about the e-books. I still own books I bought as a child, I had better be able to still use my e-books 40 years from now.

I suppose the ipad would let me do most of that, but I'll confess I'm not really prepared to pay 800 dollars for an e-pad. Knock the 500 dollars the apple logo adds to that and I might think about it.

An iPad2 with 16gigs is $499.99 at BestBuy. Android competition will knock that down this Christmas, and I expect strong Android-based tablets to be $299 in 24 months.

The iPad2 is sweet though. We got one to play with all summer through a school grant, and it's very cool. Haven't plumbed the App Store at all, and I don't own an iPhone to know what's there, but even with just the browser and some free apps (Angry Birds!!!!!), it's very useful. On the trip I read my local MN paper every day, even in hotels. We used GoogleMaps a few times. We found a motel while in transit and made a reservation. As I said, boo coo free public domain novels available (and the iPad lets you flip pages and adjust font sizes.) It has excellent battery life and with a case is pretty robust on the road. My stepdaughter is about to drop her netbook for her road warrior life and go to a pad.

If you can play with one without buying I'd say give it a try. It's very different than a laptop experience.

Ours is playing Pandora on-line radio right now in the other room. Some kind of 1920s jazz.

[CV 2]

Actually, the beginning of the end of Boarders began when they were bought out by K Mart back in the early 90s.

I know Im in the minority on this, but I would rarely if ever buy a book on line. If I want a book, I want it now. I also want to be able to leaf through it to make sure it is really what I want.

[Mynok]

I love the ebooks for reference materials and the cheap, read-once-and-pitch kind of stuff that's great for airplane trips. But I also have a nice leatherbound collection of the classics that they will pry from my cold dead hands.

[ilovestrategy]

Bullwinkle58, I have to ask, where are the first 57 Bullwinkles? [:D]

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: ilovestrategy

Bullwinkle58, I have to ask, where are the first 57 Bullwinkles? [:D]

Shallow graves outside Frostbite Falls.

Take the guns, leave the lutefisk.

[crsutton]

I am not a technophobe by any means. I am the first person I knew that had an email address. (Compuserve anyone?) But I still want to get up in the morning and read the paper at the table while ignoring my wife's conversation. And in the evening after doing my AE turn, I want a real book in my hand. I don't think that will ever change for me. I will get a pad soon and use it as a reader perhaps when traveling, but that is about it.

[Nikademus]

ORIGINAL: Mynok


I love the ebooks for reference materials and the cheap, read-once-and-pitch kind of stuff that's great for airplane trips. But I also have a nice leatherbound collection of the classics that they will pry from my cold dead hands.

There will always be a niche market for classic publications, even if they get a parraell eFormat. A friend of mine just recently bought an entire 14 book original land of Oz collection printed in the early 1900's from a local used book store here in Seattle. She was so exstatic it was infectious. While i'm not a fan of the works, i appreciated the antiquity of said books.....they were in remarkably good condition for being so old. No highlighters for these! [:D]

[Nikademus]

ORIGINAL: CaptDave

I'm a book lover and always will be, but I'm not particularly saddened about Borders going away.  While the main reason for their liquidation is their failure to adapt their business model to accommodate electronic publishing, a not-insignificant part is also their model of trying to be the low-price leader in books.  That meant I couldn't find durable, high-quality (physical, not content) non-fiction books.  Their World War II selections, for example, were 97-98% soft cover of some sort, and those just don't hold up over time.

I might be more interested in electronic publications when (1) the readers can accommodate, in a user-friendly manner, multiple simultaneous bookmarks for easy jumping back and forth, and (2) the proprietary formats go away.  Books can be read by any standard-issue eyeball, but those published specifically for Kindle can't be read on Nook and vice versa.  Note to manufcaturers: I don't do "proprietary" anything unless I absolutely have no choice.

The Kindle does a pretty good job in regards notes, highlights and bookmarks. The DX version is large enough to substitute for most Hardcover books and is also big enough for it's QWERTY style keyboard to be used quickly for said note taking. There are still some bugs of course. For some reason, "Shattered Sword"'s conversion for example causes problems when browsing your self made notes.......24 pages of scrolling through them causes the device to freeze and reboot. Amazon had to open a ticket for me on that. Initially we thought it was a fault in the device itself but the problem is specific only to this downloaded book. Interesting.

I'd like to see improvements in parsing through one's notes in future Kindle firmware releases but other than that i've been happy with it. (SS alone had something like 190 pages of "notes and highlights" i'd taken. The ability to scroll/parse through these on seperate "e-pages" cuts down on the need to write as many actual notes vs. highlights as the summary screen makes it pretty clear the reason behind said highlight.

The improved e-Ink screen is a beauty. No glare as with LCD devices like iPad, Nook or Android. Easy on the eyes. I have no need for "color" as i don't do magazines and most war era books have only BW photos anyway. The Kindle displays photos very well. With this device i can focus my "book" collecting on the larger technical references that arn't available in Kindle format anyway.

Biggest problem now is getting the publishers to convert older works into eFormat.

[crsutton]

Actually, the kindle or pad is perfect for college text books. Especially for underlining highlighting and note taking. I pretty much destroyed any book that I ever had with my highlighter. But I wonder if they will do it as college texts books are such a racket for generating revenue.

[Nikademus]

as a recent college student....i can hardily agree....both from the viewpoint of my wallet as well as that of my lower back (those textbooks are BIG and HEAVY) [:D]

[Sredni]

I wonder how the resale of e-books works. A lot of textbooks get resold the next year but I don't really see any infrastructure in place to do so with e-books. Then again it's been years since I was in a university, the kids these days might have e-book sales websites or something.

[Nikademus]

they could use a system similar to what my local library is now doing, whereby you can "check out" books on your eReader like a Kindle. You could 'rent' the needed textbook for a fee then delete it when your done. More likely they'll do it the old fashioned way....you buy it....you own it......and wait for the next revision to come out.