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That’s a question that elicits, from most trade publishers and textbook publishers, a simple, monosyllabic, unambiguous, negative response. But this isn’t true of all book publishers. At Frankfurt Book Fair this month we asked many of the publishers we met with for their thoughts on DRM-free, and a surprising number were happy with the idea. We already offer thousands of ebooks from global publishers without DRM. Their ebooks are sold in simple, un-encrypted epub or PDF formats. Our un-encrypted ebooks are mostly in specific subject categories, like: Scholarly Scientific, Technical, Medical Computing Science fiction Fantasy DRM-free can be a force for good There are undoubted benefits for readers if you decide to set your ebooks free. And for some publishers these benefits outweigh the perceived risks of letting your ebooks out there. Here are some of the benefits… Accessibility There’s something just wrong about the difficulties that a sight-impaired reader has to endure in the 21st Century to get accessible reading materials.  Most popular ebook platforms do not support screen-readers or braille converters.  A very simple solution to this would be to release your titles in PDF, which is much more functional and suited to those applications. Simplicity Ebooks are made more complicated when they’re wrapped in DRM. We’re all familiar with downloading PDFs. It’s easy. My 92 year old uncle routinely does that. His laptop is ready and able to receive and open and print PDFs. But if you buy an encrypted PDF or epub: You have to create, and remember, account credentials with one more company (the ebook seller) You must download, install, and get familiar with one more app, in order to unlock and read your book. But with an un-encrypted ebook, you can open a PDF with the same program you normally use for this. And epubs can easily be read in your browser. Microsoft Edge does this natively, and there are simple plugins for other browsers. Encrypted ebooks are more prone to technical issues. Usability: “Why can’t I print this?” There’s a steady trickle of frustration coming from people who discover, often after they’ve bought an ebook, that there’s a limit to – or even complete prohibition on – printing and copying. This is primarily an issue for professional or educational users who quite reasonably need to quote material from a book. And there are still millions of readers who want to print a section of a technical manual, and so forth. These restrictions cause consternation among law-abiding users who know full well that there’s nothing technical that prevents them doing what they want. The systems we use, including Adobe Digital Editions, do allow publishers to calibrate permitted amounts of printing and copying, but the tendency is for publishers to set unfriendly limits. Autonomy Many users just prefer to “own” the book file. They prefer to actually see the file there in their DropBox or Windows explorer. Never mind that we, their bookseller, hold an archive copy to re-download anytime they need to. This might be a fading attitude; we’re increasingly happy to entrust our photos, music, documents to cloud storage and streaming services. But for now it’s a real concern for many customers. A level playing field If your company is, heaven forbid, in an asymmetrical power relationship with a virtual monopoly vendor, think about this. “I can’t open the ebooks I buy from eBooks.com on my [monopoly device], so I’ve gone back to [monopoly].” We hear it all the time. Proprietary platforms cause this problem. Because un-encrypted ebooks can be read on all popular platforms, including monopoly platforms, they neutralise unhealthy consumer lock-in. If you choose to publish your ebooks without DRM, or just with watermarks, then the door to that walled garden opens, and it’s possible for innovative ebook vendors to sell your titles to users who can then read them on any platform, any reader device. Proprietary ebook platforms that apply DRM become, of necessity, walled gardens. Everything you buy from that vendor works inside their garden, but that garden door stays locked. Who would even think of doing this? Once a user has an un-encrypted epub or PDF on their computer, there is little to stop them forwarding it to a friend, or worse. Given the possibility of re-distribution, there seem to be two drivers for publishers choosing to dispense with DRM: Scholarly or STM ebooks For many academic and professional publishers he bulk of their revenue comes from sales to academic libraries. They sell very little to individual users. This is partly because most of the scholars and professionals who use their ebooks have access to those titles via an institutional library anyway. Therefore, some publishers will sell their ebooks to retail customers without DRM, because a simple PDF is universally accepted and easy to manage. Computing, Science Fiction & Fantasy We find that publishers will often distribute computing and SciFi titles un-encrypted. This is only a hunch, but their reasoning might be that these users are typically very technically savvy, and have no difficulty in unlocking encrypted files anyway. So they might as well make life a bit easier for those users and keep them on-side. Social DRM – a useful compromise? There is a sort of middle-ground here called soft, or social, DRM. We can deliver PDFs or EPUBs to our customers that aren’t encrypted, but they carry inside their pages a “watermark” that identifies the individual who