People are Not Reading the e-Books they Buy Anymore

I have some ebooks I purchased but haven’t yet read. I bought them when they were in sale for like $1, $2, or $3. I’m interested in reading these books, but they aren’t high priorities. A number of new books are published every month that I care about more than these books I have already purchased, so I put off reading then a bit longer. Oh well.

I usually read books to completion, and have read over 40 books this year in addition to all the news feeds, blogs, longer form articles, etc. that I read.

If I buy a ebook I rarely don’t read it (or attempt to read it). However, if I ever buy an Amazon ebook, I first strip it of its DRM and then read it in my favorite eBook reader app that only reads ePub (Marvin for iOS). Amazon will never count my ebook opening on Kindle. I bet some more are doing the same.

I wonder if they are separating free and non free books? I pick up all kinds of free books that I don’t actually end up reading because I think I might read them someday. Like others I don’t read a lot of books I buy immediately, but I get to most of them eventually.

There is not good comparison to real print books. I wouldn’t be surprised if many purchasers of print books also don’t read them.

“Last few months I bought some 20 books but I finished just 2 of them till now.” I am impulsive book buyer but I also tend to put something off when I find something more interesting.”

This is the issue across the board right now, people are too distracted to follow through. Also an ereader makes one susceptible to go on an impusive binging spree, loading up on ebooks they don’t plan on immediately reading. I blame technology.

I read everyone of mine and have open each one at least once I am OCD and have to read them in order

Unread books are nothing new.

I have the same habit with borrowed or free eBooks or Print. Start them shortly after getting and returning or forgetting them if the first two or three chapters don’t “work.” Expensive or well reviewed eBooks or Print get a few more chapters. Over all my reading has increased significantly with the use of eReaders.

Some books I buy are reference materials related to work or related to things I’m interested in. Unfortunately, I am guilty of buying more books than I can read. Its a waste of money. Also honestly, i love my Kindle but…. its not the best format for remembering or being enticed to read. A book on my book shelf might be more enticing. Especially on my old Kindle Keyboard, it was too dark and I felt i was going into a dark place in cyberspace. Now with a Voyage in some cases it just feels like a ton of books. Maybe color will one day make them a bit more appealing. Now I say all of this, but I DO READ A LOT on my Kindle! Having Text-to-Speech helped as well as i could review material I had read previously more easily.

Is this really a bad thing? While some may be buying books they lack the motivation to actually read, I’d guess that the majority of unopened ebooks are owned by avid readers that are actively building a digital library. After all, they all own an e-reader.

I’ve re-bought old favorites digitally so I can be sure to always have them on hand. Then there are Kindle/Kobo Daily Deals as well as the thousands of public domain classics available for the low, low price of $0.00. It’s easy and inexpensive to build a varied ebook backlog; and there’s no real downside to being sure you’ll always have something with you that you want to read. One advantage is that you’ll never again buy an overpriced pulp novel in an airport only to throw it away unread. 😉

On that note, I wonder how many of the print books out there have actually been opened. I don’t doubt digital has a higher number of unread books thanks to an across-the-board lower barrier of entry; but I bet the numbers are fairly close

I read an average of a book per week, but buy much more than I read because I am addicted to ebook freebie and discount sites. So after years of this I have hundreds of untouched ebooks. I like to believe there are a lot of readers like me skewing these numbers especially since people like me are exactly the kind of people who would volunteer to have there activity tracked in return for free and discounted ebooks.

I almost never get free books, except on KU, and I always read those so I can get them off the account. (Our family shares so we can max that out pretty fast.) I have probably read 95% of what I’ve bought/downloaded – I don’t see the point in getting stuff I’m not going to read. It just clutters up my library making it harder to see what I do want to read! Now, since we share an account as a family, there are things in my library that I personally haven’t read and probably won’t – my son likes books on the military, my daughter the classics, and I won’t be reading any of that any time soon. But even as a family, I’d estimate we have over 80% at any one time.

I always read my most expensive books first.. I wouldn’t pay $10 for them if I didn’t want to read them, and NOW. Otherwise, I’d get them from the library.

I don’t think it has anything to do with ebooks specifically. Every avid reader I know is also a book hoarder. I have stacks of paperbacks and even a few hardbacks which I haven’t yet read. And yes, I’d say about half of my ebooks are still unread, too. Avid readers tend to collect books they intend to read…someday. The only thing that’s changed is that it’s easier for retailers to track ebooks and know if they’ve gone unread.

