B-b-b-buying spree! EBook vs. paper

[taosaur]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Yes, and yes.

We have 3 or 4 Half-Price Book stores in town (lost track when I pretty much stopped buying paper books). Three of them on are on "loop" on our outerbelt (highway circling the city). Some Friday nights after work I would hop in the car and hit all three, one after the other and come home with a hundred books!

Ha, I lived in Columbus in the pre-ebook era and haunted those stores regularly, but I would usually just hit one at a time and rarely walked out with more than five or six books, though it took considerable restraint. I miss browsing a huge, random collection like that, but the recommendations that reach me here on MR, on Amazon, and elsewhere online are probably more effective at getting good books in front of me. Still, it felt like a treasure hunt every time.

With ebooks, I don't think I've ever bought more than five or six at once. My biggest haul of pbooks from HPB was maybe 10 or 12 at one time.

[WashWest]

Originally Posted by BelleZora

Although I always had shelves of paper books, I was never tempted to hoard them because I couldn't stand clutter. Something about ebooks has freed my apparent inner hoarder. They are all neatly organized in Calibre. I just sorted them out, keeping only the ones I really want to read in the near future in my main library...739 books. Never would I have allowed myself that many paper books. I don't even want to mention how many books, mostly freebies and public domain, are in secondary Calibre libraries.

Same here for the first part; I hadn't even thought about putting all the free stuff in a secondary Calibre library! Sounds like a project for the New Year.

I have 268 ebooks in my library; yesterday I bought 7 ebooks from Kobo, the most ever in one day.

[Tarana]

The only time I've ever bought more than 3 new books at one time was buying college textbooks required for the semester. I don't even bat an eye buying 20 ebooks by the same author (or in the case of westerns, same genre), on sale for 99 cents today only.

That said, I've bought 2 grocery bags worth of books at garage sales. They all go to my Mom, who prefers paper, but is willing to move on to ebook once she's finished all the paperbacks I already bought her. I only have about 5 novels, and those I'm hoping to get OCR'd so that I can read them. Cookbooks on the other hand.... too hard to cook from an ereader.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by WashWest

Same here for the first part; I hadn't even thought about putting all the free stuff in a secondary Calibre library! Sounds like a project for the New Year.

I have my free and paid-for ebooks in the same library, but I also have a custom column for the price paid, and in this way I can easily tell which books were freebies, and which I paid for.

I have 2,341 paid-for book in my calibre library. I've bought 248 of them this year.

[ApK]

Interesting, but be it second library or price column, why is noting which books were free significant to you? It's not like they have resale value or anything. Sadly.

ApK

[Fbone]

My largest one day total is 7. This occurred during Kobo's 95% unlimited use code.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by ApK

Interesting, but be it second library or price column, why is noting which books were free significant to you? It's not like they have resale value or anything. Sadly.

ApK

If I bought it, I definitely intend to read it. If it was free, it was just something that caught my attention a little bit. I may or may not read it.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Fbone

My largest one day total is 7. This occurred during Kobo's 95% unlimited use code.

I'm glad I missed that code... I'd probably have needed a new keyboard, a new mouse, and a few extra hard drives. With such a code, I'd not go on a buying spree; it'd be a raid.

[soulfuldog]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

If I bought it, I definitely intend to read it. If it was free, it was just something that caught my attention a little bit. I may or may not read it.

Same for me too, plus, if I read a free book and really enjoy it, knowing that it was free, I'm more willing to pay full price for another book by the same author.

[Tattncat]

If I were buying paper books and not ebooks, my purchasing would be greatly curtailed. If nothing else room constraints would prohibit the majority of my purchases.
I would not be a happy camper (er.....reader).

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

If I bought it, I definitely intend to read it. If it was free, it was just something that caught my attention a little bit. I may or may not read it.

I'll agree that books I'm willing to pay for are ones that I'm generally more interested in but....if I lose interest after I've bought them it doesn't matter. Once I've bought it the money's gone so it might as well be free at that point. (Unless I can return it for a refund....I don't think I've ever done that with a book though. Maybe because I don't keep track of what was free vs paid for or where I got them. Maybe I should start just in case, some day, I want to return one...I'll think about that.)

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

In the last few days, I've had the good fortune to be able to use A LOT of big Kobo codes of 65%-85%, some of them multi-use where others apparently only get one use (don't ask me why, because I don't know). Let's just say that the amount of books I bought could be called slightly disturbing. 36... Average price: €1.17. Paperback versions would have cost me €7.95.

Some points:

1. The money spent is not the problem. (It was mostly covered by an early christmas gift.)
2. All of those books were on my wishlist.
3. At one point in time, I would have bought them anyway.
4. No, I don't have buying sprees like this regularly.

Ebooks have the advantages of instant delivery and the fact that they take no space, even if you never read them, so it doesn't really matter if you buy them now and read them only after three years. (Assuming you're not going to pay full price for a very new book.)

What I was thinking however: would I have bought all of these books *in paperback*, if the price of the paperback had been €1.17?

Me, probably not. I never bought more than 5-6 (one complete series) at once.

You? Would you buy something like 36+ paperbacks at once if you:

- had the chance to get them at a price of €1.17 / $1.60...
- knew the normal price of the paperback would be €7.95 / $10.95...
- knew you would eventually end up with all of them anyway?

Have you ever bought such an amount of ebooks at once?

If you would do this or have done this with ebooks, but wouldn't with paperbacks (not even if the price was as low), then what is the reason for this difference?

During the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale I've been known to buy a large amount of the ones that are 100% off.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by crich70

During the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale I've been known to buy a large amount of the ones that are 100% off.

LOL Obviously.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by crich70

During the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale I've been known to buy a large amount of the ones that are 100% off.

I'm not certain that 'buy' is the right verb there. What is the word for 'buying something that is free'?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'm not certain that 'buy' is the right verb there. What is the word for 'buying something that is free'?

"Acquire", perhaps?