artist rendering of Jeff Kinney’s forthcoming bookshop
Lots of good news floating around recently on the health of the printed book.
Jeff Kinney, author of the wildly popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ series is opening a bookstore.
“I feel angry that so many bookstores have gone away” Kinney told the Boston Globe. “People love books and they don’t want to see them go away. We’d like to be a part of that movement.”
At Digital Book World, Dana Beth Weinberg tells us Why Authors and Readers Still Want Print. Citing the important 2014 PEW study, E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps, one thing that has become clear is that regardless of what happens in the e-book hemisphere there is no “corresponding lack of popularity for print.”
Alix Christie chimes in with his homage to the printed in his piece A Thousand Hands Will Grasp You with Warm Desire: On the Persistence of Physical Books.
By now most of us are heartily sick of the print versus e-book debate. It was framed wrong from the start: as a Manichean proposition, one or the other, either-or. Fortunately, we have our own experience now to instruct us — as well as the long history of the book
Beneath the barrage of e-hype, it turns out that the humble codex — the Latin term for books with spines and leaves — is holding its own. The statistics can appear confounding, but essentially the market is settling out.
And if the latest revenue numbers on ebooks from Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are any indication the market might have actually settled. In their most recent quarterly reports both companies are reporting declines in ebook revenue.
