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"We actually don't have a good gifting tradition yet for e-books," says Sourcebooks' Raccah. Despite all the advances in reading technology, physical books are

"We actually don't have a good gifting tradition yet for e-books," says Sourcebooks' Raccah. Despite all the advances in reading technology, physical books are still the best Christmas presents. Yes, that is sad. Or even lending (looking at you Amazon!). Nevertheless, e-books have done to publishing what mp3s and online video has done to the record labels / movie studios. It's basically killed them, yet they are still running around with zombies waiting for that headshot to put them down for good. E-books are here to stay and publishers, just like record labels, are useless as one can now establish a firm and successful marketing campaign mostly through the web. Self-publishing may not kill e-books by publishers but has killed not only their monopoly, but also their whole business model. Welcome to 2013. Accept it or zombify. Or better yet, die;

milkman 14y ago
I don't see the problem here. If you want to give ebooks as a gift, give them a birthday/Christmas card with a unique short URL. The recipient types in the URL, gets a few seconds of a happy birthday song/Christmas carol, then they automatically download their gift. The key here is to make obtaining the gift as frictionless as possible. The recipient shouldn't need to create an account, fill out a captcha, verify their email, re-log back into the website, upload their profile pic ("wait, are you sure that's you? We don't see a face here"), pick 5 of their favorite books then stand on their head and spit wooden nickels.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  Of course the flipside of that is that an ebook seems sort of ... "cheap." Not literally cheap (the publishers will make sure of that ><), but ... the kind of thing you buy while checking facebook, 5 minutes before showing up to the party. Oddly that sort of thing would make me rather prefer to give someone a physical book as a gift, even if I know they'd kinda prefer an ebook...

milkman 14y ago

I don't see the problem here. If you want to give ebooks as a gift, give them a birthday/Christmas card with a unique short URL. The recipient types in the URL, gets a few seconds of a happy birthday song/Christmas carol, then they automatically download their gift. The key here is to make obtaining the gift as frictionless as possible. The recipient shouldn't need to create an account, fill out a captcha, verify their email, re-log back into the website, upload their profile pic ("wait, are you sure that's you? We don't see a face here"), pick 5 of their favorite books then stand on their head and spit wooden nickels.

snogglethorpe 14y ago
Of course the flipside of that is that an ebook seems sort of ... "cheap." Not literally cheap (the publishers will make sure of that ><), but ... the kind of thing you buy while checking facebook, 5 minutes before showing up to the party. Oddly that sort of thing would make me rather prefer to give someone a physical book as a gift, even if I know they'd kinda prefer an ebook...