[WalterSear]

Books aren't video games. People don't collect them. I don't consider a game I don't finish to be a failure, a waste of my time. I do so a book.

Despite Amazon's talking points, they are relatively price inelastic. Perhaps, right now, they aren't, since people are still dealing with market novelty, but over the long term, time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books.

[joshAg]

Well, this was a horrible way to discover that I'm not a people.

If I stop collecting books, can I become a people? Is there like a specific process or licensing body?

[lotsofmangos]

I dunno. You could ask the firemen, they'll be able to tell you.

[nnethercote]

> Despite Amazon's talking points, they are relatively price inelastic.

I'd be surprised if your data was better than Amazon's.

[walterbell]

People don't have business relationships with software, apps, content, games, photos, websites. People have business relationships with people.

Ever "follow" someone on social media because you like their writing? Collecting books from an author is like that, except that you're also feeding the author, so they can write more books for you to read. So you get 64,000 words in a book instead of 64 words in a tweet.

A lower starting price increases the initial pool of people who are exposed to an author's fiction or non-fiction worldview. Authors need more input into the price curve which modulates growth of their community of readers. Neither publisher (old boss) nor Amazon (new boss) is maximizing the use of technology to improve relationships between reader-people and writer-people.

[RexRollman]

People do collect books.

[jonnathanson]

Not only do people collect books, but in fact, more people collect books than read them. A lot more!

I'd bet your average book consumer, with rows and rows of beautiful, trendy, or important books on his shelves, has read maybe 10% of those tomes. If that. 10% is probably a generous figure. Even true bibliophiles have read maybe 25-50% of their books.

There is a long and well-known phenomenon in the publishing world, which I'll call "trophy collecting." It's the process by which someone buys and conspicuously displays popular or well-regarded books on his shelves, mostly for the social esteem of being seen to have them. This is, more or less, how most literary fiction and wonky nonfiction gets sold.

[larrys]

God know I still have all the O'Reilly books dating back to the 90's that I refuse to throw out. (They are in a back room not on a bookshelf although they were on a bookshelf at my old office mid 00).

But here's the thing. How do you do that with ebooks? No physical object to collect. Much different. Nothing to display.

[walterbell]

Maybe goodreads or librarything? They seem to have a lot of users, not sure about the social dynamics.

[lotsofmangos]

time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books

I'm reading less at the moment than I used to, but I regularly have periods of reading around three novels a week. If it were not for the existence of libraries and second hand book stores, I would find money to be a far bigger restriction than time, especially when I was a teenager.