Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall - BAD Waterstones

[amjbrown]

Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker prize this week with "Wolf Hall" a historical novel about Thomas Cromwell. It looks very good, and I'd like to read it.

Waterstones responded to the win with a decent £5 reduction off the dead tree version (it's a bit niche - not Dan Brown). No prizes for guessing that the eBook version is still retailing at £15.19 - only £1.20 more than the dead tree version, but hey we are talking principles here!

I sent an e-mail to Waterstones, and after four days got the standard response, you know the one...

I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the price difference

and

in the future there will be reductions and promotions as the item becomes more popular

Barely worthy of comment as we've seen the same letter many times before. It is cheaper in WHSmiths for those that can't wait, and for those who can it is published in the US next week.

Waterstones need to get their act together. Their new site is much improved, their selection is good, but the Kindle is landing and they are going to suffer very, very soon if they don't sharpen their pricing. As to the "when the item becomes more popular" line - Bezos has said this week that he sells 48 Kindle copies for every 100 dead tree copies.

WAKE UP WATERSTONES!

Excuse the rant

amjb

[Chris Quijote]

The Kindle book is ~= $8

Meaning between £5 and £6

The price difference is remarkable! I am not used to seeing such differences in pricing - I am new to eBooks.

Publishing seems to be in the same stupid state music really got into a handful of years ago. When will they realise electronic publication and distribution is a massive potential good rather than treating every change as a threat.

Maybe the fact I have not got an MBA from Harvard is holding me back from understanding their plain-dumb approach to getting good market share at an early stage of a product with potentially massive earnings.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Chris Quijote

The Kindle book is ~= $8

Meaning between £5 and £6.

I am not seeing it using a US based Amazon account. What is the ASIN number? Is this for a UK Kindle? Amazon is, hopefully, going to light a fire under the UK ebook stores to give deeper discounts. I would not expect them to actually take a loss on some ebook though, the way that Amazon does.

[Chris Quijote]

Neither am I any longer - it now shows me the International version at $12.26

Which is still a huge difference in price.

** Tha ASIN is : B002RI9ZZ4 **

[BruceNapier]

Originally Posted by amjbrown

Waterstones need to get their act together. Their new site is much improved, their selection is good, but the Kindle is landing and they are going to suffer very, very soon if they don't sharpen their pricing. As to the "when the item becomes more popular" line - Bezos has said this week that he sells 48 Kindle copies for every 100 dead tree copies.


amjb

I agrre with all of this except about their site, it looks awful in both Safari and Firefox on my Mac Mini(Removed by moderator (bad link))
Bruce

[amjbrown]

Originally Posted by BruceNapier

I agrre with all of this except about their site, it looks awful in both Safari and Firefox on my Mac Mini

Bruce

Bruce,

I can't see your picture, but it looks fine on my MacBook Air. If you PM me the screen shot, it might be an issue with your setup? Happy to help a fellow Mac user if I can

amjb

[Gaurnim]

Originally Posted by BruceNapier

I agrre with all of this except about their site, it looks awful in both Safari and Firefox on my Mac Mini

Bruce

I would strongly advise caution in going to the adress mentioned above.
It looks like a deliberately misleading address that could lead to a malicious website.

BruceNapier, If you are well-meaning, then I'm sorry, but the IP and the MR site name in the URL don't inspire confidence for me.
Maybe you could host the image on imgshack or something like that.

[BruceNapier]

Originally Posted by Gaurnim

I would strongly advise caution in going to the adress mentioned above.
It looks like a deliberately misleading address that could lead to a malicious website.

BruceNapier, If you are well-meaning, then I'm sorry, but the IP and the MR site name in the URL don't inspire confidence for me.
Maybe you could host the image on imgshack or something like that.

Strange, I just uploaded it from my machine to this site, so don't understand your comments.

Right enough, I can't see it either - maybe an artifact of the fact that I'm using a mobile broadband connection with compression.

I'll just delete it. (Later, just) too late, I see the moderator shot it down. I'll stick to text smilies in future :-{

[BruceNapier]

Originally Posted by amjbrown

Bruce,

I can't see your picture, but it looks fine on my MacBook Air. If you PM me the screen shot, it might be an issue with your setup? Happy to help a fellow Mac user if I can

amjb

Thanks, will do. I'm on a slowish conn at the moment,but as soon as I get some speed back, I'll take advantage of your kind offer.

All the best

Bruce

[gillybede]

Wolf Hall is now on Waterstones site for £12.23, £8.73 at Smiths

[amjbrown]

And $9.99 on the Sony Bookstore, and I think less for US Amazon customers!

[Mark_C]

£3.50 as a standalone iphone app, for a limited period.

[petermillard]

Available as a Kindle edition (from the UK, via Amazon.com) for $5.82 - about £3.80; probably worth having over the iPhone App version for the sake of 30p, just for the opportunities of 'repurposing' - or so I'm told.

Makes Waterstones £15.19 seem just a touch high, though...

Pete.

[ChristopherTD]

Waterstones did a 1-day promotion on Wolf Hall ebook a while back and it was half price I think, so I nabbed it then. Annoying that it still remains high now that the paperback is out.

(edit)

I was just in Waterstones and saw a paperback that looked interesting, "Death or Victory: The Battle of Quebec and the Birth of Empire" by Dan Snow. It is £5.59 as paperback and £18.80 as eBook. Simply no excuse other than greed (or carelessness)

[Flub]

Waterstones are terrible for not discounting the ebook prices at the same time as the pbook. The new Alastair Reynolds book Terminal World is £12.39 as a pbook and a whopping £18.99 as an ebook.