I thought long and hard about starting this thread. There are many readers out there who aren't exactly flush with money. Hey, I can remember when I was in high school and college. The absolute last thing that I want to do is make anyone feel bad about it. So this thread isn't directed towards those on a tight budget, but rather to those of us with expendable income.

One of the things that I've noticed is most people here talk about either how can I get free content, or how can I convert content that I already have. Now, I like free as much as the next guy, and I certainly don't like to pay for something twice, but quite frankly, the only way that we will get more e-books is if authors see that they can make money at it. So my questions to people are -

1) how many e-books have you purchased total (all sources)?

the rest are Connect specific -

2) how many e-books have you purchased via Connect?
3) What kind of books are you buying?
4) How many new books verse e-copies of books you already have?
5) How many backlist (i.e. older) books do you have, and by who?

to start it off

1) ~440 (most of which is from Baen Books)
2) 37
3) SF, History, Science
4) of the 37, 18 were copies of books I already had.
5) I have three series - Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, McCaffrey's DragonRider , and Leiber's Lankhmar series.

I've bought every book that Barn have ever released through their "Webscriptions" programme right from the start. That's it. Nothing from Connect.

My reading is a mixture of fantasy and SF from Baen, and "classics" from PG.

I did no novel-length electronic reading before the Sony Reader, so my catalog is a little smaller than you guys how have been at it for a while on other devices. I've bought 3 books from Baen, just began looking through their catalog about a month ago. If anyone has specific recommendations from their catalog I'd be interested to hear it, currently going through the David Weber books.

Let's see, in my Connect library I currently have:

8 Baen Books (5 "free library", 3 bought)
3 Public domain books
13 Connect books

Plus the free samples that came with the Reader. If I add up my girlfriend's purchases on her laptop (we share a Connect account) we've purchased 24 Connect books.

All books we did not own, but she has been talking about re-buying some books in electronic format when she wants to re-read them.

I read mostly scifi, fantasy and some history with the occassional classic thrown in.

The Sony Reader is my Wife's. I have one on order from Sony though. She bought I think 3 or 4 books in a bundle from Connect. I have Some Star Trek ebooks that I have purchased in lit formats that I have yet to get around to read that I have been converting to LRF format. Becuase I can get LIT format books possibly cheaper and can remove the DRM and convert to LIT, I don't know if I'll be purchasing books from Connect.

Among the Baen authors that I like are Bujold (sp?), David Drake, James Hogan (he's releasing some of his older books through Baen) and Lackey. There are quite a few others, but those are the big names that he publishes.

1) Everything currently available in full from Baen (400++ books) that isn't an eARC. I'd list books from PG, but they aren't 'purchased.'
2) The ones I got with the $50 early-purchase deal-sweetener (and no more!)
3) Whatever Baen publishes, or makes available for purchase through WebScriptions. That means mostly SF, Fantasy, and a wee bit of non-fiction. I'll start patronizing other publishers when they start offering DRM-free books in formats I can use. Unlike many, I keep books and re-read them, so having DRM turn what should be a purchase into a "temporary purchase" is not acceptable to me.
4) It goes the other way. I buy the bits. Then, if I really like the book I buy the paperback when it comes out. If I think the author walks on water, I buy the hardcover too. But the list of authors I buy in HC is really really short.
5) I picked up the various Flinx books by Alan Dean Foster, and 'The Tales of the Otori' by ??? with my initial $50 credit from Sony. I'll be back for more when they start offering DRM-free books at reasonable prices. Reasonable prices in this context means "below paperback." There's no reason they can't sell at that price and STILL provide a higher royalty to the authors than paper sale does. We have an existance proof, after all -- Baen does this already.

While I understand your point on #5, I suspect that the most likely outcome of that stance is that publishers and authors simply won't provide e-books since they don't generate enough sales. You do understand that Jim Baen started websubscriptions for marketing purposes rather than as a profit center? Perhaps this is a discussion that should go in a separate thread.

I have paid for a total of 10 ebooks for my various devices (Palm Tungsten T5, M515 and Sony Reader) in addition to those I got with the $50 credit from Connect (I actually paid a total of $1.50 extra since the books I wanted didn't add up neatly to $50).