bought it. Typically that would be the user’s first and last names and email address. Many publishers prefer social DRM because it makes life simple for their readers, but also tends to make a user think twice about distributing an ebook widely. Can we sell a sub-set of our output without DRM? Yes, for sure. You can tag specific titles in your metadata feed as “DRM-free” and our system will comply. Our helpful production team will show you how. Here’s how to do it Rest assured that we won’t change anything without your explicit written instructions. It’s not for everyone but, if you’d like to sell your ebook titles on eBooks.com unencrypted, your readers will love you for it. If you’d like us to sell all of your titles DRM-free Just tell us in writing. An email message sent to [email protected] will do the trick. We’ll flip a master switch and make all your output DRM-free. To make a sub-set of your titles DRM-free Step 1.   Let us know by email that you want to sell some of your titles without DRM. By default all publisher accounts are locked down for DRM. So, in addition to the metadata snippet mentioned below, you need to actually write in and we’ll turn a switch on our end to enable the change. Write to [email protected]. Step 2:   Include one of the following entries in the ONIX product record for each title that should be DRM-free: <b277>DRM-Free</b277> or <b213>DRM-Free</b213> Final thoughts on DRM The clear advantage with DRM is that it effectively impedes piracy and file-sharing. That’s why all serious trade publishers are adamant that they won’t let any ebook “out there” without DRM. However some academic and scientific publishers are quite relaxed about it, because the bulk of their sales have always been to institutional libraries (not individuals), and those libraries will keep buying specialist works no matter how many un-encrypted files are floating around. It’s true that users really appreciate receiving a file (PDF, epub) that just opens when they click on it. DRM irritates pretty much everyone. You might consider how one of your authors would feel if a friend said, “My mate sent me a PDF of that book you wrote. Great book.” If the author is an academic, they might be pleased. But an aspiring novelist starving in a garret might feel differently. Here are some common arguments against DRM: There are tools available that enable even a novice to strip the DRM off an encrypted ebook, so what’s the point? Anyone who hunts down a pirated version of a book was never going to pay for it anyway, so it’s not really lost income. If there are thousands of free copies of your book in circulation, think of it as free publicity, akin to word-of-mouth. These arguments have been elaborated at length in the blogosphere, but they’re just  hypotheses. Or assertions, really. The only hard evidence we have is what happened to the music industry when the internet enabled everyone to rip CDs and share music files willy-nilly; and what happened to the book industry when they didn’t let that happen to books. Here’s why the idea of distributing ebooks without DRM appalls many publishers So it comes down to a judgment about risk. Whichever way you choose, just let us know and we’ll set it up.

Unlocking your ebooks can deliver unexpected benefits In 2019 we asked a major STM publisher if we might sell their ebooks DRM-free from eBooks.com. They were already selling unencrypted (watermarked) ebooks from their own website direct to consumers, so clearly they had a reasonable appetite for this. The results were remarkable. In 2018 (the last full year when we sold their ebooks with encryption) this publisher accounted for 1.35% of our total sales. In the year to June 2022, they represent 2.09% of our sales. That’s a 54% increase So I’m just curious – what’s your problem with selling DRM-free? Why would you forego an opportunity to nudge your sales up by a meaningful percentage, effortlessly? Certainly DRM-free isn’t for every publisher. Core textbooks and mass market fiction come to mind as categories that might be best be protected. But there’s a huge array of titles that are just better if they’re not wrapped in proprietary DRM. A researcher, scientist, academic — anyone who wants to really use your ebook — would much prefer to be able to print whatever, copy-paste stuff. And it’s so much simpler for the consumer. No software to install. They just download your PDF or EPUB and start reading — even on their Kindle. You have to wonder what happened to all those sales that we missed, before going DRM-free with this publisher. Did the user come to eBooks.com, see that the book is DRM’d, and then go off to the worst place imaginable, where they can get it free of charge and DRM free? I fear that’s what was going on. Is this where those (otherwise decent) people who can’t abide DRM are going for your ebooks: Authors, Publishers & Booksellers Face Their Dark Nemesis 22 September 2022 (FinTech Zoom) Here’s why you should be freaked out about ebook piracy. A nice, glowing description of how people can just download any of 4 million DRM-free ebooks at no cost. Z-Library is a free, elegant, easy interface. It’s highly likely that much, if not all, of your list is available via this site. If you’d like to give it a try, just let us know and we’ll be glad to set up your titles as DRM-free. If you change your mind later, it just needs a nod from you and we’ll revert. If you’d prefer, we can add “social DRM” which involves imprinting a watermark onto random pages through the book. Just let us know.

