Quote:
Originally Posted by xg4bx
i've checked out b&n and frankly the selection is miserable.
|
I read this statement often from people who buy at Amazon but I don't understand the basis for it. Other than a handful of ebooks that are exclusive to Amazon, what books are available at Amazon but not at B&N? Certainly all of the midsize and large publishers release their books through both. Perhaps there are some small publishers (publishers of 10 or fewer books) or some self-publishing authors that do not sell through Amazon, but I cn't believe that is more than a handful. Any published book that goes through a major distributor such as Bookmasters or Ingram or Smashwords can be found at either store.
And raw numbers are not a sufficient claim that selection at one is better than at another. To say that one has 2.35 million titles and the other has 2.1 million titles available is meaningless unless you eliminate all the duplicate versions and parse out what those numbers really mean.
I'd like to see someone who makes this claim that Amazon's selection is better than B&N's selection back up the claim with valid information and not just broad generalizations or speculation.
One other thing: Selection is fickle. It is meaningless, as noted above, to talk of raw numbers because if Amazon's selection of Romance titles is better than B&N's, that has value only if one reads Romance titles. If you never buy a Romance title, then who cares who has more titles in the genre than someone else -- the Romance selection is meaningless.