I will buy more ebooks as my current favorite author list starts showing up more and more on Connect. I never buy hard-covers because I hate holding them for reading, so I am always buying books at least a year after their initial releases (I buy the paperback releases as soon as I see them, though), so my Sony reader will have no impact on my hardcover purchases. I might, depending on the author, pay the higher ebook initial release price (which appears to equal the hardcover price) where I would never buy the hardcover book, because I will get the book in a format I enjoy reading immediately.

I have bought some back-list books which I would have bought in paperback for a new novelist on my reading list. I will do the same for other authors as I discover them and as their backlists become available.

I think the publishers could do quite well for recent backlist books which they already have in digital format (most publishers want submissions in digital format these days) with very little expense, which could do a lot to spur sales of the Reader (or similar devices) when people find they can ONLY get backlist books in ebook format.

It's the age-old cycle: Initial hardware opens the possibilities, far-seeing individuals push those possibilities with software which rapidly outgrows existing hardware, which then is improved to handle the existing software (and leaves room for growth) at which point the software outgrows the hardware again.

The same would happen for the ebook market if the software providers (authors/publishers) could only study recent computing history and open their eyes. And we all owe huge debts of gratitude to the gamers of the computer world who outgrow existing hardware almost as soon as it hits the shelves. If people had only ever done word processing and spreadsheets, we'd all by using 16MHz 8088 processors instead of the 3.2GHz pentium chips!

I can sense that the ebook market is poised to reach critical mass soon (c'mon Sony, make an even bigger push with this reader!) where the cycle will really catch on after the first few abortive attempts over the past 10 years.

And it will be made more interesting when more other sites besides Connect and Baen begin offering ebooks for Sony Readers. Once publishers discover that they won't have to share the profits with Sony/Connect, they'll find more incentive to open the e-book marketplace.

I've bought 34 books, which is an incredible amount of titles.

I also try to buy bundled titles whenever possible, especially especially of authors I like or bundles that seem intriguing.

I'm contemplating 2 bundled series right now, at only $11.99 for each bundle. When I buy those, then my total purchased Connect titles will be 40 books.

I'm so thankful right now that Sony has been unable to acquire Knopf's authors, or I'd be spending about $100 every month.

THANK YOU SONY FOR DRAGGING YOUR FEET AND NOT PUTTING A PRIORITY ON NEGOTIATING NEW E-BOOK CONTRACTS WITH KNOPF AND THEIR AUTHORS! (I'll now be spending approx. $300-$400 a year instead of about $1,200.)

Don

NONE so far.

I have scoured the net for anything freely available.
Like books from Cory Doctorow
Like books from Baen free library
Like a few selected classisc from Project Guttenberg
Like many, many other books

Then I have scoured dark corners of the net ...
I will not elaborate this source of books on this forum

I do not plan to buy ANYTHING from Connect
- Sony does not want our stinkin' european money*
- I very much prefer DRM-free books
- I strongly dislike the style used for formating Connect books - at least those books that came loaded on my reader. **

I am willing to pay a modest sum for an ebook that I am able to format for my Reader the way I like and that I am able to read on my future ebook devices (basically DRM-free)
I would be willing to pay, for example, for the "Otherland" series by Tad Williams. The Connect store doesn't carry Tads books :-(

*
I know I could purchase a gift certificate with the help of fellow forum participants and paypal, but there are other publishers that do not force me to do such complicated stuff. If you want to sell something, ANYTHING on the net - or anywhere else, for that matter - you have to make it as easy as possible for a customer to part with his money.

**
- user should be able to choose font style for book (either serif or sans-serif). Yes. I strongly prefer sans-serif for reading from a low resolution screens
- user should be able to choose margin width. Why does Sony waste so much of my precious (and expensive!) screen real estate by setting ridiculously wide margins for their Connect e-books
I load my texts to my Reader as RTF sans-serif font - usually Arial - size 16, and margin width 0.01

My Fictionwise bookshelf shows 257 books, mostly in Mobipocket format. In addition to that I've downloaded a lot from Gutenberg, Manybooks and BlackMask, as well as purchasing one of the Blackmask DVDs. I've also bought 20 from Mobipocket (including their Classic Library with several hundred books) and 36 from eReader.

Does the Silk Pagoda disk from Black Mask Online (http://www.silkpagoda.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=83&products_id=650&keywords=) count? I'm showing 10,531 books.

I've purchased about 10 books from Connect.