Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
I guess, once again, I'm the outcast. First, I think the marketing surveys are accurate. They certainly reflect my habits and those of people I know. More importantly, as large as the online bookselling marketplace is, more books are still bought at b&m stores. That may be changing, but it hasn't changed yet.
Second, every naysayer (and me, too, as a non-naysayer) regarding the marketing surveys isn't buttressing the contrary view with any fact, just anecdotal evidence or personal experience. Which leads me to one of the failings in MR discussions: too many of us take as established fact that represents the views of the majority (or even a plurality) of book buyers and readers both anecdotal evidence that supports our perspective or our own personal experience -- and we become adamant that our "facts" are the only true "facts". Perhaps we are deluding ourselves.
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Well that is quite true. For me the difference between how adventurous I am online as opposed to in a bookstore could be characterised with words such as 'staggering'. So it's probably natural for me not to be able to see any veracity in a mentioned market survey that says otherwise.
But of course, my case is also different because I'm in Australia. The cost of books in bookstores actually prohibits experimentation for me. Whereas the noticeably more friendly costing in online purchasing - whether for physical books or ebooks - encourages the opposite. The only time I find that a b&m bookstore encourages any kind of wild purchasing is at the bargain table, where you can pick up ludicrously cheap novels that the store is trying to get rid of.
My experience in b&m stores is that I tend to limit my perusing to my favourite genre(s) because at that price I don't want to take too many risks. Then I look over the bargain table to see if any pops out at $5 that I can take a punt on. Alot of that changed when I realised I could purchase from Book Depository for a third of the price and I could explore more widely knowing that I wasn't going to waste any money in the bookstore anyway, but that was a relatively recent thing.