Ebooks vs traditional format - the issues etc

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Is an ebook version planned?

Here here!

My physical library is full and my eyes do better with Kindle anyway

The publisher would have to answer that, but as it is only going to be around 7mm thick I'm sure that you can find a suitable gap in your library somewhere.

Living "down under" as some of us do, postage is increasingly expensive, slow and unreliable. Ebooks aren't my first choice, but when postage doubles the cost of a book and it ends up taking 3 months to arrive, ebooks start to look more attractive.

 

[Schneiderman]

Living "down under" as some of us do, postage is increasingly expensive, slow and unreliable. Ebooks aren't my first choice, but when postage doubles the cost of a book and it ends up taking 3 months to arrive, ebooks start to look more attractive.

So no more collaborations with Chris and Blue Envoy Press then?

 

[CJGibson]

I must agree with Paul, postage to anywhere outside the UK is just getting silly. The Antipodes and North America are eye-wateringly expensive.

I'm currently weighing up ebooks and print on demand for whatever's next. The problem with the former is colour and having a format that flows (Osprey appear to have cracked it, their Kindle ebooks appear to cope with different screen sizes and font changes to a certain extent. Then there's colour images. I've been watching the colour e-ink ereaders - quite expensive and images look a bit washed out.

There's rumour/gossip/speculation about a colour Kindle.

I must admit I love my Kindle, 1-2kg of my baggage allowance used to be books, now I go offshore with one paper book for reading on the chopper (needs to fit in a survival suit pocket, so no BSPs) and the rest on Kindle. Tellies in cabins killed the rig library, so have to take books. Mind you I always did, you can only read so much Dan Brown.

A few years back Scott and I did some tests with Kindle and found that our beloved drawings only rendered properly if the line weight was set to Chubbi-Stump, thus losing detail. Zooming in wasn't really an option as it was basically a pain in the arse.

Print on demand, my concern is print quality. It's highly variable and I like a quality paper. Oddly enough, this is all a rerun of 2008/9. That ultimately led to hard copy books on quality paper.

Whether it's ebook or POD, a layout/design specialist and editor are required. Good ones (and there's plenty of criticism of layouts and editing on this forum) are hard to find and expensive. I have yet to find a layout/design specialist that is up for trying ebooks.

The other week, a bloke kicked off on the Aviation Enthusiast's Book Club, calling all publishers crooks and saying he was going it alone and would be doing Print-on-demand. I await the results with interest. Especially on the layout, editing and print quality. Then of course, there's security.

Ho hum, time for flakes.

Chris

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

ALL ebook formats are crackable. So it is almost inevitable that a book released as an ebook will be cracked and distributed.

This doesn't necessarily mean that it is inherently a bad idea though. Not all readers will have the inclination or ability to obtain an illegal copy - if it is reasonably cheap and easy to purchase.

In my mind the best option would be

1. Initial print run
2. 6 months after print version, ebook versions:
   1. 300 DPI PDF version (direct sale from website)
   2. Kindle formatted version via Amazon

The easiest is a simple PDF of the printed book. If you have an iPad Pro or something, this can be a very nice way to consume the book. This could also be sold directly without having to pay Amazon or Kobo or another company.

Then, a Kindle formatted version. Harder to do.

 

[Schneiderman]

I must agree with Paul, postage to anywhere outside the UK is just getting silly. The Antipodes and North America are eye-wateringly expensive.

Chris

I bought a book from an ebay seller in the US, 290 pages, hardback, and was charged just $7 postage. Granted it took just under three weeks to get here but it shows that the ridiculous rates some businesses quote are a bit of a scam.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

I wanted to buy a single photo and the postage from the US to NZ was $38 USD.

 

[Schneiderman]

I have no love for ebooks, probably because a large percentage of my book collection is pre-war plus all the Putnam's and similar where only printed is the only viable option. I surely would not want BSP and similar titles, such as Chris' and my small output, in ebook format, you lose so much if the book is image and drawing intensive. Even proof reading pdfs is not ideal.

 

[Foo Fighter]

Well I found beyond the Spitfire available on HamaZon so it will be arriving shortly. Looking forwards to the arrival immensely.

On the topic of ebooks, I thought that as a Trekkie, I would be really up for it. I can't stand the bleeping things tbh.

