[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by tompe

I do not see why people care so much about the price. I read 50-100 books per year.

I read 50,000 words/day more than 3x/week. I read 150,000 words some days. Marathon nothing-but-reading days can be 250,000 words. I remember a stretch in high school when I averaged reading 3 books a day. I'd get to school, check out one from the library, read it during my breaks in class & at lunch, check out a second book for the rest of the day, and at the end, turn it in for another book to take home. They tended to be short YA books, but I got into the habit of *always* reading. 100 pages/hour, on average; a five-minute wait at the train station is almost ten pages of reading time.

I am insanely grateful to fanfic writers who produce excellent stories in mega-epic lengths. But there aren't enough of them to keep me in ebooks all the time, so I also buy ebooks. Right now, I could probably afford $1500/year on ebooks... two years ago I could not have. $30/week on entertainment for me, that I can't share with anyone without violating a TOS, is well outside my budget for selfish indulgences.

I certainly can't afford to double that for the other two avid readers in the house. (Neither of them reads at anything like my speed.)

A bigger problem is time. What I cannot afford is to read to many bad books or start with to many bad books. That means I have to give up a good book. So I only look for new authors to try to find very good books. Books that are just OK or good I have a lot of unread at home already.

I do a lot of reading the HTML samples at Smashwords. I have standards--No more than $6 for fiction; if there's a noticeable typo or grammar error in the blurb that bothers me, I don't bother checking the sample. If the blurb has phrasing that bothers me, I don't bother reading further. I don't buy without sampling. If the sample annoys me, I give up on the book. If I read several pages of the sample and I really really want to know what happens next--I buy the book.

And of course the probability to find a very good book is much higher if it is recommended AND it has been published by a real publisher.

I'm going to enjoy watching people try to find a phrase to describe the older publishers when the new ones get more prevalent, and use many of the same methods as the Agency-pricing group. What makes a "real" publisher? Author advances? Hardcover books? Ads in Publishers Weekly?