R. Garcia's Website
  • Home
  • Documents
    • Fiction
    • Poetry and Poetry-Related
    • Humor
    • Essays
    • Photographs
  • Blog: The Eclectic Life
  • Quotes
  • Books
    • The Sun Zebra
  • : ^ )
    • Fun Quotes
    • Rolando's Official Web Mascot
    • Cool Videos
    • The Power of Words
    • Odd and Fantastic Pictures
  • Contact

The Strange World of E-Books

10/13/2012

8 Comments

 
If you buy a print book, the book IS yours. You bought it, it belongs to you. No can one can take it away from you and you can sell it if you please, or family members can inherit it if you pass away, and they can later donate it to a library. This is not the case with e-books.

Many readers don’t understand that when they buy an e-book from Amazon or other businesses they are not buying a book, they are merely entering into a licensing agreement. You don’t own an e-book, you are just leasing it. And legally you cannot sell your copy of the e-book, have your family members inherit your e-books, or give them away to a library.

Amazon created a huge stink back in 2009 when it deleted (of all books) George Orwell’s “1984” from Kindles because the book had been placed for sale on Amazon by a company that did not have the rights to sell it. After some readers brought a lawsuit Amazon clarified and limited the conditions under which they could delete digital content from their customer’s Kindles. This happened again in 2010 with books that contained fictional accounts of incest. This time Amazon deleted the books from the Kindle archive. If customers had the book in their Kindles, the books were not affected, but if they had moved the books to their Kindle archives, the books vanished and could not be re-downloaded. In the first case Amazon gave refunds to their customers, and in the second case they reinstated the book to the archives of readers who had bought them (although they deleted them from the general store due to content violation). But the point is that Amazon HAS the ability to delete the e-book you purchased.

In an earlier post I have also covered the fact that Amazon monitors what you read with your Kindle, how you read it, and the highlights or notes you make.

In many ways this is a strange new world. I am sitting typing this next to a bookshelf that contains some books that belonged to long-dead relatives. Now these books belong to me and my family. The publishers or vendors of these books cannot take them away from me, in fact they don’t even know I have them, and the books have marks on them whose nature is only known to me and my relatives. These books are in many ways a connection to the past, a bridge between generations.

As most of you know I am all for self-publishing and e-books. In fact I believe that when it comes to e-books, their sales pattern is more natural than that of print books. But I wonder what sort of world we are creating. One hundred, or two hundred years from now, what will reading look like for families? Will everything be electronic? Will people be able to inherit and read the books (files?) read by their ancestors and see what comments they typed on them or what passages they highlighted? Or will the reading performed by one generation be cut off from the next?

What do you think?

                                   ***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.
8 Comments

The Mystery of the 3 Star Reviews

6/8/2012

16 Comments

 
I was looking at the patterns of 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 star reviews of books on Amazon and I noticed something interesting that I want to share with you.

When you look at a book’s Amazon page there is a graph that displays the number of total reviews a book has, distributed by the number of stars. Taking my own book, the Sun Zebra, as an example, the graph looks like this:

Picture
This is an example of the type of graph you get when readers like a book. There are many 5 star reviews and a much lower number of reviews with fewer stars. However, even 42 is not a lot of reviews for statistical purposes, so I will concentrate here on books that have 200 or more reviews.

The first such book I want to show you is “Wool” by Hugh Howey. Having a book with this many reviews and almost a 4.9 average is a significant accomplishment for an author and a sure sign the vast majority of readers loved the book. A large bar of 5 star reviews is characteristic of very popular books.

Picture
The converse is also true. For example, Robert Jordan’s “Crossroads of Twilight” is an example of a book a lot of readers bought but the majority didn’t like. Here you find a situation where you have a large bar with 1 star reviews.
Picture
I also wanted to see how these graphs looked in books with intermediate ratings. For example, could I find books with large bars of 4 and 2 star reviews? After skimming over 4,000 books on Amazon that I searched by “popularity” and “reviews of 1 star or more,” to my surprise I found none. The most common way in which a book gets an average rating of 4 is because the number of 4, 3, 2, and 1 star reviews counteract the effect of the 5 star reviews such as in the case of “Loving Frank” by Nancy Hogan.
Picture
Likewise, I could not find any book with a rating of near 2 with a prominent bar of 2 star reviews. The way a book ends up with an average rating of 2 is that the number of 5, 4, 3, and 2 star reviews bring up the average counteracting the effect of the 1 star reviews such as the book “Trace” by Patricia Cornwell.
Picture
I was especially interested in 3 star reviews because these indicate that, in theory, the book is neither very good nor very bad. Surely I would find a book with 200 or more reviews and a prominent 3 star column, like this example that I made up:
Picture
That was not the case.

The way a book ends up with a rating of around 3 on Amazon is if a lot of people like it but an equally large number of people hate it. Such is the situation of “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E. L. James. Here there are 2 large bars at opposite ends of the scale: 5 stars and 1 stars.

Picture
However, the situation doesn’t have to be this extreme. Take the book “Mile 81” by Stephen King. Here the 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 star reviews are nearly all the same, and the graph is a near flat line.
Picture
I want to state that the reason I didn’t find it is that I may have missed it (I only checked 4,000 books and there are more than one million books on Amazon).  So please if you know of any book with 200 or more reviews and a prominent 3 star bar that stretches past all the others, please leave a comment and let me know.

But let’s get to the point of this post. If my observations are true, what does this say about the psychology of the reviewer? Why does an average book achieve a neutral rating of “3,” not by the majority of the reviewers giving it a 3, but rather by half of the reviewers rating it above 3 and the other half rating it below 3? Is this a reflection of our polarized society where we can’t find a middle ground on anything?