 

[Schneiderman]

I wanted to buy a single photo and the postage from the US to NZ was $38 USD.

Outrageous. How about using a trusted forumite in the US to buy it on your behalf and then send it on. I bet the total postage cost would be far lower than $38

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

I have done so a few times for rare finds. Seems like an imposition though.

 

[Schneiderman]

I have done so a few times for rare finds. Seems like an imposition though.

We're one big happy family here (give or take a few ), I'm sure many would not find it an imposition given the effort you put into running this forum.

 

[GTX]

I have/use/buy both ebooks and original hardcopies. I currently have nearly 3000 traditional books sitting on the shelves of my library and probably about 300 ebooks. That said, the ebooks do increasingly find favour due to the following points:

• Physical space - mind you, I tend to still buy the big bound copies of ones like the Secret Projects series (just can't say no...), and similar;
• Cost of postage - I buy from all round the world but find some places (looking in your direction UK) the cost of postage in the last couple of years has become ridiculous - as Paul mentioned, sometimes it is almost doubling the cost; and
• Tied to the first point, and echoing Chris a bit, I often travel with work (or even on holidays) and the ease of having a library on my iPad to travel with is wonderful.

Another tangental point I would raise (again) is that when new editions are released, it would be wonderful if there was an option to only buy the updated parts rather than the entire book, especially when one might be talking about only 5 - 10% change at most. Something such as this lends itself especially to e-book format.

 

[GTX]

I wanted to buy a single photo and the postage from the US to NZ was $38 USD.

Outrageous. How about using a trusted forumite in the US to buy it on your behalf and then send it on. I bet the total postage cost would be far lower than $38

I have done so but it doesn't always work. And while there are some sellers undoubtedly making a profit on the postage I don't believe this is always the case.

 

[steelpillow]

Having both bought and published books via both PoD and eBook, and long honed my layout skills as a professional technical author (including X/HTML), dare I offer the voice of experience.

First, Print-on-Demand (PoD). It is absurd to print a book in one country and then ship it to another. The big PoD publishers have print houses (or agreements with same) in all the major countries, so postage is never more than local. Secondly, a huge variety of formats and bindings are available one way and another, and you can get a book published in many of them, on the global marketplace and with free ISBN, for the cost price of one proof copy, probably less than £20. People (some of them here) moan endlessly about the traps they have fallen into, or fear doing so, but I have used Lulu.com from day one without a single showstopper. For example Lulu will chase down a dud copy and give the printer responsible hell. Just return it to them, sit back and wait. Other PoD publishers may charge various levels of fee.


Then, eBooks. There are three main formats: PDF, ePub and Kindle. All can have copy protections applied by the publisher, with some being harder to crack than others. Pirated copies are usually made available as free downloads, but beware: either the file itself or the download site will be infected with malware, as this is the whole reason the pirate can be bothered to crack the protection. In other words, a pirated eBook is usually just bait to catch the fish. Pirating will happen, but its impact on your sales will be limited.

• PDF is easy to create, especially if you want to sell it alongside a print edition. Just copy your wordprocessor file, tweak its ISBN and front matter as required, and Save As... A good publisher will check your formatting and add copy protections.
• ePub is best created using specialist authoring tools. Nowadays it is quite a rich format and there are several standards of richness to choose from, not all supported by all e-readers (e.g. colour, page size, multimedia, etc). So you need to match your format to your market. Free tools such as calibri are popular, but not as easy to use as regular wordprocessors or DTP packages. I create my ePubs, complete with XML markup, in a text editor. I wrote a Linux script to compile the zip without making any mistakes.
• Kindle is proprietary to Amazon, and they are good at converting whatever format you throw at them into Kindle. While your market is of course confined to Amazon, theirs is the biggest eBook market out there, so the loss is minimal.

I have published eBooks via several routes, but only my Lulu eBooks have sold. Like their global PoD options, they go out to all the major retailers and distributors, including Amazon, Ingram, Barnes & Noble, Apple, etc. etc.

The voice of experience that I offer, and is all too often ignored, is to check out Lulu.com, as well as a few others that a search on "best PoD or eBook publishers" will rub your nose in, and only start complaining if you know exactly which of your requirements they cannot deliver on.

