Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
And see? I'm not sure that that's true, either. Not everyone flips through, from the cover. Lots of people pick up a book, (if they're righties, let's keep this simple for my sake), and will use their right thumb to find "page 1." Which is typically the first page of the first chapter, right? And start reading there.Iv'e seen that behavior more than I've seen "flip from the cover back, page-by-page." I was recently at a bookstore, and I watched people, specifically due to this very convo. I saw more "flip to Ch. 1" folks, than scanners from the cover back. Could be that they were just trying to decide, of course.
Hitch
|
You make very good points, but at this one, I'm not sure if you can extrapolate what people do in a bookstore to what they do once they've got the book home. In my old print-book days, I'd flip to the body of the work to get a taste of a new author's writing style. Occasionally, as I got older, it would even be to check the font size.
Doesn't mean once I owned it that I didn't read the dedication or front stuff.
I will say that I tend to skip all the praise at the front of ebooks. They might have been useful in my more naive and print-book reading days as a suggestion on how good the book is. But I've always viewed those pages as a selling point - something to tempt you to buy the book while you're in the store - rather than anything useful once I actually own the book.
