Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books
Publishers don&#x27;t need to kill e-books, they were never a good product to begin with, which is why they&#x27;ve mostly failed to replace paper books.<p>The author missed the most obvious reason e-books have hit a wall. Compared to hard-copy books, e-books offer a vastly worse user experience, with the only benefit being lower price and easier storage.<p>Paper books are incredibly durable, easy on the eyes even for very long periods of reading, affordable, and a nice break from staring at a screen all day. Even children prefer paper books to kindles and other e-readers, so it&#x27;s not a matter of nostalgia or people refusing to change. Paper books are just a really great user experience as far as media goes.<p>The comparison to other media like music and video is also completely wrong. Records, tapes, video cassettes, etc. are all new technologies, less than 100 years old in most cases. So eight-tracks and CDs getting replaced with mp3s and streaming services is a case of a new technology being displaced by a slightly newer technology. Books on the other hand have had centuries, even millennia to develop and perfect the user experience, which they largely have (I can&#x27;t take credit for this last argument, Nassim Taleb points this fact out in his Incerto series).