Having said that, my PoD editions sell faster than the eBooks, and for higher royalties.

 

[edwest4]

I work for a book publishing company. Years ago, we could send many pounds of books by mail via boat, or Surface Mail, to countries like Australia. Then, for reasons unknown, the U.S. Postal Service dropped it. We lost the majority of our foreign customers.

This no doubt helped the ebook industry. However, sales of print books continues to increase. Foreign customers either pay the increased postage cost or do without.

Piracy is still a problem. I have sent takedown notices to various places online. It was a bit disheartening to discover a book we had spent months on scanned cover to cover online. This is called theft. As in theft.

That said, we are working with one outlet to distribute PDFs of our books. Copyright does not allow anyone to do whatever they want.

Before the internet, I would get calls from various copy shops. It would go like this:

"Hi. I'm calling from XYZ Copy Shop. We have a customer who wants us to photocopy one of your books (in its entirety). Can we do that?"

No.

 

[Pasoleati]

Regarding shipping costs, one way to reduce units costs is to order fewer bigger shipments. For example, from the U. K. UPS ships 25 kg of books for less than £2/kg to Finland.

 

[GTX]

Regarding shipping costs, one way to reduce units costs is to order fewer bigger shipments.

Have done that at times though it isn't always an option.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

My problem with e-books are they are ephemeral. That is, they don't last. You can't put an e-book on a shelf and come back to it in ten years and it'll still be readable. Computer and electronic technology changes.
A print book has durability. Books printed centuries ago are still readable today. I doubt anything in e-format today will be several centuries from now.
That's fine with popular tripe and such, but if you want something that'll last, it's still paper and bound.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

My problem with e-books are they are ephemeral. That is, they don't last. You can't put an e-book on a shelf and come back to it in ten years and it'll still be readable. Computer and electronic technology changes.
A print book has durability. Books printed centuries ago are still readable today. I doubt anything in e-format today will be several centuries from now.
That's fine with popular tripe and such, but if you want something that'll last, it's still paper and bound.

With respect, this is completely the wrong way round. EBooks are made of ASCII characters and formatting code. These will be readable forever and last forever, unlike paper books. Tools like Calibre can convert between formats.

Now, some ebooks are DRM protected or otherwise "locked". I can concede that you might find yourself locked out of an ebook due to protection. I would avoid protected ebooks, and I would note there are tools to remove DRM protection.

 

[Orionblamblam]

With respect, this is completely the wrong way round. EBooks are made of ASCII characters and formatting code. These will be readable forever and last forever, unlike paper books.

First ebook I ever owned was on a floppy disk, unless you count the texts i had on cassette tape for my Texas Instruments TI-99. How do I go about reading them?

 

[Orionblamblam]

With respect, this is completely the wrong way round. EBooks are made of ASCII characters and formatting code. These will be readable forever and last forever, unlike paper books.

First ebook I ever owned was on a floppy disk, unless you count the texts i had on cassette tape for my Texas Instruments TI-99. How do I go about reading them?

Also: While I'm in the process of building a series of Faraday cages to put some of my electronics in when not in use, due to Certain Current Events leading to the possibility of an EMP event becoming somewhat greater than it was not that long ago, I don't see any particular need to put my books into a Faraday cage. And if the EMP happens and the temperature plummets under a dark cloud of trillions of particles of combusted cities, even if I've saved my electronics it's not like there'll be a lot of electricity to run them, while I can still read my paper books by the light of candles rendered from the flesh of my enemies.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

With respect, this is completely the wrong way round. EBooks are made of ASCII characters and formatting code. These will be readable forever and last forever, unlike paper books.

First ebook I ever owned was on a floppy disk, unless you count the texts i had on cassette tape for my Texas Instruments TI-99. How do I go about reading them?

My first ebooks were downloaded from university computers via floppy disks to my Amiga 4000 computer back when crazy people were TYPING BOOKS IN BY HAND and uploading them to the internet prior to workable OCR.

I still have them, having been through said Amiga, uncounted Windows computers, a Mac and an Ubuntu laptop. They are currently stored on my server (across multiple disks for redundancy) and backed up to a cloud service in Australia. If my house burned down tomorrow, I'd lose all my paper books, but not my ebooks.

Your lack of forward planning regarding media obsolescence doesn't make my point redundant.

