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Science Fiction Book Club polls members on e-books
July 8, 2009 | 8:38 pm
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By Chris Meadows
I managed to miss this when it was first pointed out, but a MobileRead thread of week or so ago notes that the Science Fiction Book Club recently polled its members on how they feel about e-books. There are no other public articles or blog posts about this poll that I can find; however Bob Roberts reports on Baen’s Bar’s “baen.EBookReader” newsgroup:
Among other questions, it asked whether I thought $7.99 was a fair price, and whether I would be interested in buying a dedicated reader from them for $99.99. The survey distinguished dedicated readers from laptops and pda’s, etc., giving Kindle and Sony 505 as examples of “dedicated ereader”s.
This is only speculation based on how the book club works with paper books, but I expect that the e-reader purchase would be subsidized. That is, someone who bought a $99.99 e-reader would then be obligated to buy a certain number of e-books at club prices ($7.99?) over the next year. (There are some e-reader book clubs around already—the Filament Book Club gives away an eBookWise reader “free” in exchange for signing up for one year of membership at $20/month, for example.)
The survey has since closed, and there is no word on what the results were. However, just the fact that the SFBC took such a survey is interesting in and of itself.
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Comments:
That would be interesting. To make up for the profits lost on a $99.99 e-book reader like the Sony or Kindle, I would imagine that a lot of e-books would have to be sold.
The give away the reader ploy might work in other circumstances, but the Filament Book Club seems to only offer truly weird books on UFOs, pseudoscience, and a smattering of public domain works, so you’d have to be bent towards those kind of books to find the club interesting. For laughs, I’d say, check out EMF by Stephen King.
BTW, the site blog has not been updated since August 04, 2007. I wonder if the Book Club is still active or if any one actually joined.
I will be interested to see the results of the survey if they are published. I think many authors, like me, are toying with the idea of e-book publishing but there is little information available to help with making this decision.
I for one am sticking to the traditional printed style for my recently released fantasy novel, Randolph’ Challenge, Book Pne-The Pendulum Swings. You can find details on http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/RandolphsChallenge.html
Chris Warren
Author and Freelance Writer