Nobody buys books

[Marcel Birgelen]

I'm probably a classic hypocrite.

While I love strolling through big book stores and libraries for hours, most of what I buy those days are e-books, both for technical papers and fictional stuff...

Meanwhile, while most of my work involves computer screens, keyboards and mouse, I do 90% of my note-taking by hand, using a fountain pen...

[Leo Enticknap]

For an entire orchestra, an electronic score management system might offer significant benefits. Hauling, say, 100 parts times 30-40 major pieces on a big tour could easily come to several hundred pounds of paper that would have to be shipped all over the place. As against which, a backlit screen on a music stand could make it more difficult to see the leader or conductor, and size would be an issue. I'd struggle to read a typical page reduced to a normal tablet size on the music stand of the organ console I play most often (about 14-15" from my eyes, I'd guess), and would need something at least the size of a 24" monitor for an electronic display solution to work.

[Frank Cox]

There isn't as much of a size difference as you may think. You can crop the margins out of the pdf on the screen so what's left isn't much different than a the average printed score.

Here is a photo someone posted a while back of a Pixel Slate Chromebook beside a paper score:

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My current music tablet is a Samsung XM-X610 and I don't have any particular trouble reading (most) scores. In the worst case scenario you can turn the tablet sideways and do half-pages, and that's much bigger than printed music.

Since everything is on my tablet I can find what I'm looking for instantly (no more flip flip flip flip I know it's in here somewhere flip flip flip) and my wife appreciates not having piles of paper stacked up on and around my piano.

[Frank Cox]

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This is a picture I just took of what my tablet looks like on my piano.

It's quite readable from my normal sitting distance. Looks like my camera focused on the brand name on the piano rather than the tablet; it isn't that blurry in real life. The gray pencil thing in the middle is a Samsung S Pen that came with the tablet. You can use it to write notes on the score (in any colours you like) just like using a pencil on a paper score.

Really slick, actually. When you approach the screen with the S Pen it automatically switches to score annotation mode.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Lots of pro musicians use those. Very common... Especially pianists and organists.

[Martin Brooks]

I believe those numbers are thrown off by self-published books. It is true that very few books sell a lot of copies, but that's always been the case (it's also true in the music industry). It's also true that more books are published today than ever before. Back around 1996, there were about 1.4 million books in the active Books in Print database (and many of those were not actually available, but publishers didn't like to declare books "out-of-stock" because in many cases, the rights would revert back to the author, so they'd label them "out-of-stock" or "out-of-stock indefinitely" and they'd remain in the "in-print" database.) Today, that many books are published each year.
The big publishers still do quite well. Penguin-Random House (which is owned by Bertelsmann) had revenue of 4 billion Euros in 2021. They claim that 35% of their books are profitable, but just 4% account for 60% of the profits. They wanted to buy Simon & Schuster from Paramount, but the DOJ blocked the sale. It went to KKR instead, which paid $1.62 billion for the company. They wouldn't have paid that if they didn't believe they would see a return.

Having said all that, when I'm in a bookstore and look at many of the books published which are so niche or of so little general interest, it makes me wonder how they were ever approved for publication.

[Gordon McLeod]

Lots of pro musicians use those. Very common... Especially pianists and organists.

I dislike the tablet for sheet music it often has glare from reflected spotlights

[Ryan Gallagher]

I dislike the tablet for sheet music it often has glare from reflected spotlights

Lots of lighting designers hate them too, just like they hated when individual musicians in a symphony would bring a personal bright LED light with a completely different color temperature and look than the rest of the stage. But used with an element of control, they can be very cool. Tablets tend to light up faces of musicians accidentally, this can be an interesting asset when used intentionally, where as classic stand lights faced towards the page and a much softer glow bounced back off the page. I bet most of the apps can be forced into "dark mode" too for even less light thrown off the music stand.

[Frank Cox]

Since I don't perform the idea of stage lights reflecting off of the tablet screen is something that never crossed my mind as being a potential issue. I can certainly see where it could be a problem in some venues, though.

I always thought that a bigger issue for the pros would be having the tablet quit for any reason or none in the middle of a performance. If I was a pro, I think I'd want at least two identical tablets set up and ready to go at the start of each performance just in case one decided to go to never-never land partway through the show. The minute you depend on something like this is the minute that it quits.

Mobilesheets (the only program I have any experience with) does have "night mode" where the colours are inverted. And it also allows you to choose any background colour you wish in normal mode.

[Lyle Romer]

A workshop is one use case where a printed manual is superior to a pdf file. You won't get grease on your tablet or computer and if you drop the manual on the floor it's probably not a big deal.

Not for the current cost but a workshop is a great application for Augmented Reality from an Apple Vision Pro (or similar product). Being able to overlay the manual on what you are looking at would make it very easy to see where things are or where they need to go when reassembling.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Not for the current cost but a workshop is a great application for Augmented Reality from an Apple Vision Pro (or similar product). Being able to overlay the manual on what you are looking at would make it very easy to see where things are or where they need to go when reassembling.

Well... I was recently watching some old Louis Rossmann videos trying to ramp up some of my rusty soldering skills. I watched him using a microscope with a camera mounted onto it. And I thought, maybe this, ironically, could be a killer app for something like the Apple Vision Pro. Ironically, because it's one of the least repairable pieces of technology out there.

But since this is the first headset with high quality, low-latency vision pass-thru that's so good, it doesn't seem to make people sick, I thought it could be a cool, but rather expensive tool for repair purposes. Not only could you overlay schematics onto the actual picture, but you could tie in a zoomed image into your field of vision, or what about meters and scope tools that could overlay their results directly into your field of vision?

[Martin McCaffery]

Sounds like something Tony Stark patented somewhere in the early stages of Iron Man

[Bobby Henderson]

Very few brick and mortar retail book stores remain in existence. That has to be a big factor pushing down sales number of many books. I think browsing for books and discovering something new was a hell of a lot easier when looking through retail shelves than it is now when looking at some damned app or whatever Amazon suggests. In the past you could pick the book up off the shelf, read the jacket notes or whatever.

The retail model was a great filter to separate the legit authors from all the self-published stuff we see now. Today any good novel is stirred into the same giant pot with all the other crap. "Digital" doesn't do much to differentiate quality.

The only good thing about e-book sales is the books don't eat up living space. People in younger generations don't tend to have very room for book cases.

The music industry is arguably in just as bad of shape. Most music performers only see income from live concerts; they usually don't see anything from sales of music CDs or anything at all from streaming. Typically only the most famous of music acts manage to get any revenue from unit sales of CDs, Vinyl LPs or whatever. All sorts of creative accounting games are played by the distribution companies. The games get worse with music streaming. It wouldn't surprise me if companies selling e-books play the same accounting games.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I miss strolling through book stores. I generally only ever visited the bigger book stores, which could fascinate me hours on end. While Amazon often allows you to read a chapter or so of a book, it's not the same as strolling through a physical book store and discovering new things. It's probably a nostalgic thing, but there also is something to the feel and the smell of paper.

The most practical about e-books to me is that I don't need to pack a whole bunch of them when I'm going somewhere, I simply "pack them all".

Sounds like something Tony Stark patented somewhere in the early stages of Iron Man

It's 2024, it's the future! It's about time it starts to feel like it.

[Frank Cox]

I have a bunch of books on my phone and always think I can read that when I'm sitting in a waiting room or something. But that never seems to happen because any time I've tried it within ten minutes I (re)discover that the screen is too small.

That screen is fine for reading a text message or looking up an article about something but not for extended reading.

I love ebooks on my main computer and my laptops though. The computer holds the book for me and I can just sit back and read.