“Goodreads recently asked 1,000 members of the social network publishing’s burning question: What convinced you to read the book?

They revealed the results at the Tools of Change (TOC) conference (chart embedded above). Overwhelmingly, most readers relied on real life conversations: “trusted friend,” “everybody was talking about it” and “book club” were the top answers. Here’s more about the survey:

“Discovery” is a huge topic in the publishing industry, especially as more and more books are published each year. For this presentation, we took a different tack. Rather than just ask a general “How do you discover books?” question, we went to recent readers of two popular books on Goodreads and asked: “What convinced you to read this book?” The two choices were Gone Girl (which was the most reviewed book on Goodreads in 2012 and the winner of the Mystery & Thriller category in the 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards) and The Night Circus (a debut novel from 2011, which was a finalist in the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards).”

Here’s the complete slideshow from the TOC presentation…

“Goodreads has posted the results of a user survey that touches on many topics that will likely be of interest to many of you. The results were first shared at the Tools of Change conference a couple of weeks ago.

From a summary blog post:

On Book Discovery

Goodreads asked members how they discovered the two most read books of 2012.

A recommendation from a trusted friend was the clear winner for both books. This reinforces other industry studies and also underlines something we’ve long believed: Books are one of the strongest social objects that exist.

On Format Choice

• 37% of our survey respondents read e-books on their cell phones. Of these,
  • 72% read e-books on their cell phones while commuting or waiting in line
  • 13% say that their cell phone is the only device they use to read e-books
  • A surprising, but still small, number of people noted in the “Other” response option that they use their cell phone as a backup device. For example, one member wrote that she uses her cell phone to read e-books “when my child has my Kindle.” We think if we’d given this as an option that we would have seen a high enough percentage to have included “use as backup e-book reading device” in the top responses.
• 86% of survey respondents who own a tablet read e-books on the device. Of these,
  • 74% use their tablets to read around the home
  • 68% read e-books with their tablets in bed
  • Almost a third (32%) say that the tablet is the only device they use to read e-books

On Acquisition of Ebooks

We also took a look at how locked in people are to their e-reader devices. Surprisingly, we found that almost three quarters (73%) of e-book readers shop around for the best price at least sometimes. And 20% always shop around for the best price.

The summary and complete report (embedded below) has MUCH more including many useful charts.