[andrewburt]

So, question for everyone, where do you buy your ebooks from -- and why? I imagine the most common reply will be "Amazon" of course, but I wanted to delve into that more deeply, with the "Why?" part. (Given that books bought on Amazon are often DRM'd, and only in one format, precluding their use on non-Kindle devices.)

And if you buy elsewhere, why there? (B&N? Smashwords? Small ebookstores?)

Where I'm going with the question is that there's this report, from Goldman Sachs, that says Amazon sells twice as many ebooks as B&N -- however, I've studied a wide range of data from authors (mostly professional authors) and found that B&N sales are typically more like 10% or under compared to Amazon.

So I'm wondering (a) does B&N really sell half as much, or is it really more like 1/10th as much? and (b) why is that?-- since there's more hard evidence of how many devices B&N sells, and so it seems like B&N should be higher than 1/10th of Amazon. (Plus there are so many non-Nook .EPUB reading devices that would tend to steer traffic to B&N or other places that aren't just .MOBI.)

Somewhere there's a disconnect in the numbers, so I'm trying to get a handle on where.

And then I'm just generally curious how people feel about buying from Smashwords, or other smaller ebookstore. (It seems to me there'd be a benefit from getting ebooks DRM free, and in multiple formats, but the evidene points to people sticking mostly with Amazon. So... what's the biggest reason for that?)

Not knocking Amazon -- I generally like Amazon quite well -- just trying to wrap my head around discrepancies in reported numbers, and curious how people feel.