From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 08:52:18 -0700

An Amazon customer survey in my mailbox is devoted mainly to
persuading me that Amazon is "innovative" -- not a quality I value in
a company.  (That is, if you give me what I want, I don't care whether
it's innovative or not, and if you teach a fly to type 200 words a
minute that's innovative, but I don't care.)  What struck my eye was
this question:

About how many books do you read in a typical year? Please consider
books you read and complete for yourself either personally or
professionally.

2 or more books per month
About one book per month
From 5 to 12 books per year
From 3 to 4 books per year
About 1 - 2 books per year
Less than one book per year

To my professorial eye, they want a lot of detail about people who
don't read many books at all (half the questions) and people who read
some books (half the question) but no differentiation among power
users -- 2 a month, that's the max, when there are plenty of people
reading an order of magnitude more than that, and certainly some
people at two orders of magnitude -- good customers of Amazon I would
think.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.