Managing territorial sales restrictions is a complex, important business. Trade publishers in particular are very concerned that vendors like eBooks.com adhere strictly to the rules they set. Matthew Dunlop, who is currently leading a complete re-build of the eBooks.com website, took time out to optimise some aspects of our file ingestion system and emerged with these gems: Of the 1.4 million titles in our database, 54 per cent are allowed to be sold anywhere in the world. Of the remaining 46 per cent, there are only 11,495 permutations of territorial sales rights. This last item is interesting because, even though 11,495 seems like a big number, it’s tiny compared with the possible permutations. The possible permutations are a nine with about 20 digits after it. In their metadata for any given ebook, a publisher can specify all or some of the 252 countries the system recognises. The combinations and permutations turn out to be gigantic. But in fact our publishers thoughtfully limit themselves to this minuscule set of territorial rights permutations. For which moderation we are very grateful.

A recent report from the Association of American Publishers signalled that the apparently inexorable growth in ebook sales has stalled. Having captured 24 per cent of the book market, the digital juggernaut ran out of puff and stopped. To the relief of booksellers and bibliophiles everywhere, it looks as if ebooks are going to take their place as just another format, alongside audio-books, leaving plenty of room for printed books. Almost from the moment ebook sales took off, the format recorded triple-digit annual growth rates in the United States. But last year, growth slowed to just 45 per cent. And just this month [Nov 2013], it was reported that ebook sales in June were similar to sales for the same period in 2012: Looking very much like an abrupt halt. Sales of ebook reader devices are declining. And there is evidence that some early adopters are putting their Kindle in the bottom drawer and returning to print. For those of us who have enjoyed a lifetime of visual, tactile and olfactory pleasure from the printed page, any sign that printed books are going to survive this digital tsunami is welcome. But these trends and headlines bear some scrutiny. There will always be a market for printed books, just as there is still a market for vinyl records and fountain pens Bullied onto the bandwagon First, what caused this slowdown in ebook adoption? The short answer is that the market for ebooks — the present-day market — is saturated. It should have been clear to us from the outset that there is a limit to the number of people who would actually want an ebook. For now, the “natural” market for ebooks includes a lot of early-adopter enthusiasts, extreme users (who read a book or two per week), travellers, professionals and scholars. It is likely that these natural users will continue to prefer digital, for obvious reasons. But there is another group of users who could be described as normal people who were bullied into getting onto the ebook bandwagon by friends, family and the media. There are countless thousands of Kindles, Nooks and Kobos in the hands of grandmothers and uncles who received them as well-meaning gifts. Millions of us succumbed to brute force marketing campaigns by booksellers with everything to lose. Having tried the ebook experience, some are now drifting back to print. The novelty just wore off. Many of us are buying both print and digital. If you see an interesting book in your local bookshop, you buy it. If you search for a book online, you download it. It is not a zero sum game, but it goes some way to explaining the slowdown in ebook market growth. Better than paper Notwithstanding this current hiatus, there are three key drivers that determine the destiny of any market: Innovation, price and demography. What happens next with ebooks will be a function of these three things. By “innovation”, I don’t mean “enhanced ebooks”. A lot of heat is being generated these days about adding cool things to books to make them more appealing. Video and audio are tops. Links to external resources, functional mathematical formulae, in-book collaboration … There is probably value in all that, but the more of it there is, the less clear it is that the object you are enhancing is still a book. The innovation I look forward to is not so much about added functionality as about elegant simplicity. Today’s ebooks are still a slightly awkward simulacrum of a print book. You cannot quickly flip through an ebook, back and forth, the way you can with paper. Even turning pages, after all the practice I have had, is still a bit clumsy. Writing margin notes requires a keyboard of some kind. The list is long. But with time, and through the incremental efforts of thousands of designers and developers, all these things will resolve. There will come a time, quietly, when the experience of reading and managing your ebooks will actually surpass that of paper. The second driver of ebook