The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead

I think it has more to do with the eBook ownership model -- you don&#x27;t really own a book and you get tied down to a particular service to access the book. So you can&#x27;t lend a book to friend.And if a particular book becomes disputed for copyright or censorship reasons it can just disappear. If you loose access to a service for some reason you can loose all your books (and thus all your $ investment). On top of that the prices are too high. Why is an eBook as much as a physical hardback? The hardback costs money to print and ship. Storing and transferring an eBook is a fraction of that cost.<p>Finally eReaders&#x2F;tablets are still not quite comfortable enough to replace books. They need to be lighter, even a bit flexible and cheap.<p>There are the things that keep me from diving in. If someone came up with a solution to these issues I think we&#x27;d see eBooks really take off.

As a Kindle fan, I&#x27;d say e-book sales slipping are easily attributable to the fact that there is so much free content out there for e-readers that people are reading the free stuff and not buying. I think a significant test would be comparing library check-outs to ebooks to print sales. (Figuring out a test that isn&#x27;t skewed would be hard, but let&#x27;s handwave that away). I wonder if you&#x27;d see that &#x27;e-book reading&#x27; people who used to check out lots of books from the library have dropped off and are just reading free books from e-book stores?