Ebook Buying Addicts' Support Thread

[DrNefario]

I built some calculations into the Kindle part of my spreadsheet, so I can answer this pretty well for those, which do make up the bulk of my ebooks.

1. A little over 50% were free. 51.8%

2. I have read 14% of the freebies, vs 54% of non-freebies.

3. I don't tend to review anything on Amazon or Goodreads or anywhere that stores a star rating. I normally write a few lines about everything on at least one forum. (It used to be the What are You Reading? thread here on Mobileread, but I dropped that when I had too many other communities.)

Edit: Looking at this year's reading, I can see 4 free kindle books in the last few months. I didn't much like 3 of them, so it's probably for the best that I didn't review them.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by JWT

Hello,
To the ebook buying addicts out there, three questions?
1.Of the hundreds and thousands of books on your devices what percentage were free?
2. How many of the freebies you have downloaded have you actually read, and
3. Have you formally reviewed any of the feebies you have read - what percentage of the freebies have you reviewed?
Thanks
John Westley Turnbull

1. I have slightly over 5700 ebooks in calibre. About 18% were free. That's probably an over-estimate, as some are expanded omnibuses, where the extracted books are marked as costing £0, and the price is left with the omnibus.
2. About 85% of the freebies have been read
3. None. I don't post reviews.

[ekbell]

I have a lot of *free* books. I don't exactly keep track of all of them so I can't give exact figures.

I do have stats for books for what is likely the biggest chunk; my free-to-share virtual library (ie. public domain, creative commons, open access, and Baen free). I've read a bit over a tenth of those.

Another chunk are books that came along with books I wanted to buy (book bundles and the like), including Open Media's recursive free book offers. Unfortunately, I can not give stats but I have found some very good books this way.

Then there are a few books from authors and publishers that I liked well enough to check for websites. This includes a couple of free book/story of the month offerings as well as a handful of indie authors.

And I do have a very few freebies that I picked up from amazon back when I was first checking out ebooks. The first few turned out to be of dubious quality so the rest languish unread, only in my library because it would be more work to find and remove them.

I have never published a review of any book but I have searched for more books in the library and/or bought more books by a particular author because I enjoyed a freebie.


So I have a lot of free books, I haven't read the majority of them, at this point I'm reluctant to acquire and read books without either a publisher or an author of known quality, and I don't do reviews.

[Tarana]

In response to JWT:

1. I only track unread and currently 27% are free. I am not counting the ones where I used credits to get free.
2. About 200. Once I've read it, I don't track price so just a guess after looking at my goodreads completed library.
3. I do a review on every book I read including freebees. Often they are very short as too many reviews include too much plot.

Last week I went on a buying binge because all the Bill Slider books were on deep discount so I finished off acquiring that series. Author is Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. Detective novels. My Mom is interested in reading the series so no guilt.