From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 23:04:26 -0700
This is genuinely surprising. Even outside the realm where people
read several books a week as part of academic duties, there is a large
number of people who read genre fiction in buckets. Romance readers
are probably at the top of the list, but I have known people who read
a science fiction novel every day. In my local used bookstore, I see
some of the same people every time I stop in, filling a shopping bag
with paperback mysteries.
I suspect, with zero evidence, that there is a short head and a long
tail among readers. The short head--people who read gobs of
books--may comprise a very big part of the overall market. We pay too
much attention to the Long Tail.
Joe Esposito
On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 9:05 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.
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