Poll Results: Them Tomes, Them Tomes -- Brick-and-mortar bookstores still have a place in the hearts and minds of TidBITS readers, to judge from the results of last week's poll question asking what factors most influenced your decision to buy a computer book. 66 percent of the respondents said that flipping through a copy of a book was important, followed distantly by published reviews at 42 percent, word of mouth at 35 percent, and reader-contributed reviews at 30 percent. Plenty of respondents (19 percent) voted for Other and told us in TidBITS Talk that we should have included Author, Publisher, and Book Series as options. I was interested to see that only 16 percent of respondents felt that special pricing was important, and only 9 percent felt they were significantly influenced by bookstore descriptions of books or author sites or events (and I have to say that book signings are often pretty sparsely attended these days). Coming in dead last as an influencing factor was advertising, but that may be in part because advertising for computer books is extremely scarce.

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Also featured prominently in TidBITS Talk last week were suggestions for beginning Macintosh books and AppleScript books (most of which focused on Internet resources, since there aren't many AppleScript books available). [ACE]

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