Re: Amazon to drop free books from Kindle bestseller list

Oh, I dunno.  I think it makes a lot of sense to have two separate lists.

It's pretty obvious to me that a lot of people will download free titles 
whether they actually read them or not, simply because they are free.
It's like the dreck/tchotchkes that are given out at conferences and such:
lots of people will pick up one of everything that's "free" and drop it in 
their goodie bag just because they can, and later either toss much of it 
or give it away without using it.

That's not to say that all free ebooks are dreck!  I'm not saying that at all.
But a label of "FREE" will tend to artificially inflate the number of times a 
book is downloaded, whether it's ever read or not.  I've downloaded a few
free Kindle books that I read a few chapters from, and then deleted because
they were not worth my time.  

Besides, isn't it sort of a no-brainer that things that are free will tend to go 
out the proverbial door a lot more quickly than things that cost money?  On 
any given day when a burger joint starts giving away free hamburgers and 
announcing it widely, you can bet that there will be more free burgers being 
eaten than their more expensive cousins, regardless of quality or the 
customers' usual preferences. It's just a human tendency.

Having the free books on the same list as the for-a-price books never 
made sense.  


Tony Burton

--- In [email protected], "Daniel P. B. Smith" <yahoogroups2006@...> wrote:
>
> > ----------------------------------------------------------
> > Amazon To Drop Free Books From Kindle Bestseller List
> > ----------------------------------------------------------
> > One list for paid books and another for free titles
> 
> Interesting... 
> 
> Obviously they want to downplay the extent to which people are using Kindles to read free content. 
> 
> I wonder why?
> 
> Remember when GemStar started to crack down on "personal content?" There was a stealth firmware downgrade that removed advertised features from the REB1100, notably the ability to import Web content. They pulled the plug on "RocketLibrary," a website originally billed as a sort of service feature of the device, that offered user-contributed items such as Project Gutenberg texts that had been professionally converted to GemStar format.
> 
> Most amazingly, there were people on this very list who not only defended, but praised the move, saying that the people at GemStar were business geniuses who knew far more about their business than I, a mere customer. That I was watching from the sidelines and that shelling out $300 for the gadget hardly gave me a stake in it. Though I might be part of their actual market, I was not part of their "target market." And that I, who used the device almost every day, was out of touch with how people "really used it." The success of GemStar would soon prove me wrong.
> 
> No, I don't think Amazon is going in that direction. But, alas, greed is starting to show. $10 books were a part of the Kindle "social contract."
>




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