Where readers buy their ebooks? Week 7 of our 10-week e-book purchasing survey

We're on week 7 of our 10-week ebook experiment. Like all experiments, it began with a question: Where will readers look to buy their ebooks? Following the launch of Google eBookstore, its collaboration with independent bookstores and with Amazon, B&N, Borders and other bookstores fighting on their market share, the competition between ebook retailers is getting fierce.

Our assumption is that many readers will look for e-books using a search engine and will buy from one of the first results of their search. So we randomly chose 10 books of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2010 and googled each title with the word ebook and wrote down the first two results we got. We redo it every Thursday for 10 weeks and will see if there are any changes in the search results.

Here are the results for week 7. In brackets you'll see the last week's results. If they were the same we just wrote 'same'. And if you click on the titles, you will be forwarded to the first place on the title's search):

1. Girl by the Road at Night by David Rabe
1st place: Simon & Schuster (same)
2nd place: Simon & Schuster (same)

2. The Long Song by Andrea Levy
1st place: Amazon.com (same)
2nd place: Amazon.com (same)

3. The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie
1st place: Amazon.com (same)
2nd place: Amazon.com (Simon & Schuster)

4. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
1st place: Powell's Books (Amazon)
2nd place: Amazon.com (Powell's Books)

5. Big Girls Don't Cry by Rebecca Traister
1st place: Simon & Schuster (same)
2nd place: Barnes & Noble (Simon & Schuster)

6. The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman
1st place: Kobo (same)
2nd place: Amazon.com (same)

7. INSECTOPEDIA by Hugh Raffles
1st place: Amazon.com (same)
2nd place: Amazon.com (same)

8. Country Driving by Peter Hessler
1st place: Goodreads (same)
2nd place:Barnes & Noble (same)

9. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
1st place: Random House (same)
2nd place: eBooks.com (eBookMall)

10. Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens
1st place: Amazon.com (same)
2nd place: Atheist Movies (Barnes & Noble)

Here's the summary of the results:

	Amazon		B&N		Publishers		Others
	1st	2nd	1st	2nd	1st	2nd	1st	2nd
week 1	6	3	1	2	3	4	0	1
week2	6	4	1	3	3	3	0	0
week3	6	2	1	2	3	4	0	2
week4	6	3	2	1	2	4	0	2
week5	5	4	1	2	2	3	2	1
week6	5	3	0	2	3	3	2	2
week7	4	5	0	2	3	1	3	2

We give 2 points for 1st place and 1 point for 2nd place:

		Amazon		B&N		Google		Publishers		Others
week 1		15		4		0		10		1
week 2		16		5		0		9		0
week 3		14		4		0		10		2
week 4		15		5		0		8		2
week 5		14		4		0		7		5
week 6		13		2		0		9		6
week 7		13		2		0		7		8

So what do have here? Amazon is still performing well in the first place, but the real news is the growing power of the 'Others' segment, which is now the second one after Amazon with 8 points. You can find under 'Others' bookstores (Powell's Books), online bookstores (eBooks.com), dedicated e-reader bookstores like Kobo and the occasional blog (Atheist Movies this time).

Conclusions? We're still 3 weeks far from ending our experiment, but the growing presence of smaller players may suggest that only few weeks but it looks like the competition is getting stronger, which means that when we talk about books that are not brand new, even if they're bestsellers, than it's getting easier to small players to take larger pieces of the pie on the account of the bigger players, especially from the big chains - B&N and Borders, which looks like they're getting weaker and weaker. Anyway, it's certainly getting more interesting! See you next Thursday.

You can find all the survey results so far at www.ecolibris.net/buying_ebooks.asp

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!