adoption is demographic. While the natural market for ebooks sits at about 24 per cent of the total book market today, the relentless march of generations will have its way. My children and their friends already get 85 per cent of their news and information online. My grandchildren are digital natives. There is no doubt that, by the time they enter consumer mainstream, they will prefer digital over paper. And that time is not far off. Price: the point of collapse Finally, price. The low-price channel always wins. The massive downward price pressure in recent years has been a boon for consumers. More importantly, all that pressure simply accelerated a process that was inevitable. It is true that the capital costs incurred by publishers and booksellers in re-tooling for the digital age are considerable. But, having built the infrastructure, the unit cost of production per ebook sold is tumbling, and ebooks have the capacity to just keep getting cheaper in coming years. Consumer expectations and the natural competition between publishers will continue to drive ebook prices lower. The widening price gap between ebook and print editions, combined with improved usability and a generational growth in demand for digital books, will precipitate a moment of collapse for printed books. Improvements in book production and distribution services may delay things, but there will come a point where ever-smaller print runs will push the unit price of printed books upwards, beyond tolerance. Something will break. It will no longer be economic for publishers to ship books or for booksellers to pay rent. When it happens it will happen quickly — over a year or two. There will always be a market for printed books, just as there is still a market for vinyl records and fountain pens. But the real future, a golden future, for books and reading is digital. All things considered, I expect the print book market to collapse on Sept 12, 2020. [This is a slightly edited version of a presentation to the International Summit of the Book, Singapore, August 2013.]

Nick Earls, The University of Queensland While just a few years ago, headlines predicted eBook supremacy and the demise of the paper book, that’s now reversed. They’re now saying the Kindle is clunky and unhip and paper books are cool and selling well as eBook sales crash. But are today’s claims any more accurate than those of 2012? The latest round of headlines was triggered by UK Publishers’ Association figures noting a fall in consumer eBook sales of 17% in 2016, while physical book sales rose 8%. This statistic seems straightforward enough on the surface, but it pays to go deeper. Mainstream media have long been in the habit of relying on figures from publishers’ associations, retailers’ groups and Nielsen data, but the industry has changed. While these measures are accurate, they are only accurate in terms of what they measure, and they represent far less of the industry than they once did. They are no longer a proxy for the industry. A recent history of eBooks Amazon’s Kindle was launched in November 2007. Barnes & Noble followed with their Nook in October 2009 and Kobo with their eReader in May 2010. Apple’s launch of the iPad in January 2010, meanwhile, introduced a non-specialist device that gave a pleasing eReading experience. US eBook sales rose 1260% between 2008 and 2010. By early 2011, US advisory group Gartner reported that industry researchers were predicting a 70% annual growth rate for eReader sales globally. In February that year, the REDgroup, the parent company of Angus&Robertson and Borders in Australia – chains responsible for 20% of the country’s book sales – went into receivership. Retailers across the industry in Australia were noticing a downturn. After 5% growth in 2009, Australian book sales contracted slightly in 2010, then dramatically in 2011, with falls of 13% in volume and 18% in value, and significant falls continuing into 2012. In January 2011, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more eBooks than paperbacks. According to Nielsen figures, US eBook sales went from US$69m in 2010 to US$165m in 2011, a 139% increase. They increased a further 30% in 2012 and 13% in 2013. Nielsen figures, though, only record sales of books with ISBNs, something many independently published eBooks do not have. Despite not counting many eBooks, Nielsen still recorded sales as increasing, albeit probably at diminishing growth rates each year. In January 2011, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more eBooks than paperbacks.Artem Evdokimov/shutterstock With increases in both average smartphone screen size and smartphone use, the 2014 to 2015 period marked another shift – the phone was becoming a significant reading tool. According to US Nielsen surveys, while the percentage of the eReading population reading primarily on tablets had increased from 30% in 2012 to 41% in 2015, the number of eBook buyers who used their phones to read at least some of the time increased from 24% to 54% in the same period. Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, stated in 2015 that,“The future of digital reading is on the phone. It’s going to be on the phone and it’s going to be on paper”. Peak eBook? EBook sales in the US, though, appeared to plateau at 2013 levels, according to Association of American Publishers figures, and then dipped early in 2015. In the UK, the Publishers’ Association reported digital sales for the year 2015 falling slightly and print sales growing minimally. “Readers take a pleasure in a physical book that does not translate well on to digital,” the Publishers’ Association stated, and declarations of “peak eBook” became commonplace. Those figures, though, do not tell the whole story. As Simon Jenkins admitted in The Guardian last year when declaring that peak digital was at hand, the adult colouring book fad made a contribution to print sales in 2015. Unlike fiction blockbusters, sales of colouring books are almost entirely in print format. In the case of the UK market, the £20.3 million generated by adult colouring books in 2015 matched the growth in the overall print market. Without it, the pattern of zero or negative growth seen in the preceding seven years would have continued. In the US, Nielsen reported that sales of adult colouring books surged from one million units in 2014 to 12 million in 2015. Australia was also part of the adult-colouring craze. Nielsen BookScan’s November 2015 Australian top 20 featured eight colouring books, each one of them outselling the most successful Australian novel. The adult colouring book fad was a huge boon to print sales in 2015.shutterstock Other factors were at work as well. Following the renegotiation of pricing between major American publishers and Amazon, eBook prices rose in the US Kindle Store in late 2014 and 2015. Until then, Amazon had pushed publishers to keep prices no greater than $9.99, and buyers had become conditioned to paying less than $10 for eBooks. Publishers that increased prices above that mark subsequently recorded a fall in eBook receipts, and some identified higher prices as a factor. According to journalist Jeffery Trachtenberg, publishers viewed this pricing change as involving “some sacrifice, but they felt it was worth it to keep Amazon in check”. The specific books published from one year to the next had an impact too. Some publishers noted that 2015 saw fewer “hot” titles. With nothing to match Frozen and the Divergent series, children’s and young-adult eBook sales fell 45.5% in 2015 in the US. eReading growth not counted While the Association of American Publishers’s figures are based on a survey of 1200 publishers and often seen as authoritative, the Amazon Kindle Store stocks many independently published titles and titles published by small and micro publishers not captured by the survey. At the same time as the association was reporting a drop in overall eBook sales, Amazon, the retailer with the majority of the US eBook market, reported increases in sales in terms of both units and revenue. And other avenues were opening up that facilitated continued growth in eReading that was not feeding into the statistics. Public libraries were lending eBooks and subscription eBook libraries were opening for business – Oyster in September 2013, Scribd the following month and Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited in July 2014. While subscriber downloads earned an author readers and, in the case of subscription libraries, revenue, they did not count towards sales. David Montgomery, CEO of publishing services company Publishing Technology, drew on these factors to declare last year that publishing had split into two markets, with a widening gap between them. Self-published and micro-published authors, particularly those writing genre fiction, were pricing their eBooks much lower and claiming an increasing share of the market, particularly through Amazon, while large publishers were increasing eBook prices in a way that reduced eBook sales. The subscription eBook library Scribd opened in 2013.shutterstock This pattern has continued, and the rhetoric that pits one format against another appears to be continuing too. At the Digital Book World conference in January 2017, Nielsen presented 2016 data from more than 30 traditional US publishers showing a fall in eBook sales from 2015 to 2016 and hardback unit sales overtaking eBooks for the first time since 2012. Despite their data being an estimate and covering relatively few publishers, Publishers Weekly ran its story on the presentation with the headline “The Bad News About Ebooks”. The week after the conference, the Sydney Morning Herald published a Bloomberg-sourced piece headed “How Print Beat Digital in the Book World”. Association of American Publishers (AAP) data released in February 2017 appeared to confirm the decline of eBooks, with eBook sales for the first nine months of 2016 down 18.7% on the year before. However, at the Digital Book World conference in January, other evidence was presented that attracted less