 

[steelpillow]

Isaac Asimov observed back in the 1970s that, over time, information evaporates. All is stored in physical archives of some description, and such archives get destroyed for all sorts of reasons. The format makes little difference; fire, flood or nuclear war send it all the same way, while for every USB stick wiped by an EMP event there are a thousand books eaten by mould and mice. The only sure way to preserve information for posterity is to copy it faster than it evaporates.

Somewhere out there is a fringe geek religion which worships Information and regards its destruction as the cardinal sin.

Obsolete storage methods, be they forgotten digital disc formats or forgotten languages, can render information inaccessible even before it is destroyed. Encryption and other protection methods make the problem worse. Not everybody can build a Colossus or unearth a Rosetta Stone to recover the stuff.

When I recall the amount of time we spend here bemoaning the loss of so much German technical documentation at the end of WWII, the scale and wantonness of destruction of parish records by our local authorities over the years, or the ravages wrought on the 30,000 documents in the J W Dunne archive by acids, mould, hungry little beasties and human carelessness, the idea of a digital archive I can routinely back up suddenly makes a lot of sense. I have old USB sticks, Psion memory cartridges, hard drives, floppies from PCs, Acorns, Amstrad PCW and SAM Coupe, all of various 3", 3.5" and 5 3/4" formats and track densities. I still have a few Sinclair cassettes and Microdrive cartridges, and even a reel of punched tape and a stack of punched cards from the 1960s. Many are now copied either to my backup hard drive or to sheaves of dead trees - a mix of electronic and paper formats as proved most practical for my varied purposes. But some has already evaporated and, if I am not diligent with my backups before the remaining boxen die, more will follow.

Both digital and print formats have their place in the world, and always will.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Your lack of forward planning regarding media obsolescence doesn't make my point redundant.

My lack of forward planning? As a ten year old with extremely limited funds, even more limited technical ability and no conception of how technology was going to change? Yeah, what a retard I guess I was back then.

From where I sit I can see books I got as a child. My copies of "Tom Swift," already old books when I got them in the 70's, are as readable today as they were sixty or more years ago, and barring flood or fire - things that won't do ebooks any good either - they'll be readable for another sixty or more years. I didn't *have* to do media swaps with them every few years. I don't have to upload them to the cloud and hope that I don't forget the password or the storage site goes belly up or gets hacked and mutilated or I change credit cards and forget to update the info and they delete my stuff for me... or the storage site sits under a North Korean nuke and gets fried by EMP or a Carrington Event comes along and puts all the zeros on one side of the flash drive and all the ones on the other.

Ebooks are fine, but their long term viability is uncertain in an uncertain world.

 

[steelpillow]

Dear Orionblamblam. I sense a windup. I wouldn't get too aereated over it, if I were you.
Paul also noted that he keeps a backup copy on another continent. Cheaper than a Faraday cage, and less prone to coffee spills in my experience.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Dear Orionblamblam. I sense a windup. I wouldn't get too aereated over it, if I were you.

Meh, no windup. I just see the argument of "eboks vs paper" as currently being about as valid as the "winged horizontal vs rocket vertical" argument for reusable launchers back in the 90's. A lot of screaming back and forth without a lot of actual demonstrations. "Paper vs ebook" will only be settled after civilization collapses. THEN we'll know for sure. What I do know is that in the nuclear winter to come, I won't be able to burn ebooks to stay warm, while volumes of tax law and boxes of unsold Hillary Clinton hagiographies just might carry me through till the sun peeks out between clouds of Beijing and New Delhi.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Well, at 10, you can be forgiven. I was 18 and a compulsive reader and computer geek. I read about eink technology many years before the first product and started collecting ebooks before e-readers existed.

Yes, a bit tongue in cheek, but its pretty hard for me to backup my print copy of Flying Wings and Radical Things to Australia, while my ebook copy is safe providing the world doesn't end. It isn't signed by Tony Chong though, and I do still prefer to look at the paper copy.

I try to scan all my stuff, but no-one has the time to finish that.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Well, at 10, you can be forgiven.

No child can be forgiven. Horrible creatures.

my ebook copy is safe providing the world doesn't end.