What do you think?

Note: the links on the books are provided just so you can check them out. I do not advocate you buying them except, of course, my own.  : ^ )


                                    ***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.
16 Comments

Beware of Amazon's Pricing Bot!

11/11/2011

0 Comments

 
Author James Crawford had an e-book on Amazon called "Blood Soaked and Contagious", but he decided that, as a promotion, he would publish the first 3 chapters of his book on Barnes and Noble for free. So when his promotional book was published the similarity between the free B&N version and the Amazon version confused Amazon's pricing mechanism, which proceeded to list his book on Amazon as "free". By the time the problem was corrected 5,000 plus copies of his book had been given away for free and, due to Amazon's pricing policies, he is not entitled to any compensation for this error. You can read the author's account here.

Pricing a book for free on other outlets is a very common trick writers use to give their books away for free on Amazon because of Amazon's price matching policy. What writers need to remember is that the process is automated; it is a robot, a program, which makes the decisions. So if you have a book on Amazon make sure any promotional excerpts you publish elsewhere at a lower price are very obviously different from your Amazon book. Lest you confuse Amazon's pricing bot!

Please check out my first collection of short stories, The Sun Zebra. 

0 Comments

Giving Kindle Books Away for Free at Amazon

7/19/2011

0 Comments

 
Just thought I would share with you this tip that I read in cyberland.

Many Kindle authors want to give away some of their material for free on Amazon as a promotional strategy. The problem is that Amazon does not allow books to be given away for free. Digital books between 3 and 10 megabytes must be priced at a minimum of $0.99. And in case you are wondering, yes, selling your book at $0.99 is vastly different from giving it away for free. But there is a trick you can use.

Amazon also has the policy of price matching. That is, if a competitor like Barnes and Noble offers your book for a lower price then Amazon will match that price, at least for a while. So what many authors do when they want to give away their Kindle books is that they publish them for free on sites like Smashwords. Smashwords then distributes to Barnes and Noble and other book outlets. Amazon notices that their competitors have listed your book for free and lowers the price to zero for about a week or so at a time.

This has dramatic effects. Some authors report that their free books were downloaded at a rate of hundreds of downloads per hour with some reaching into the tens of thousands during the "free" period. Of course, these authors were not making money, but this is a very effective way to advertise yourself drawing attention to your other books and to your website.


0 Comments

E-reader Ownership Doubles in Six Months

6/28/2011

0 Comments

 
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project of the Pew Research Center, the number of American adults who own an e-reader doubled in six months. From November 2010 to May 2011 e-reader ownership went from 6% to 12%. Despite this remarkable growth, the e-reader ownership is well below that of other devices like Laptops (56%), desktops (57%), and cell phones (83%). Hopefully this means there is still a lot of room for improvement!
0 Comments

John Locke Sells One Million E-books!

6/20/2011

0 Comments

 
Author John Locke has become the first Indie author to join the Kindle Million Club. This is in recognition of him having sold one million books at the Kindle store. He was able to compete successfully against established writers thanks to the platform that e-books provided him, and also thanks to his unque approach to writing and selling books. He shares his writing/publishing/marketing secrets in a recent e-book.
0 Comments

Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books!

5/20/2011

0 Comments

 
I wrote before in my blog that sales of e-books would probably increase faster than expected. Now Amazon.com has put out a news release revealing that its sales of Kindle books have exceeded those of its print books. This is good news for authors considering going the self-publishing route. The bad news is that the Kindle store has 950,000 e-books. So, if you self-publish your book, the Kindle store will have 950,001 books. How will you make your e-book stand out over the other 950,000? Time for a reality-check?
0 Comments
    Picture

    I am a tinker, tailor,
    soldier, sailor,
    rich man, poor man,
    beggar-man, thief!

    Follow Phantomimic on Twitter

    RSS Feed

    Blogroll

    Laura Novak
    Barbara Alfaro
    Suzanne Rosenwasser
    Sunny Lockwood
    Christine Macdonald
    Jennie Rosenbaum
    Kristen Lamb
    Joe Konrath
    Sweepy Jean
    Ingrid Ricks
    The Jotter
    Robert David MacNeil
    Molly Greene
    The Passive Voice
    Third Sunday Blog Carnival
    Marilou George
    Laura Zera
    Jeri Walker-Bickett
    Lia London

    Categories

    All
    Advice For Writers
    Amazon
    Art
    Author
    Ballet
    Bloggers
    Bluegrass Music
    Book Promotion
    Book Review
    Cats
    Censorship
    Clopper Mill
    Coffe
    Cool Places
    Coral Castle
    E Books
    E-Books
    Enchanted Highway
    Fair
    Fiction
    Glenstone
    Goodreads
    Grammar
    Guest Post
    Harry Potter
    Indie
    Interview
    Issues
    Kdp Select
    Kindle
    Milestone
    Milestones
    Muses
    Nell
    Novel
    Nuclear Missile Sites
    Painting
    Picture
    Poe Toaster
    Poetry
    Politics
    Prague Quadrennial
    Print Books
    Quality
    Reading
    Restaurant At Patowack Farm
    Science
    Scribd
    Self Publishing
    Self-Publishing
    Short Story
    Song
    Spirit Women
    Spotlight
    Sun Zebra
    Supernatural
    Theater
    The Sedlec Ossuary
    Video
    Women
    Words
    Writer
    Writers
    Writer's Block
    Writing

    Archives

    April 2020
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    January 2015
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    October 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011

    Picture
    Picture
    Picture

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.