This is how free e-book samples look to me most of the time. How about you?

Free ebook samples [cartoon] | Ebook Friendly

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Piotr Kowalczyk
Founder of Ebook Friendly. Ebook enthusiast, technology geek, iPhone artist and self-published author from Poland. His short story collections were downloaded across the web more than 150,000 times.

7 COMMENTS

  1. That’s an interesting point, Marilynn. Piotr lives in Poland, and as he writes in this post from earlier today , geo-restrictions are often an issue there. (Although I don’t imagine that would apply to the length [or brevity] of samples. They’re either available or they’re not, I would think.)

    Actually, my understanding of the joke was that free samples so often feel like a tease: No matter how long they may be, if the book is good, you always want to keep reading … and so the sample always feels too short, even if it’s long in reality. That happens to me, at least, whenever I finish a sample of a book that’s priced at 12.99 or something: I *really* want to keep reading the book, but I also want to wait for the price to go down.

    This happened to me a couple weeks ago with Josh Ozersky’s “Colonel Sanders and the American Dream.” The free sample was so long that by the time I reached the end, I’d completely forgotten that I didn’t actually own the entire book! It was infuriating because the book was SO good. But the Kindle price is $9.99–and while that’s a price I wouldn’t normally mind paying for a good book, I also know that if I hold out just a little while longer, I’ll probably be able to grab it on the cheap. (Perhaps I have a habit of taking frugality a bit too far.)

    Speaking of KFC, did anyone happen to notice this article in the Guardian back on May 31, about the newly-discovered 46-year-old Col Sanders autobiography that KFC is giving away as a free download on Facebook? Turns out it’s actually a PDF, but amazingly, it’s still available. I just downloaded it, and it looks pretty good, assuming you’re into that sort of thing. You can grab a copy here: https://apps.facebook.com/colcookbook/

  2. Actually, Piotr may be looking at Kobo’s samples, which usually include all the front matter and leave out the story entirely… And recently I seem to have to sign in to look at the useless sample… so I don’t bother any more. I sample at Smashwords.

  3. The interesting thing about the cartoon is that based on the sample provided, I would definitely not buy the book. There is a grammar error in the first sentence fragment, which would not bode well for the rest of the book.

    Aside from that, however, I wonder how many people actually read an entire sample or even a majority of a sample. I decide whether to buy a book largely on factors other than the sample; I simply do not have the patience to read a sample. It is the rare ebook that I buy that I read immediately. Instead, the ebook gets added to my ever-growing TBR pile. However, if I took the time to read the complete sample, I would feel obligated to continue reading the ebook, assuming I liked the sample well enough to buy the ebook.

    Because my TBR is so large and constantly growing, I find that I prefer to decide whether to buy an ebook based on a synopsis and perhasp the reading of a paragraph or two of the sample. (All I’m really looking for in the sample is good grammar and spelling.) I wouldn’t be surprised to find that many other readers do the same.

  4. I often send samples to my kindle when I am not quite sure if the book is for me, especially if it’s a book that is a genre I don’t typically read. If the book is promising, I will buy it. If the book manages to keep me wanting to read on, I will devor the entire sample, then, like Dan said, I will remember that I was a sammple and go buy the whole book instantly.

    Samples allow me to buy a book the way I would purchase a dead tree book in a book store. Most Kindle samples are a good length, but I have had a few where, after all the small print, there were literally not even two pages worth of reading left. Those ones, I would never consider buying. That’s what the cartoon made me think of 🙂

  5. The cartoon made me laugh. Great dry humor.

    Sample? I gave up on them a while back when I spent 3 days reading samples, didn’t like most, found a couple of the books had gone way up in price and realized that I’d wasted 3 good reading days. ;-D

    I read the description at Amazon, sometimes read a couple of worst and best reviews, and then if it looks interesting I make a note and check my library first. If they don’t have it and I still want to read it, I add it to my watch list and will pick it up when the price goes down. I seldom pay $9.99 for an ebook, as I seldom pay that for a printed book. I’m retired and I’m frugal. 😀

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