So just how do you choose your ebooks?

In a recent straw poll of a variety of age groups, it was revealed that despite best efforts by Amazon to ‘recommend’ similar titles and by a plethora of sites and social media discussions to promote choices, the favoured method for selection is word of mouth.  

This tried and tested mode will of course always come top as we trust the judgements of our real friends as well as the feedback and comments of those celebrity reviewers whom we choose to follow.  Yet this primary route to our next good read is closely tailed, maybe not so bizarrely by going to a bookstore, thumbing through those hallowed pages, breathing in that heady aroma of pulp fiction…

This might not be so daft if we are buying actual books – but this is the preferred course for discovering good reads, irrespective of format, so that the idea of purchasing from our bed/sofa/car/hotel room is mocked by the act of driving into town, parking, paying for parking, finding a bookstore, browsing, recording choices, returning to bed/sofa/car/hotel room to order said choice…

When asked about their habits, the following responses were the most common: 

“The benefit of accessing ebooks is to build a favoured library of great reads that I can take anywhere.  I do not wish to download any old rubbish and ploughing through the stack of sites promoting books is a nightmare.  My friends, my book club, the bookshop in town and the TV chat shows are my trusty sources of recommendations.”

“I only want to choose holiday reading, so I listen to the radio and read the book review pages in the press…”

"As a student, having access to on-line texts means I can search for specific authors, titles, themes and genres, which I do on-line."

Clearly the science of marketing e-books to our purchasers needs to utilise the traditional routes as much as the new and to get smarter at filtering out the splattergun approach in favour of sending a targeted, defined message to specific audiences.  Of course as independent platforms like mardibooks and self-publishers lack the marketing budgets of big corporations and often the technological expertise and man-hours at their disposal, this will always appear an uphill struggle.

As e-books and e-readers are a new technology, utilising technology to seek out digital natives will always be easier than finding and accessing the digital immigrants.  Many adopters of ebook readers are not au fait with social media and will still want the comfort of the multi-sensory purchasing route.  They may be happy to read an e-book, and be competent at downloading, but their preferred route to discovery is not yet via Google...or social media...

Possibly by networking together in concert may prove more beneficial for the independent writer and smaller publishing houses than all adding to the general chaos of white noise.

In the meantime, Happy fishing; happy hunting for that elusive customer.