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Originally Posted by pwalker8
One of the stats that I'm interested in is how many ebooks are sold to what I would call hard core readers verse how many are sold to the 50% of the population that only reads 10 or less books a year. If a majority of books (or a majority of non best seller books) are sold to hard core buyers, then it's quite possible that a cross platform ebook store would be successful if it somehow appeals to hard core readers.
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I'm pretty sure the majority of books are sold to a small, hard core crowd. That was the vibe I got from working in a B&N a few years back. You could tell which customers were readers and which customers were there to pick up a book that was required reading for a class and maybe flip through some magazines in the cafe. And that was before Kindles mainstreamed e-book reading.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
After thinking about it a bit, I would say that no-DRM (or the ability to easily put books on multiple platforms) is necessary, but not necessarily sufficient to bring readers in. I still think you would need either a Jim Dandy reading app or a great shopping experience to pull people in.
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You know, I hear about the shopping experience, but buying e-books from the Barnes and Noble website or Android app is about the same for me as buying e-books from Amazon's website or Android app. I will say that I usually know what book I'm looking for before going to either site, so it may well be (probably is) the case that Amazon is better at 'discoverability' of similar books than B&N is.
My big B&N complaints are lack of reviews (which is a result of lack of traffic, I think) and smaller selection. I have gone looking for books on B&N that are unavailable, though Amazon has a Kindle version. That's the case with the book I'm reading right now (thanks Alf!).
Also, B&N strengthened their DRM with no warning to customers. That put me off of buying from them for half a year or so. I'm only just taking some tentative steps back now.