Physical Media

[jcb]

It occurred to me that I have some actual data on physical books vs. e-books, namely my own sales. I'd assume the figures are typical for conlang nerds.

Overall:
36,000 print, 20,600 e-books. That's 63% physical.

For fiction: 492 print, 442 e-books.

I'm surprised how resilient physical sales have been compared to digital sales! But maybe the very simplicity of words (and sometimes images) is what saves it from being swallowed by digitality: Words on a page require no electricity, so physical works just fine, unlike audios or videos, which require electricity to play no matter what, so you might as well just store the file digitally too then.

[jcb]

At first I thought you meant you had thirty-six thousand print books in your house…

After two moves last year, it felt almost like that. In fact I have about a thousand print books, and that's after some culling.

I'm not sure how many physical books (and magazines) that I have total. I have about a dozen with me right now, but most (probably about 200) are in storage at my childhood home.

[Raphael]

At first I thought you meant you had thirty-six thousand print books in your house…

After two moves last year, it felt almost like that. In fact I have about a thousand print books, and that's after some culling.

I'm not sure how many physical books (and magazines) that I have total. I have about a dozen with me right now, but most (probably about 200) are in storage at my childhood home.

I'd have no idea how to even go about counting.

[bradrn]

It occurred to me that I have some actual data on physical books vs. e-books, namely my own sales. I'd assume the figures are typical for conlang nerds.

Overall:
36,000 print, 20,600 e-books. That's 63% physical.

For fiction: 492 print, 442 e-books.

I'm surprised how resilient physical sales have been compared to digital sales! But maybe the very simplicity of words (and sometimes images) is what saves it from being swallowed by digitality: Words on a page require no electricity, so physical works just fine, unlike audios or videos, which require electricity to play no matter what, so you might as well just store the file digitally too then.

Also, complex text layout and images as in zompist’s books are often poorly supported in e-books. All of zompist’s books I’ve bought, I have in e-book format, and it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience to read; if I ever get around to buying the new Historical Atlas, it will definitely be in physical format.

[jcb]

It occurred to me that I have some actual data on physical books vs. e-books, namely my own sales. I'd assume the figures are typical for conlang nerds.

Overall:
36,000 print, 20,600 e-books. That's 63% physical.

For fiction: 492 print, 442 e-books.

I'm surprised how resilient physical sales have been compared to digital sales! But maybe the very simplicity of words (and sometimes images) is what saves it from being swallowed by digitality: Words on a page require no electricity, so physical works just fine, unlike audios or videos, which require electricity to play no matter what, so you might as well just store the file digitally too then.

Also, complex text layout and images as in zompist’s books are often poorly supported in e-books. All of zompist’s books I’ve bought, I have in e-book format, and it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience to read; if I ever get around to buying the new Historical Atlas, it will definitely be in physical format.

Aren't ebooks just HTML and CSS? In 2026, showing an HTML document should be a solved problem.

[bradrn]

I'm surprised how resilient physical sales have been compared to digital sales! But maybe the very simplicity of words (and sometimes images) is what saves it from being swallowed by digitality: Words on a page require no electricity, so physical works just fine, unlike audios or videos, which require electricity to play no matter what, so you might as well just store the file digitally too then.

Also, complex text layout and images as in zompist’s books are often poorly supported in e-books. All of zompist’s books I’ve bought, I have in e-book format, and it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience to read; if I ever get around to buying the new Historical Atlas, it will definitely be in physical format.

Aren't ebooks just HTML and CSS? In 2026, showing an HTML document should be a solved problem.

It’s not just that: there’s also the small form factor and black-and-white display to consider. A physical book can be carefully typeset to make as good use of the available space as possible; on a display with resizeable text, that problem becomes more difficult.

[Travis B.]

Also, many e-books are rather shoddily put together by publishers; I have seen quite a few where their formatting was utter crap.

[alice]

After two moves last year, it felt almost like that. In fact I have about a thousand print books, and that's after some culling.

I'm not sure how many physical books (and magazines) that I have total. I have about a dozen with me right now, but most (probably about 200) are in storage at my childhood home.

I'd have no idea how to even go about counting.

Oh, that's easy. Pick a book and assign it the number "1"¹. PIck another and assign it "2". Keep going, assigning


We interrupt this post to let you know that alice has exceeded the stupidity quota for this month and has been temporarily terminated.


¹ Yes I know that's syntactically a string, but never mind.

[jcb]

Also, many e-books are rather shoddily put together by publishers; I have seen quite a few where their formatting was utter crap.

Maybe this is because ebooks (and web pages in general) are often put together by programmers that lack a sense of style, and not typographers.

For example, compare the web and newspaper versions of the New York Times. On the website version, *the text isn't even justified!* Yet the newspaper version of the New York Times has been justifying their text for over 100 years.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/busi ... trump.html
- https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/09 ... rJumbo.jpg

All they'd have to do is add "p { text-align: justify; }" to their style sheet, but apparently that's just too difficult or obscure.

[bradrn]

All they'd have to do is add "p { text-align: justify; }" to their style sheet, but apparently that's just too difficult or obscure.

