Thread: What do you like to read?
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Old 04-02-2011, 08:13 PM   #21
Elfwreck
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chrisarippel View Post
Elfwreck,

Thanks so much for your comments about the poll being heavily skewed toward mainstream-publishing mentality and the point about POD. I will rethink my wording for the next version of the survey.
You're welcome. It's not bad; it's just seeking data from a perspective that doesn't mesh with my reading choices.
Things I'm not sure how to categorize:
  • Fanfic, as I mentioned, which is sometimes available in ebook formats
  • Former in-print books reclaimed by authors & published as ebooks (sometimes has POD options)
  • New ebooks by self-pubbed authors (may or may not have POD option)
  • Documents not from the web: job-related files, school assignments, private docs from friends (I suspect that, at the moment, this isn't anyone's top use of an ebook reader--but both businesses and schools are trying to figure out how to use them)
  • Multimedia ebook-ish docs (which I don't touch, but may become more popular)--"enhanced" ebooks
  • Documents that aren't remotely booklike (most of which are something like "docs you made yourself" or "docs from the web", but somehow, including bus schedules, hotel reservation verifications, and shopping lists under "ebooks" seems weird.)
  • Audiobooks. Which fit in the general categories of "bestsellers/others/indie," but are still very different uses of the ebook reader.
  • Podcasts. Ditto.
  • Ebooks with no print version by non-indie publishers. (F'rex, some of P.C. Hodgell's ebooks by Baen.)
  • Bootleg/pirated ebooks. (Which, although a worthwhile category to gather data about, you don't need to ask--not enough people will admit to it to make the numbers useful. But you need to be aware you're not getting that info.)
But even those aren't how I think of ebook reading. If I were gathering data on ebook readers, I'd ignore the "bestseller" category--who decides that? How would a reader know if a given ebook is or was a "bestseller?" Those who mostly buy currently-on-the-charts bestsellers may know; those who buy or read a notably broader range may not pay attention to whether a given book is a bestseller. (And if you read ebooks that were bestsellers 8 years ago, where does that fit?)

Without knowing what you're trying to do with this info, it's hard to come up with better phrasing or categories. If it's just for idle curiosity, anything interesting to you works; if you're an aspiring author and want to know how people use their ebook readers, that's different from if you work with an indie publisher and are trying to figure out how broad the marketplace is.
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