media attention.An analysis by the Author Earnings website (an aggregator and analyser of eBook sales data) identified that, outside the world of traditional publishing, authors who were self-published, independently published or published directly by Amazon imprints, had sold more than 260 million eBooks worth more than US$850 million in the US in 2016. Total eBook sales by Amazon – which makes up 83% of the US eBook market by volume and 80% by value – rose by 4% from early 2015 to early 2016, at the same time as eBook sales recorded by the AAP were falling. Self published authors are claiming an increasing share of the market.shutterstock While no direct comparison exists for the UK market – where the Publishers’ Association reported a 17% fall in consumer eBook sales from 2015 to 2016 – 42% of eBook sales in that market are by self, indie or Amazon-published authors. This added up to 40 million of the 95 million units sold in the UK in 2016 – a percentage that is growing as the eBook market share held by the larger members of the Publishers’ Association falls. The publishing industry has changed. It is no longer solely the domain of members of publishers’ associations and books with ISBNs that allow easy tracking and accumulation of data that appears robust but tells much less of the story than it once did. Moving beyond the ‘format wars’ It is too easy to have our attention grabbed, and sometimes our biases or hopes confirmed, by an appealing set of statistics from an authoritative source, and to misunderstand what those statistics are measuring. It is also too easy to fall into viewing the evolution in eBook and print sales solely through the prism of Amazon and its often public power struggle with publishers, and to be drawn too deeply into seeing the future of publishing as one format versus another. While it is possible to speculate about the future trajectories of the eBook and paper book markets, many confident pundits have been wrong before, as new factors have emerged that have significantly impacted reader behaviour and sales patterns. From the practical perspective of writers wishing to connect their work with readers, it is prudent to see both paper and eBooks as significant for any book-publishing project in the present and near future, and to develop strategies to meet both of them. It is also prudent to look beyond both platforms to another, one that had long been regarded as a peripheral player: audiobooks. All we can be sure of is that the digital platform is still evolving. What will an eBook be 20 years from now? What will a book be? Nick Earls will be available for a live author Q&A Wednesday from 1pm to 2pm. Post your questions below. Nick Earls, PhD Candidate in Creative Writing, The University of Queensland This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Recent reports suggest that screen fatigue is behind a decline in ebook sales. The reasons are more to do with usability and market saturation. Last Thursday the Guardian published two articles about ebooks. The first, by Mark Sweney declared, incorrectly, ‘Screen fatigue’ sees UK ebook sales plunge 17%. Another piece in the same issue penned by Paula Cocozza carried this headline: How eBooks lost their shine: ‘Kindles now look clunky and unhip’. On the same day, The Telegraph ran a story by Charlotte Runcie sub-titled, helpfully, 10 Reasons Ebooks Suck. What’s happening here? These articles and the chatter they spawned among those who see modern things like ebooks as somehow inauthentic were triggered by a report, or ‘yearbook’, issued by the UK’s Publishers Association, and subsequent comments made by their Executive Director, Stephen Lotinga. The buzz around these articles, and the articles themselves, reveal the prejudices of their authors and of others who yearn for the days of quills and buggies: Ebooks are stupid. The ebook fad is over, thank God. People can only take so much screen time. It would be helpful to consider these beliefs because, if true, I’ve made a huge mistake here and need to reconsider our business plan. Do ebooks suck? It depends on who’s asking. Benefits and features are gained and lost with every technical innovation. If the smell of old paper is important to you, then maybe. Along with certain efficiencies, the advent of the motor car brought issues of noise and safety. But also, your car can’t be your friend like a horse can. Nor can you eat it when it outlives its usefulness. And, after more than a century, cars still don’t have that cosy horsey smell. But in the end, after a generation or so, the car won. Cocozza and Runcie are mostly bagging ebooks because of those things they’ll miss when people don’t read print any more. ‘There’s no romance’; ‘Books do furnish a room’; ‘An ebook isn’t a friend’. Frankly I sympathise here. (My bedside table is stacked with printed books with bus tickets and things acting as bookmarks.) But not to the point where I think this whining actually makes much sense. Full disclosure: Cole’s bedside table. The founder