units<\/em> sold was even higher.<\/p>\nAnd yet, every online poll I’ve seen–such as the one currently up on CNN.com, but which I can’t link to directly–shows that respondents to said polls prefer hardcopy books by a huge margin. (At the time of this writing, 80% of people responding to the CNN poll favor hardcopy books.) And that’s an online poll, where we can expect the numbers to be weighted in favor<\/em> of e-books.<\/p>\nThis means a lot of things. It suggests or implies a lot more. And lots of it can be argued. But what it says to me<\/em> is this:<\/p>\nThe people who prefer hardcopy books aren’t buying them<\/em>.<\/p>\nIf that’s you–if you prefer hardcopy books, but haven’t been buying books lately–you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself. I don’t want to hear about having to decide where to spend your entertainment dollars, or how you feel about "modern fiction" (which is a ludicrously large brush to tar an entire medium with). The bottom line is, if you’re not buying books, then your book-buying preferences don’t matter<\/em>. Book publishers have zero reason to care about the opinions of people who aren’t buying books; they’re going to tailor their products to the market that actually, y’know, earns a profit. You want your voice heard? You don’t want to see paper books replaced entirely by e-books? That’s a valid opinion to hold, and certainly worth real discussion on both sides.<\/p>\nBut you only get to voice that opinion, in any way that matters, by putting your money where your mouth is. Answering polls? Ain’t gonna carry a single breath of weight with the publishers.<\/p>\n
Want "real" books? Buy "real" books.<\/em> Regularly. Period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not a conclusion to the discussion, mind you. Just a conclusion I’ve come to. For the first two months of this year, for the first time, e-book sales figures equaled or exceeded those of hardcopy books. And of course, since e-books often run cheaper than hardcopies, that suggests that the number of units sold was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-old-news","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mouseferatu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}