One of the problems with the future of publishing debates (and you know there are so many of those) is that there are a variety of publishers and not every scenario is going to equally fit each and every publisher.

A topic I don’t see mentioned too often is the difference between reading and book buying habits:

Not everyone who reads a lot also buys a lot of books.

The people who buy books represent a smaller segment than people who read. People who borrow mostly from the library or mostly frequent used bookstores are likely people who don’t buy a lot of new books anyway.

Maybe I’m wrong, but publishers are probably more concerned about people who buy books, which is a smaller segment than people who read. Invariably, someone will say that publishers have to decide which industry they are in - the book business or the information business. Good question. But the answer may not be the same for every publisher.

It’s also the same question that libraries face and later I’ll examine how libraries dealt with that.

I really don’t understand hardcover publishing. There are just so few titles that I would ever consider buying in hardcover, but maybe that’s just me. Yet, I would be willing to try a $9.99 e-book of a new book that is currently only in hardcover, such as My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

E-books do offer the potential for tempting readers to try a book if the price of the e-book is significantly cheaper, which is the case when comparing to hardcover but not to paperback. Maybe for that reason alone, publishers might continue producing hardcover titles with low print runs but anticipating high rates of sales for e-books due to the perceived bargain factor, though I’m sure that plays havoc with trying to figure out an author’s advance.

Continuing books I would never buy in print if I had a Kindle and books I would always buy in print even if I had a Kindle.

If I really, really like reading a particular title as an e-book, then I very well could be tempted to buy a print copy of that book, too.

While I seldom read books-in-print from a library, I have been known to buy books that I’ve already borrowed from the library and read. One example that comes to mind is Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman. (Oddly, that book appears not to be in-print in the U.S. but has been relaunched in the U.K. by Simon and Schuster. I wonder what the story is behind that.)

If I really, really enjoyed a particular e-book, then there’s a very good chance that I would acquire a print copy especially if the print version had a nice design…..just like all those people who bought a hardcopy of the newspaper after Obama’s election victory…..sometimes you want the print, too.

Continuing yesterday’s examination of my book buying habits if I had a Kindle.

There are certain types of books that I always will want to have in print, regardless of how much I use digital technologies. These may be books I love, either because of the author or the experience of reading the book left such a strong impression that I want to have the book on my shelf. (Somehow having an image of the book cover on a virtual bookshelf just doesn’t give me the same feeling).

First and most definitively - any novel by Coetzee, Ondaatje, or Pamuk.

I noticed that none of Coetzee is available in Kindle, while only a few works by either Ondaatje or Pamuk are available in Kindle.

Followed by most literary fiction. While I rarely read a novel more than once, I like having a good collection of literary fiction. (Notice from yesterday’s post that I don’t care if I have a collection of good mystery/detective/suspense fiction though I also enjoy reading those books.)

Basically, with buying and keeping print books I’m looking for quality writing whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. There’s a lot of historical non-fiction that I also would consider as preferable for print as well as contemporary non-fiction such as as books by Oliver Sacks.

Tomorrow, books I might buy both in print and as e-book if I had a Kindle.

Skewing the whole topic of e-books is the general assumption that everyone’s reading habits are the same.

It’s true that commercial genre fiction sells more than literary fiction. In looking over my bookshelf, there are some books I cherish because I value the author and really just want to have the book. Other books I enjoy reading (or didn’t like as much as I thought) and end up mostly selling those to used bookstores. It’s the latter type of book that I would end up likely to buy if I had an e-book reading device.

So, here’s a short list of the type of books I would likely never buy in print if I had a Kindle (or the Sony reader, etc.):

• Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus detective novels
• Michael Connelly’s detective novels
• Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
• Books by Malcolm Gladwell

You may notice some type of theme here …. mystery/detective fiction, non-fiction about current events (especially politics or functioning of the U.S. government). On a related note, I would never buy any of those books in hardcover either, preferring mostly to wait a year until the paperback came out.

Tomorrow, a post about books I would always buy in print even if I had a Kindle.