and Chief Executive of eBooks.com hasn’t been completely won over. It’s a ledger. On the left, the benefits; on the right, disadvantages. And then it’s a personal choice. Here’s a list that opens Cocozza’s piece: Cocozza’s list is a good one. It amounts to a challenge to us, the ebook people, to improve the experience of reading ebooks. Runcie’s list of 10 sucky things about ebooks is more problematic. It’s hard to respond to criticisms like, ‘Ebooks are no good in the bath’, ‘Instant gratification is overrated’ or ‘Bookshops are wonderful places’. This flurry of anti-ebook sentiment is really a claim that it is these perceived deficiencies of ebooks that caused the recent decline in consumer ebook sales. That decline provides comfort and vindication to those who hated ebooks anyway; who will always hate them for silly, nostalgic reasons. The decline has more to do with market saturation and technical deficiency than screen fatigue. The consumer ebook market will inevitably find a stable level and resume steady growth, for many reasons. But that growth can and will be accelerated by improving the user’s experience. In the end, even though I doubt we’ll get around to making ebooks smell like binding glue, ebooks will win; for the reasons I’ve gone into previously. Is the ebook fad over? Pfft. Hardly. You wish. Two things: Last year’s decline in sales has been exaggerated in the press; and there’s a good reason why ebook adoption is taking a breather right now. Look at the headline to Sweney’s piece: UK ebook sales plunge 17%. Actually, no. As he cites elsewhere in the report, overall ebook sales were down by 3%. That 17% figure related to an important subset of overall sales, namely consumer books — fiction, popular biography, self-help and so on. In fact, the remainder of the ebook market, including scholarly, scientific, professional and educational titles, continued growing. There’s a kind of logic to this. Scholarly, scientific, professional and educational titles are naturally at home on a desktop. But for leisure reading, it’s a bigger, more fundamental shift for the reader. So, really, the news here is that consumer book sales have dipped. That isn’t really news because I and others predicted there would be an exhaustion gap following years of stupendous, saturation marketing of the Kindle platform. There had to come a time when all those uncles and grannies who’d been given gadgets by well-meaning friends would quietly tuck them away and return to printed books. But underneath the drooping consumer ebook trend-line there’s a steadily rising core of real ebook people who have embraced digital reading for the right reasons, for their own reasons. This cohort is growing. I know this because I’m at the coal face. We’re engaging with our customers, new and old, all day, every day. So, here’s a stat that was mentioned in the PA report but was largely passed over: After just 10 years, digital sales now account for 35% of total book sales revenue This simple fact amounts to a revolution. The  ‘screen fatigue’ hypothesis The PA’s Stephen Lotinga cites ‘screen fatigue’ as one reason for the decline in consumer ebook sales. This term, sometimes called digital fatigue, has various meanings and a tenuous connection with lived experience. It might relate to eye strain, or just a general sense that you’re spending too much time looking at screens of various kinds. The notion of ‘screen fatigue’ merits scrutiny Last June, Publishers Weekly suggested that screen fatigue might be behind the decline in consumer ebook sales, citing a report by the Codex Group which showed that younger readers were drifting back to paper faster than older readers. It’s a risky business taking consumers’ statements of intent at face value. When directly asked, they might say that they pine for the fjords and meadows and yearn to be unshackled from their screens. But look at them. Just look. In cafes, cars and emergency wards, on  footpaths, boats and massage tables they’re all looking at their phones. And smiling. Don’t talk to me about screen fatigue. Technical Shortcomings In a thoughtful analysis of the same Codex report Jonathon Sturgeon argues that the decline has more to do with technical deficiency that screen fatigue, and I am inclined to agree. The consumer ebook market will inevitably find a stable level and resume steady growth, for many reasons. But that growth can and will be accelerated by improving the user’s experience. Let’s face it. E-Paper isn’t black-and-white — it’s grey on grey. It just is. Flipping through a printed book to find something is just easier/better/nicer than sliding your finger back and forth along a tiny status bar. The frustrations expressed by Runcie and Cocozza are real. There’s still no end to little irritations in reading ebooks  but, with time and focus and resources, they will be mitigated. And ultimately, through incremental improvements, reading ebooks will be better than reading printed books in every way. Apart, perhaps, from the smell of horse glue.

