Quote:
Originally Posted by petrucci
It concludes that only 16 percent of used book sales at Amazon cannibalize new book purchases.
With regards to the study you seem to be an outlier. I wonder if its results are still valid?
Obviously price can be a factor when you (the OP) are purchasing a particular book. Thus, in many instances you favor the paperback. Is it a factor when considering which one of several titles to purchase?
|
The answer to your question is no. I usually go looking for a specific book that I read about or heard about. If I'm looking for a topic, not a specific book, I usually go to
Smashwords for novels and
O'Reilly for technical books.
But the study you cited made another error.
Quote:
|
Our analysis suggests that used books are poor substitutes for new books for most of Amazon's customers. ... As a result only 16% of used book sales at Amazon cannibalize new book purchases. The remaining 84% of used book sales apparently would not have occurred at Amazon's new book prices.
|
.
I buy used pbooks at Amazon because they're cheap and extremely convenient. But I don't buy
any ebooks at Amazon because Amazon only sells ebooks in their own proprietary format for their own proprietary ereader. No interest.
So pbooks sales do not cannibalize new book sales at Amazon for me, but not for the reason they considered.