A Short Survey About E-Books

[dray20]

Hello. I'm an international student and doing some marketing research. Please click on the link below to start a short survey on e-books. It will take just 5 minutes to complete, but will be most helpful for me. Thanks for your help.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Z6PZHDF

[SteveEisenberg]

I've seen a number of such surveys here, and, like virtually all, some questions are leading or unanswerable.

Over what period of time will paper books possibly go away. Years? Centuries? Millions of years?

As for the question about how much an eBook should cost, this sounds like the just price theory from the middle ages. I make buying decisions, not pricing decisions. Publishers bear no loyalty to me. They should charge whatever maximizes revenue*. I suspect that in a decade or two, print books will be a small niche luxury market, and the price of an eBook will be a small fraction of the paper price. But I don't see justice as dictating any particular price, and feel the survey propagandizes an anti-market POV by failing to give a "none of my business" option.

________________________
* There might be some exception for literature essential to human health, like medical journals with government-funded research findings. Perhaps they should be provided for free. In this post, I am just thinking about general readership books.

[speakingtohe]

As Steve Eisenberg said, the survey itself seems a bit biased and leading towards a conclusion instead of looking for one.

Can't look at it again as I have completed it, but seemed sadly lacking in anything related to market research. Your instructor may get a good laugh.

It was very simple though.

Helen

[Elfwreck]

I would've liked to see the question on "how do you read ebooks" to include answers like:
1) Currently-available Dedicated ebook reader, like Kindle, Kobo, Sony Reader, Nook Classic, Jetbook
2) Tablet, like iPad, KFire, Nook Color
3) Desktop/Laptop
4) Phone
5) Older dedicated ebook reader, like Rocketbook, Gemstar
6) Other device -- [include text field here]

[Dr. Drib]

Welcome to MobileRead.

Rather than simply asking us to do a survey for you, why not become a part of our community by contributing your thoughts to the various forums and threads that you might find interesting?

Although we do have the occasional survey here from students who say they will let us know the results by posting, they rarely come through. They're here one moment and then gone forever.

Will you be any different?



Don
(Moderator)

[mycurlylocks]

Survey completed. Good luck with the research.

[alecE]

Well, survey completed and good luck with your work. It wasn't clear if you were comparing the price of ebooks to the price of paperbacks or hardbacks and there was no option to indicate that ebooks should be 100% of the price of printed books (or even more).

[DiapDealer]

I don't know about anybody else, but I can't wait for the first "What do you think about books being downloaded directly into your brain via a cortical shunt" survey to be posted by a marketing student. If only to break up the monotony of "The eBook Survey." Seriously, is it the equivalent of the "What I did on my summer vacation" report or what?

[dray20]

Thanks for your help and advices!

[meeera]

1. Not everyone is male or female
2. Why aggregate everyone over 60 into one group, when all other adults are in five-year groups? You're missing a lot of potential granularity.
4. From "did not attend school" to "graduated from high school"? What about people who attended school but did not graduate high school?
5. You're missing a whole lot of languages. A write-in box would be better, if you can't do a drop-down.
6. Learn more about your topic before attempting to formulate questions like this. If this is _market_ research, why are the choices Kindle/iPad/phone/computer/other ereader? Which phones? What about other tablets? Why give two brand names precedence, while all other brands are plonked into heterogeneous groups? This question makes no sense, and is very unlikely to give you usable information. In addition, you've written "ever read", meaning if I've ever opened a book even once in an iPad, that gets a tick, despite me doing 99.9% of my reading on, say, a Kobo. You've not even attempted to gather information on what people are using daily, instead of what they looked at once five years ago. As it is, I ticked every square. What have you learnt from my answer?
8. is missing more options or a write-in "other" option.
9. is unanswerable. I think e-cookbooks should be a lot less than their beautiful embroidered-cover hardback counterparts. The gap for mass-market novels should be a little less. For small-press books, perhaps even less again.
10. Again unanswerable. They'll never completely and utterly replace hardcopy books, much as buggy whips still exist in the world.