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Answers to Book Industry Questions Posed 17 Years Ago


Troy

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These questions were posed before the advent of social media and during what I'd describe as the height of the "Black Literature Renaissance" in 2000.

Check out all the questions and answers: https://aalbc.com/fun/survey.htm

poll-from-1999.png

 

The really interesting thing is that even though this site gets orders of magnitude more traffic in 2017, than in 2000, I doubt I could get as many people to respond to surveys like this.

Part of the reason AALBC attracts more visitors is that there are FAR more people with Internet access than there were 17 years ago.  But they reason I suspect I'd get less participation is that visitors are generally far more engaged on social media and the large corporate sites than they are on smaller indie sites.  This is one of the reasons there is less choice and diversity on the web than there was 17 years ago, but that is a rant for another day ;)

I plan to ask visitors many of the same questions I asked back in 1999, I'll really anxious to see what people think today compared to almost two decades ago.

 

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Last night after, writing the post above, I began running a new poll. To ask the question Where did you buy your last book.  Of course, the software available to collect this information is far superior to what I used back in 1999.  I was able to find and implement a new poll in a matter of minutes.  The company I used is called Get Site Control.  I never heard of them prior to looking for poll taking tool software.  Get Site Control also provide a variety of other widgets for your site or Blog.

Creating a feature rich website is much easier than ever before, but we have much less diversity on the web because massive corporate sites dominate.  It really is a great loss of creativity, but I digress...

Here are the results of the Where did you buy you last book? question thus far:

where-did-you-buy-your-last-book.png

Of course, given Amazon's dominance, I don't expect any relations with this question.  The main purpose is to contrast the responses with those given 17 years ago.

I also recognize that since this question is posted on this website, that there are inherent biases, so I would not extend these answers to the general population.  But given the fact that internet penetration is so much higher today compared to Jan 2000 when the question was first asked. The survey is probably less biased than the one taken 16 years ago.

Finally, it will be interesting to see if I get 856 responses and how long it takes.  

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Amazon is being analyzed as a company that may potentially become a trillion dollar business. The giant is rolling downhill and everything in its path will be crushed. Macy's, The Limited, Sears and countless small retailers have disappeared and it is not going to get any better. We the people demand speed and convenience and those things are all that matters. Speed and convenience means that we are left to be on our phones and watching our shows. We don't need or want to walk or drive to visit stores if that store isn't connected to our phones in some way.

 

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