Doesn't take that much. "The cloud" is only safe until some clever hacker figures out how to ransomware the thing. A few years ago "Analog" SF magazine had a story set a short time in the future when Americans had uploaded essentially everything to the cloud... and Al Queda paid a guy to come up with a way to encrypt or outright destroy it all. Difficult to do... but the repercussions would be awesome. Everybody storing everything off-site? Imagine all your documents and family photos and videos and bank records going *poof*.

 

[Calum Douglas]

I did some very limited market research at the start of my book writing, from memory, I think out of about 38 respondants,
one said they wanted an e-book. Everyone else wanted "weighty hardback tome"

Now that its been printed that has changed a little, and I think there is a bit more interest for the e-book, mostly
for two reasons, firstly that my book weighs over 2kg, and travelling and or moving it are non-trivial, and secondly
that as its in chronological not thematic order (although there is a sizable index), its very very useful for
the more studious types to be able to do text searches.

I suspect that a lot of the people wanting the e-book are customers who already own the hardback, and want the
e-book for added convenience. I dont think many people are just buying the e-book in isolation.

The only * and ** star reviews of my book are people with older kindles who bought the e-book only to find
its in pdf style representation and so they have to zoom in on each page to read it and it just didnt work,
there were also reports of missing pages among some buyers of the kindle version.

We pulled the kindle version, and now the e-book is only available for the larger format colour readers.

I spent months and months evaluating self-publication through PoD, including going to presentations and meeting
people from Imgram Spark. In the end, it appeared to me that the only way to actually make enough money from
a book to make it "a job", was to not even do that, but to print, sell and distribute it all on my own. Mainly because
even if you use PoD, how to you distribute it ? Inevitably Amazon, who then steal almost all your profit, unless you set
the sales price at some pathetic level (I forget now, maybe <$15 ? or something).

For books which are not 500pages of A4 hardback with a high sales price this may apply less.

When I evaluated the "doing it all yourself" tactic, that was in the days before the post office decided
that it would cost more than the entire RRP of the book to just post it to mainland Europe from the UK.

Note that in the UK, the threshold for the "large parcel" prices is 2kg. So for smaller books than mine the
postage cost is a large step downwards.

 

[Nicknick]

I bought your book, but I've got frustrated over my eyes, so I postponed reading it until I have my first reading glasses in live....(getting old). Might have been easier for me, to read it as e-book, but I still prefere paper.

 

[steelpillow]

I spent months and months evaluating self-publication through PoD, including going to presentations and meeting
people from Imgram Spark. In the end, it appeared to me that the only way to actually make enough money from
a book to make it "a job", was to not even do that, but to print, sell and distribute it all on my own. Mainly because
even if you use PoD, how to you distribute it ? Inevitably Amazon, who then steal almost all your profit, unless you set
the sales price at some pathetic level (I forget now, maybe <$15 ? or something).

Yes, promotion and distribution are always the key issue. Like most consumer industries there are always more products than the distributors can handle. It's pot luck whether your book gets noticed by one of them, and whether it happens to be the right book in the right place at the right time. PoD at least gets the book out there to be promoted, and there is a new breed of distributor specialising in PoD authors beginning to grow up.

 

[Volkodav]

I recently moved and finally got to unpack my entire library, as well as taking possession of selected items of my fathers library after his passing. What I found pretty much brought me to tears, I wont be throwing anything out but too many of my books have been damaged beyond repair by years of storage in the tropics.

Conversely I still have every ebook I have ever bought and have been able access them on multiple generations of devices over more than a decade.

Don't get me wrong, I love my hardcover collection, I love my book cases, but the convenience and security of my ebook collection gives me peace of mind. Another factor, as my eye sight deteriorates (my arms are not long enough anymore) its great to be able to increase font size and not have to wear glasses.

 

[edwest4]

My problem with e-books are they are ephemeral. That is, they don't last. You can't put an e-book on a shelf and come back to it in ten years and it'll still be readable. Computer and electronic technology changes.
A print book has durability. Books printed centuries ago are still readable today. I doubt anything in e-format today will be several centuries from now.
That's fine with popular tripe and such, but if you want something that'll last, it's still paper and bound.

With respect, this is completely the wrong way round. EBooks are made of ASCII characters and formatting code. These will be readable forever and last forever, unlike paper books. Tools like Calibre can convert between formats.