Whether your taste skews creepy or cute, these creative Halloween costumes and decorations from talented Etsy sellers deliver fun and frights. Calling all witches, ghouls, and vampire bats on a Halloween mission! Seeking eerie decorations for a monster bash? The perfect kid’s costume for trick-or-treating? Enchanting candles to set the mood for some strange magic? Whatever moves your spirit for spooky season—whether it’s wicked wall art, party supplies, creative accessories to complete your look, or something else—talented Etsy sellers have all the creative costumes and delightful decor you need to celebrate Halloween your way, in style. Read on to unearth some of our favorite super-unique Halloween shops to add to your Favorites—plus, plenty of bonus costume and decor inspo! Enchanting candles from By Michelle Handmade SHOP: Halloween candles from By Michelle Handmade, from $11 The cobwebs are hung, a hair-raising playlist is spinning, and the themed treats are prepped. To complete the haunting ambiance, all you need is a glowing candle—or six! The candlemaker behind By Michelle Handmade creates soy and beeswax candles in a variety of styles, colors, and scents. Think: pumpkin-scented ghost candles, stacked skull candles, and ombré taper candles. Price range: $11-$29 | Returns & exchanges: See item listing details for information, plus Etsy Purchase Protection | Shipping: Free shipping options DIY paper masks from IVYpaperArt SHOP: DIY paper mask templates from IVYpaperArt, from $6 Halloween is a creative spirit’s time to shine! If DIY is your jam, dust off the cobwebs and break out the craft supplies to make your own origami-style paper mask with expert guidance from Etsy seller IVYpaperArt. As their tagline goes, “You can make anything with just paper, scissors, and glue.” Choose from a wide array of downloadable mask templates—including bird masks, dragon masks, jack-o-lantern masks, and lightweight helmets—to complete your costume and draw awestruck compliments. Price range: $6-$10 | Returns & exchanges: See item listing details for information, plus Etsy Purchase Protection | Shipping: Digital download Adorable pet costumes from Purrs and Stitches SHOP: Pet costumes from Purrs and Stitches, from $11 Black cats in witches' hats—does it get any more Halloween than that? Etsy shop Purrs and Stitches specializes in handmade, crocheted hats, regal crowns, and adorable accessories for your favorite felines and petite pups. Most hats are available in three sizes for kittens, small cats, and large cats (or small dogs), and the seller offers custom sizing and color options, too. Price range: $11-$30 | Returns & exchanges: See item listing details for information, plus Etsy Purchase Protection | Shipping: Free shipping options Sewing patterns for kids’ costumes from Imaginary Tail SHOP: Sewing patterns for children's costumes from Imaginary Tail, from $3 As long as you have a grasp of basic hand-sewing stitches, you can follow Imaginary Tail’s sewing patterns to assemble sweet costumes from felt for babies and kids. Whether you pick a woodland creature, a cuddly kitty, or an out-of-this-world alien pattern, these costumes are perfect for trick-or-treating, as well as imaginative play all year long. “I design my costumes trying to shape a character which has a neutral expression,” says seller Nini B., “so that the child's face and personality will appear and not be covered by a mask.” Price range: $3-$18 | Returns & exchanges: See item listing details for information, plus Etsy Purchase Protection | Shipping: Free shipping options