Where readers buy their ebooks? Week 6 of our 10-week survey: It's getting messy!

We're on the 6th week 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 6. In brackets you'll see the first week 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: Simon & Schuster (Amazon)

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

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

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 (eBooks.com)

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

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

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

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

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

So what do have here? Amazon lost another point, but is still in the first place, but right now this is not the news. The real is news is that a) B&N is loosing ground with their worst performance so far (just 2 points) and b) we see a growing number of new players joining the game - Powell's Books and eBookMall, which are joining gooreads and kobo, giving the 'Others' segment on the highest number of points so far - 6 points.

Conclusions? Not yet, but it looks like the competition is getting stronger, which means that it might be a field of Amazon and many others, or just multiple number of players without anyone that really dominant the search results. Anyway, it's certainly getting more interesting! See you next Thursday.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!