Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
You find that so difficult to believe, VR? I only downloaded a couple of their free "classics," and that was mostly out of curiosity. I suspect that most folks didn't download them -- most folks seem to be interested in newer stuff. Perhaps a side effect of being forced to read "classics" in public school. 
On the other hand, I've actually bought more books from Sony's book store than I thought I would, probably about 20 or so -- not nearly as many as I have from Baen. I tend to get things from Sony that I don't expect to want to read again later (so I won't be bothered if they're not available for download again later), and I find the convenience of getting them pre-formatted in BBeB is nice (I can usually read them on the L setting  ). |
But I don't think, and this is a guess, that you or I are at all typical Sony Reader buyers. You and I hang out here where we have better public domain books to download. And you and I know of other stores to buy new books in Sony-format. While I'm not saying the average buyer is stupid (uh, wait, let me think about that for a minute), I'm just assuming that more than half of them don't even know MR or Baen, etc. exist. If that's true, then you have a buyer of a new gadget and they have the opportunity to download 100 books free within a certain amount of time from the one and only bookstore they know about. Okay, it's Dickens (who?) and not Rowling, but even I had to make sure I didn't let that offer slip away.
Even if just a quarter of the owners did what I did, that's 7.5 million downloaded books which is several times as many as Sony is claiming. And that leaves no room for even one purchased book. Nope. I don't buy it. *If* the numbers are correct, then I'm pretty sure that the 3 million refers to sold books other than the Sony Classics. It is the sales of
those books that Sony wants to tell the publishers about anyway.
And, as I mentioned earlier, if that's the case, then Sony Reader owners have, on average, only purchased 10 books each from Sony. I don't know what a typical buy rate is for avid book readers but I would have guessed that over a period of several or many months it was bound to be a lot higher than that. A pretty depressing result, in my opinion. Maybe they found that there just weren't that many good books for sale at Sony.
