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.