Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
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.
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.
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I've always heard that a smaller core of readers buy most books, but just haven't seen any good numbers or research to back that up.
The two biggest reasons that I don't buy from B&N is lack of selection and difficulty browsing for books. I think that people who already know what books they want to buy have a very different experience in most ebook stores than people who are browsing for a book they might like. None of the ebook stores have a very good browsing experience. With B&N, I can put in an author's name and pull back a bunch of books that not only are not by that author, but aren't even close. Amazon will usually pull back the author, thought they do like to put in a bunch of other authors they are trying to push on you.
Amazon isn't horrible/terrible, but they could be so much more. How hard would it be to have a database of authors that I want to be notified every time a new kindle ebook becomes available? Automatically add any author that I buy one of their books, but let me add and remove authors from the list. It doesn't even have to be real time. They already have most of the information, it really would be all that hard to do.