Quote:
Originally Posted by sirmaru
You hit 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.
|
Well if you are satisfied with this method more power to you. I read fiction based on the author and select new authors based a blurb that makes the book sound interesting or a personal, MR, or blog recommendation . Non fiction, I tend to ignore the author and choose books by searching for something on a subject or a friend's recommendation (or a catchy title).
Number of pages makes no difference. Some authors can tell a story in 150 pages that is a lot more satisfactory to me than some 1000 page books. Some authors write books that I enjoy so much that I wish they would go on forever. It is about enjoyment for me in both fiction and non fiction. I will struggle with a difficult non fiction book on a subject I am interested in if that is all there is (Knuth comes to mind) but I prefer a well thought ought and well explained book to a long book filled with difficult to decipher facts and studies.
So what traditional publishers have done for me in the past and still continue to do is provide me with books that I like.
I have never paid attention to who published a book when buying one and have bought many books before ebooks from very small publishers and even directly from authors.
I don't actually care who publishes a book but looking at the books I have read in the last three+ years (803) that I have marked a read in calibre 90% are from traditional publishers.
This is because I have been reading for 60+ years and have a very long list of authors I know I will enjoy.
I do read books by new authors and some of these are Indy. And I don't check out who publishes it before buying.
Overall my satisfaction level with books is very high with books published by traditional publishers, big or small and not nearly so high with self published, although in the time before ebooks when books could not be marketed for a minimal cost it was equal.
So this is what publishers have done for me and do even more so today. They give me a reasonable assurance that I will find the book I am buying is worth reading and not just words on a page.
Helen