Making Smart Choices: How to Find Out More About a Potential E-Book Purchase

I’ve consolidated my blogging life. No more will I write about free ebooks, paid books, computer games or other digital goodies in half a dozen different blogs here or there. Instead, I am getting serious. Why do I blog? In part because I want to share information with other people, information I wish I had when I had wanted it. My work for Teleread is part of this goal. So is my new blog. And I am looking forward to contributing—a lot more—-to both of these projects.

Imagine this scenario. You are newly converted the the joys of e-reading, and you’re browsing some of the goodies on sale this week at Fictionwise. Fictionwise is a wonderful website, but its one limitation is the lack of reader reviews. They do have scale ratings, but knowing that some people found the book ‘poor’ and not knowing why they found it so is not terribly helpful. I’ve corresponded with people in the know on this, and I understand that Fictionwise is trying to protect its authors from spammers and from biased raters trying to play with the rankings. I know Amazon.com has had these sorts of problems. But if you are an intelligent customer who can tell the difference between a review that says ‘this book sux’ and a review that gives you actual information you might want to have, where do you go to find out more about a book before you buy if the vendor won’t provide you with any of this information?

My first stop is usually Amazon.com. If the book is from a major publisher and has a twin in the print world, you’ll find reader reviews for it there. But what about the smaller indie presses? Or the on-line only ones? Well, if your experience is anything like mine, the best that you can hope for is that some poor sucker got to it before you did and had deigned to share their thoughts.

Allow me to introduce myself to you. I am that poor sucker. I just can’t resist a good e-book bargain, and yes, I have been burned a few times. But I have also discovered some real gems. I’ll tell you about them. And, I hope, my new review blog will come to be a place where people can go when they are looking for information about these indie titles. As a bonus, it will also be a place where you can go to find cool Creative Commons licensed music, great free reads, websites, video, and digital media of all kinds. Just go to e-finds.blogspot.com where the party is just getting started. And stay tuned to Teleread for more from me on the digital book world, from the point of view of an average customer.