This survey is now closed. The link to the survey has been removed and the original post is in italics below.
I closed this survey after we got over 6,000 responses. First, thank you to everyone who took a moment to fill out the survey. The results are fascinating to me and very helpful. I’m sharing the results after the jump.
This is obviously not a scientific survey. But it’s representative of our readership, our TPM community – generally affluent, very highly educated, mostly center-left politics. I’m not sure any of the results surprised me. But they are striking. Just over half say they read either mainly digital books or a mix of digital and physical books. That is a kind of book that didn’t exist 20 years ago and which one company, Amazon, totally dominates. Amazon’s dominance is similarly apparent as the place where 62% of readers buy most of their books. The only real competitor is the local independent bookstore. They account for only a bit more than a third as much as Amazon. But big national chains and other online retailers trail far behind.
Amazon’s dominance was not what we were interested in measuring here. My interest was in how many books you buy and what topics interest you most. But Amazon’s gargantuan footprint remains inescapable.