I know OCD has become a slang term for perfectionism, but Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a very real and painful psychological disorder, and it’s disrespectful to those who suffer from it to use the term so casually. Call yourself a rigid control freak if you want to be honest, but please have some respect for others who truly suffer from this condition by NOT pretending you’re one of them. If you had a cold, would you laugh about having cancer and think it was okay because you’re “just making a joke”? I think not.

I am an avid reader and read 2-3 books a week. I try to get e-books (kindle) when they are on sale. I have a lot of e-books that I haven’t yet read as there are just so many books that I want to read.

The last sentence should read…
“get that book at a future time for both ebooks and paper books.”

Sometimes I see an interesting article about a book and then later when I remember the article, I can’t remember the title of the book well enough to do a successful search for it. I lost too many opportunities to get the book because of that.

I do it. When I great book is a “Daily Deal” or “Monthly Deal” or whatever on Amazon, I buy them “just in case”–never full price though, it’s always the sale books that might not get opened (eventually, though, maybe…)

I understand what you’re saying, but you are rather assuming that Kiera is not actually OCD …

I am an avid reader (I’ve read at least 85 books since 1-1-2015). Yet I probably have read only 30% of the ebooks I have purchased. I buy ebooks
* because they are on sale and I intend to read them later, and something distracts me
* because I already read them in print and want an e-copy
* because they are in the back catalog of authors I really like and I’m not sure how long they will stay available in any format
* because they are related to my work, but I’m not often motivated to do work reading during my free time
Lately I have found myself preordering books at full price and not reading them right away, aargh! Usually it is because I’m caught up in a different book at the time the preordered book arrives. I only do this with authors I really really like, usually if it’s the next book in an ongoing series, but still, I’m trying to stop.

I still check books out from the library, but more and more often, I return them unread. It’s more comfortable to read e-books (lighter weight, backlight, adjustable font, no need to mark my place, etc.) The library copy helps me decide whether to purchase the e-book. For example, I want to read Unfair by Adam Benforado but the e-book is $13.99. I checked the hard copy out of the library and never got around to reading it, which means I’ll probably never get around to purchasing the e-copy either, unless it gets marked down significantly. If the e-book were $6.99, I would have bought it without a second thought, but would I have read it yet? Hard to say.

I used to buy too many print books, too, and still have piles of print books I intend to read “someday.” If it were possible to track print book habits, I suspect no one would be shocked by this Kobo finding.

Please be sure to check if your library has downloadable ebooks. We do at my library.

It might also be those freebies that people ‘buy’ in droves. I often find that they aren’t quite what I’m looking for and either plan to leave it for when I have nothing else to read or not at all. Soo many books and not enough time.

Another possible explanation for some of the noted behavior: Sometimes I flip between reading an ebook and its physical counterpart. That means that many times a book won’t look finished on my digital account, even if it has been.

I am also guilty of taking advantage of Amazon’s daily freebies because there are plenty of classics I’ve still yet to get around to! Plus, I would never say no to a free book, especially one that won’t take up more space on my shelves! So I am probably looking at having read very, very little on my Kindle relative to what is there. However, I also read voraciously and, like many have said before, for a book lover you often just hoard books so you always have the next thing to read at your fingertips! My to-read list will never be completed, I know that, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.

I read somewhere that Michael Kinsley visited a bunch of DC bookstores back when Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time was a bestseller. Kinsley stuck slips of paper into the middle of the sale copies that said something like, “When you find this, contact me and win $50.” No one claimed the money–Kinsley felt it was because people were buying the books but not actually reading them.

I’ve read only the first 8-10 of these comments and they all make sense! We’re also far too busy. We have good intentions, but you know what the road to hell is paved with!

I don’t know if you can blame it on just technology because I do the same thing with print books as well. My family got me a kindle because of my book hoarding lol but I will still snatch up print books at garage sales and thrift stores by the bag full . So even without technology there are ways for people to collect books that they do not have enough time to read.

Sadly, I know exactly why I don’t read many of my ebooks anymore. It has become so easy to publish an ebook that, unfortunately, many of them just aren’t good. I know that tons of great writers are going the self publishing route these days, and the stigma against self publishing is going down some, but the simple fact is many not-so-great writers are also publishing that way, and most of their books are in ebook format. I’ve downloaded so many books from authors that I didn’t know, and to be honest, I’d say about 85%-90% of them weren’t, well, good. They were either poorly written (most of them) or just plain boring. I still get excited when I see a good cover picture or read a summary that sounds interesting, so I’ll download it, but when I sit down to actually read something, I usually get discouraged from my past experiences and fall back on authors I know or other books I have that I know are good and reread those. I just expect the ones I’ve download to be bad because most of them have been, and I don’t want to waste the few moments I’ve managed to steal for myself on a bad book.