E-books - how do we buy them?

[Drakedh]

Hey guys! I am writing my masters degree thesis on the e-book and mp3 market. Can you help me with a little survey? Shouldn't take more than a couple minutes. I'd love to see how the digital books and music market looks like in various countries. Thanks a lot for any help

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...LVh6Y2NLVFE6MQ

[MMHaven]

Done! I would have liked the option to check both the "I sometimes post reviews," and the "I read user reviews of the products I am interested in," answers, but this was a brief and interesting survey. Good luck with your thesis!

[Polarpenguin]

Done
Good Luck

[Elfwreck]

Notes about survey:

• I know some people whose gender doesn't fit neatly into "male" or "female." (Why does it matter to you?)
• "Place of Residence - Population" should probably say "city or town of residence" because my state is also my place of residence. (And some people might well think you mean "district" or "region.")
• "What percentage of music have you purchased in a digital form during the last year? (in contrast to traditional CDs)" was confusing to me. I have purchased no music, digital or otherwise, in the last year.
• ebooks-vs-print books was also hard: I've purchased both. I assume the percentage is by dollar value, rather than number of units? Even so, I've purchased only one *new* pbook, the kind that pay royalties, in the last year. (Which, ah, cost over $100. I have no use for print books that aren't intended to outlast me.) Be aware that if your survey is including "books I bought from eBay and used at garage sales" (which I assume it does), the results won't meaningfully connect to any kind of publishing sales trends.
• I wound up checking a lot of "I don't buy digitized music" even though I have done so in the past; I think it'd skew the survey badly to answer the questions about my buying preferences to cover the one or two songs every year or two that I buy. (I occasionally buy used CDs. And I'm not tired of listening to my current collection.)
• "In which stores have you purchased digitalized music and books online?" was troublesome. I've bought MP3s at Amazon, but not ebooks.

I'm not sure what the point was of conflating ebook and digital music purchases; the demographics and amounts are so drastically different, I can't see useful information coming out of putting them together.

[ucfgrad93]

I completed the survey.

[Drakedh]

Thanks a lot for your help and all the suggestions

I know many of the questions may sound awkward or misleading. That's mostly a result of two things. English is not my native language (Polish is) and although I can communicate in it quite freely (I think), I don't participate in English surveys very often. I had done some research to find out what specific vocabulary I should use in certain questions, but I can't say I nailed everything perfectly. The other problem is also that the survey has to also be done in Poland, using Polish language. It's a tough job to have 2 versions of a survey and make them as comparable as possible. It takes a lot of compromise. Like the amount of money spent for example - should they be the same or adjusted accordingly? Accordingly to what? Polish incomes differ a lot from, let's say, American, and spending $30-50 on books or music is a lot for most people here. Same with the size of the city/town they live in. There are only few cities with a population of about 500.000 and only one with a million, and they are considered very big. The rest of a nearly 40 million population lives in much smaller towns. I suppose in USA the criteria of calling a city big or small are a bit different. How should I compare it? And that's just 2 countries, what about other?

I am not saying some of the questions couldn't be better/more specific. Many could, and probably should. But it's not always easy to do.

What's the point of conflating e-books with music? Finding similarities in some cases, and a few differences perhaps. I hope at least. It's not that all I get from the survey are simple percentages. That would be useless. The output of a survey done by google docs is a table in excel, with every respondent having their own row of answers. This way I can group people based on any criteria - age, residence, what they buy - you name it, and see if there are any trends worth discussing. What's more interesting - about 80-90% of people saying they buy e-books or mp3 music, actually buy both. I know in many cases the questions are connected and ask both about e-books and music, but nobody would bother completing my survey if it was too long. And it's already pretty lengthy for an internet survey. My initial sketch was a few times longer, but I had to narrow it down to the things I am most interested in. And don't forget it's just a masters thesis, not a phd. Of course it should be done as well as possible, but I don't have the resources to target a wide and representative enough audience. It just has to be simplified a little bit.

One more thing - I can't force Google to make the interface of my survey English. It just won't listen. Sometimes (or often, from what I hear) the bottom buttons 'continue' and 'submit' display in Polish, even though I have set all my Google services to display English. Sorry for any inconvenience.

But really, thank you all for your time, you are really, really helping me a lot. Thank you!

[Sweetpea]

When you say "What percentage of music have you purchased in a digital form during the last year? (in contrast to traditional CDs)", does that include music subscriptions? Because I haven't "bought" any music since I took a Spotify subscription...


Edit:

I filled it in, but still a bit confused with my spotify subscription. I decided to treat that subscription as a buy...

[Drakedh]

Yup, since all the music you pay for comes from Spotify, that's 100%. Sorry for the confusion. And thanks for taking part

[AlexBell]

Can we expect to get a summary of your findings?

[Drakedh]

I guess a short summary would be nice Sure, why not

[Pinecone]

Questions that are hard to answer as the proper choice is not available, or needs to check multiple boxes:

I usually buy - Single Tracks or Whole albums. I am probably 50/50 based on a very little music purchased.

The above mentioned on online sharing. I do post reviews, and I do read reviews.

Attitude to online reviews - They are important to me, but most of the reviews have no idea what they are talking about.

Problems you have experienced - No choice for None.

[RainingLemur]

Hope it helps!

[rdjack21]

Filled out the survey as well. It seemed to be to be more aimed at music instead of books but still comprehensible.

[ebusinesstutor]

How can you call everyone over 40 as one market? A 70 year old's preferences are very different than a 41 year old, more so than the difference between an 18 year old and a 22 year old.

In this section you give the following options but only let us choose 1. In my case I do read reviews of products and I do post, so both would apply:

[quote]Do you participate in online sharing of information about products? *
Yes, I sometimes post reviews of the products I buy
I read user reviews of the products I am interested in
I am not interested in user reviews of products[quote]

In this section, you give us these options:

[quote]What is your attitude to reviews of products posted by other internet users *
Product reviews posted by other internet users are important to me
I usually trust opinions posted by other internet users
Often such reviews are posted by manufacturers or their competitors
Users posting such reviews often have no idea what they are writing about[quote]

1 and 2 are really the same as are 3 and 4. There is no middle of the road option for those of us who read reviews carefully and learn to weed out the spam reviews.

[Ivy]

Completed.
Added Grooveshark for music question and "I work online" for the internet usage question.

Good luck!