Not that simple, unfortunately: in general, CSS justification is known to produce notoriously poor results.

[zompist]

All they'd have to do is add "p { text-align: justify; }" to their style sheet, but apparently that's just too difficult or obscure.

I don't think it's an obscurity issue. It's become a convention for web pages to be unjustified. I'm sure I've seen justified text on the web, but offhand I can't find a major site that uses it. Even literary magazines are unjustified.

A web designer points out that justified text starts to look bad if the columns are narrow and hyphenation isn't supported. This is supposedly done by adding hyphens: auto to the CSS, but the two browsers I have on this computer don't seem to support it.

[jcb]

All they'd have to do is add "p { text-align: justify; }" to their style sheet, but apparently that's just too difficult or obscure.

I don't think it's an obscurity issue. It's become a convention for web pages to be unjustified. I'm sure I've seen justified text on the web, but offhand I can't find a major site that uses it. Even literary magazines are unjustified.

A web designer points out that justified text starts to look bad if the columns are narrow and hyphenation isn't supported. This is supposedly done by adding hyphens: auto to the CSS, but the two browsers I have on this computer don't seem to support it.

It should support it, if it's been updated in the past five years: https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_hyphens_auto

I still think justification without hyphens looks better than having jagged edges.

[Travis B.]

Also, many e-books are rather shoddily put together by publishers; I have seen quite a few where their formatting was utter crap.

Maybe this is because ebooks (and web pages in general) are often put together by programmers that lack a sense of style, and not typographers.

For example, compare the web and newspaper versions of the New York Times. On the website version, *the text isn't even justified!* Yet the newspaper version of the New York Times has been justifying their text for over 100 years.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/busi ... trump.html
- https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/09 ... rJumbo.jpg

All they'd have to do is add "p { text-align: justify; }" to their style sheet, but apparently that's just too difficult or obscure.

Knuth recommends that one either buys his dead-tree books or, if one is to buy e-books, one buys specially-typeset PDF e-books from his chosen source, because the Kindle e-books that have come out of his books, despite his insistence against them, are utter crap.

(For those not aware, Knuth with his creation of TeX, which he originally created specifically to typeset TAOCP, has basically set the standard for mathematical typesetting.)

[jcb]

All they'd have to do is add "p { text-align: justify; }" to their style sheet, but apparently that's just too difficult or obscure.

I don't think it's an obscurity issue. It's become a convention for web pages to be unjustified. I'm sure I've seen justified text on the web, but offhand I can't find a major site that uses it. Even literary magazines are unjustified.

A web designer points out that justified text starts to look bad if the columns are narrow and hyphenation isn't supported. This is supposedly done by adding hyphens: auto to the CSS, but the two browsers I have on this computer don't seem to support it.

But why did it become a convention? I'm not convinced it became a convention because it was better, because after all, the internet is also full of sites where the font is too small and the width of the column of text is too large.

I think it's simpler to conclude that most people that put text onto the internet are just typographically illiterate.

[xxx]

I have 32 linear meters of books
(and often stacks of books sitting in front of each row...)...
as for digital files, there are probably fewer than 50 PDFs and ePubs on the hard drives of my crashed—and thus lost—PCs...

I only have a few linear meters of CDs (and even those belong to my wife); I never really bought physical albums—maybe one audio cassette in the early '80s (you could say I've always listened to music via streaming...)...

when it comes to movies, I probably have about a hundred discs from the days when my daughters watched a lot of cartoons and teen movies, plus a handful of other discs...

no more board-games (except chess, cards, dice, somewhere...) some old atari VCS + games and gameboy, nes, PlayStation 1, wii from my daughters... that are probably no longer working...

[Richard W]

All they'd have to do is add "p { text-align: justify; }" to their style sheet, but apparently that's just too difficult or obscure.

That severely messes up narrow columns, which is a problem when one comes to tables. Whether there are tables depends, of course, on the type of book.

[Richard W]

I'd have no idea how to even go about counting.

Oh, that's easy. Pick a book and assign it the number "1"¹. PIck another and assign it "2". Keep going, assigning

Doesn't that rather depend on deciding what counts as a book? I was going to count my father's books, but hit a problem with an enormous number of what I would call pamphlets.

[alice]

I'd have no idea how to even go about counting.

Oh, that's easy. Pick a book and assign it the number "1"¹. PIck another and assign it "2". Keep going, assigning

Doesn't that rather depend on deciding what counts as a book? I was going to count my father's books, but hit a problem with an enormous number of what I would call pamphlets.

You can count them separate from the books, surely, assuming you have a reasonable way to tell them apart?

[jcb]

I'd have no idea how to even go about counting.

Oh, that's easy. Pick a book and assign it the number "1"¹. PIck another and assign it "2". Keep going, assigning

Doesn't that rather depend on deciding what counts as a book? I was going to count my father's books, but hit a problem with an enormous number of what I would call pamphlets.

What are the uncountable pamphlets about?, and how did he acquire so many?

[Richard W]

You can count them separate from the books, surely, assuming you have a reasonable way to tell them apart?

The issue was to devise a reasonable way to distinguish them. They were bible-based Christian teaching, some of them apparently for examinable courses.