Now, some ebooks are DRM protected or otherwise "locked". I can concede that you might find yourself locked out of an ebook due to protection. I would avoid protected ebooks, and I would note there are tools to remove DRM protection.

Fer cryin' out loud. ""protection'' is there for a reason. Imagine this: "YOU" -- yes YOU -- have spent years researching a book, paid artists, and so on, and 30 days after release, it's ONLINE for NoTHing - as in NOTHING !!! Thoughts? Is that fair? Does that represent the non-future of publishing?

If your hard drive dies, your ebooks are gone. Does the average person even know there are any *** tools *** out there to convert anything to anything?

I work for a company that gives me a research budget. One assignment involved locating the best books on a certain country's mythology. Among the books I located was a title from the late 1800s. It was in great shape. Perfectly readable. It cost $80.00.

 

[edwest4]

With respect, this is completely the wrong way round. EBooks are made of ASCII characters and formatting code. These will be readable forever and last forever, unlike paper books.

First ebook I ever owned was on a floppy disk, unless you count the texts i had on cassette tape for my Texas Instruments TI-99. How do I go about reading them?

Also: While I'm in the process of building a series of Faraday cages to put some of my electronics in when not in use, due to Certain Current Events leading to the possibility of an EMP event becoming somewhat greater than it was not that long ago, I don't see any particular need to put my books into a Faraday cage. And if the EMP happens and the temperature plummets under a dark cloud of trillions of particles of combusted cities, even if I've saved my electronics it's not like there'll be a lot of electricity to run them, while I can still read my paper books by the light of candles rendered from the flesh of my enemies.

Oh... well... uh... oh, well...

???

 

[GTX]

I suspect that a lot of the people wanting the e-book are customers who already own the hardback, and want the
e-book for added convenience. I dont think many people are just buying the e-book in isolation.

Interesting observation.

 

[GTX]

I bought your book, but I've got frustrated over my eyes, so I postponed reading it until I have my first reading glasses in live....(getting old). Might have been easier for me, to read it as e-book, but I still prefere paper.

True - damn eyes!!

 

[GTX]

too many of my books have been damaged beyond repair by years of storage in the tropics.

I don't live in what is defined as the tropics (although it can still get very wet and humid) but when I did I learnt the lesson of putting plenty of silica gel throughout the library to help reduce the localised moisture.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

My problem with e-books are they are ephemeral. That is, they don't last. You can't put an e-book on a shelf and come back to it in ten years and it'll still be readable. Computer and electronic technology changes.
A print book has durability. Books printed centuries ago are still readable today. I doubt anything in e-format today will be several centuries from now.
That's fine with popular tripe and such, but if you want something that'll last, it's still paper and bound.

With respect, this is completely the wrong way round. EBooks are made of ASCII characters and formatting code. These will be readable forever and last forever, unlike paper books. Tools like Calibre can convert between formats.

Now, some ebooks are DRM protected or otherwise "locked". I can concede that you might find yourself locked out of an ebook due to protection. I would avoid protected ebooks, and I would note there are tools to remove DRM protection.

Fer cryin' out loud. ""protection'' is there for a reason. Imagine this: "YOU" -- yes YOU -- have spent years researching a book, paid artists, and so on, and 30 days after release, it's ONLINE for NoTHing - as in NOTHING !!! Thoughts? Is that fair? Does that represent the non-future of publishing?

If your hard drive dies, your ebooks are gone. Does the average person even know there are any *** tools *** out there to convert anything to anything?

I work for a company that gives me a research budget. One assignment involved locating the best books on a certain country's mythology. Among the books I located was a title from the late 1800s. It was in great shape. Perfectly readable. It cost $80.00.

I guess what I am talking about is the permanence of media. Any scheme which controls access to an ebook you have legally purchased that is reliant on servers on the internet, for example, runs the risk of stopping working one day when those servers are turned off. This is not something you need to worry about with printed books.

 

[Orionblamblam]

too many of my books have been damaged beyond repair by years of storage in the tropics.

I don't live in what is defined as the tropics (although it can still get very wet and humid) but when I did I learnt the lesson of putting plenty of silica gel throughout the library to help reduce the localised moisture.

That's what dehumidifiers are for.

 

[GTX]

Same effect, much cheaper to operate.