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Comment by cgrubb | Hacker News Reader

An interesting claim in the article is that Amazon isn't doing its fair share of helping people discover books. The primary source of the research doesn't appear to be public. An excerpt from a July 2013 Salon article:

    According to survey research by the Codex Group, roughly
    60 percent of book sales — print and digital — now occur
    online. But buyers first discover their books online only
    about 17 percent of the time. Internet booksellers
    specifically, including Amazon, account for just 6
    percent of discoveries. Where do readers learn about the 
    titles they end up adding to the cart on Amazon? In many 
    cases, at bookstores.

Why couldn't we be told what percentage of books are discovered in physical bookstores? The idea that 83% of books are not discovered online seems wild. Who did the Codex Group survey?

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/19/amazon_could_be_a_victim_of_...

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I know it's anecdotal, this idea does not seem far-fetched to me at all.

I buy about a hundred books a year, and while I used to buy a lot of them from amazon, I know that I discovered at most 2-3 a year through it. Now I never buy books on Amazon any more, because I'd rather give my money to the bookstores that I love (and provide me a valuable service) than to yet another internet monopoly.

Bookstores (well, the ones that do their job anyway) tend to select the books they will put on display and write reviews to help you discover good new things to read. On the other hand Amazon seems to be very bad at this, only ever giving irrelevant or useless suggestions (i.e. books on the same topic that the one i just bought, all the other books from the same author - as if I couldn't find them by myself - and that kind of useless "recommendations")

Probably because that number is actually less or equivalent, otherwise I am guessing they would have published the number. I would posit that most people find books not through stores, online or physical, but through friends/family reccomendations or television (e.g. Oprah driving book sales).

I've discovered many interesting books by simply buying a large box of random used scifi books from ebay.

Well, Amazon sure tries, and I've certainly benefited from "People who bought/looked at/whatever the book your're looking at/bought also liked" selections.

And if I have a topic I want to come up to speed on, I've found it pretty good for that, when combined with its invaluable reviews.

And echoing user crucifiction in another reply to your posting, I can make the very best book recommendations for the friends I know well. If word of mouth, amplified to the Nth degree by the net, is still powerful, then a simple "what fraction does what" metric may not tell us very much, except for methods with negligible share.

That stuck out to me too. Of course, it could just come down to the particular people surveyed.

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