Quote:
Originally Posted by sirmaru
You the nail on the head. The history and biography books I read are mere compendiums of words. I never look for authors, pictures or covers. I look for subject matter and buy the most pages I can get for the buck.
Actually, I place all my eBooks of interest to me in an Excel spreadsheet and sort by Pages per Dollar. Then I buy the highest ranked to read. The more pages I can get for the same price determines which eBook I actually buy. Pages of End Notes count equally as other text pages since the more notes tends to make the information more reliable.
Most of the eBooks I read run from 600 to 1,000 pages each and many are sets of 2 or 3 eBooks each of that length. I rarely buy an eBook of less than 400 pages.
I find candidates for my spreadsheet by authors being interviewed on TV, documentaries I watch on TV, looking at the Book of the Month Club site for interesting books, reading the NY Times email I get daily, and reading about them at other internet sites.
Thus, the Amazon model fits me perfectly since they supply the number of pages and price for me to enter in my spreadsheet. Hype from old line publishers is totally irrelevant to my selections.
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Hum, that might explain some things. Not all authors have the same quality, attention to details or for than matter accuracy. Most of my reading is either genre (SF&F, mystery or adventure for the most part), or related to specific subjects (mostly History, though some science, law and economy). When researching a new subject (say for example, Roman History or WW II), I tend to look for the best regarded books and best authors. I pay for quality, not quantity. It doesn't matter how many pages a book has if the author's main source for Roman history seems to be the HBO series Rome or his main source for the facts about Iwo Jima was John Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima.