BoB promotion, Sony PRS-505 at $99 if you buy $500 gift card. Free with $1000 GC
 

I just receive an email with BooksonBoard lastest promotion

A Sony PRS-505 for $99 if you get a $500 gift card

with a $1000 gift card the PRS-505 is free

Offer expires Wednesday, May 6th at 11:59pm CST.

:chinscratch:

Very nice deal for sure. Only $130 more cash up front than a Kindle plus you get $500 worth of books.

If that does not prove the cost of these devices is nothing compared to the content then nothing does. I expect to see more and more of this sort of option.

that is a Whole Lot of money to put into books on board though (which I imagine, lots of books go for Full retail) they defenatly arent giving you this for free. but if you spend that much there anyway, go nuts

BooksonBoard actually has some pretty good discounts. I can and do spend that much money in a year on books but paying the whole amount upfront is a bit difficult to manage at the moment. I'm really tempted, though...

That's a good deal if you're going to spend that much money on ebooks there. I spend at least that much at Barnes & Noble each year, I have no doubt there are people that can and do spend that much a year on ebooks.

Heck, I'm even thinking about this to get the wife into readers.

There is no such thing as a free lunch...

I have actually bought several books from BooksOnBoard. They have discounts off the publisher price AND sometimes they have rewards. The first time I purchased there, I got 5 books for $23 and just yesterday, I got 2 books for $8 and some change. And even though they are PDF, I haven't had any problem with formatting, etc.

If I had enough money up front, I would probably take them up on this offer.

If only I had that kind of money to spend...

Don't forget that gift cards are worthless in the US after a bankruptcy. This is a sweet deal for anyone who buys lots of ebooks, and I don't expect BoB to go bankrupt, but if you intend to use the gift card over an extended period this is worth bearing in mind. You are loaning BoB money, and you might not get it back.

Is BoB close to bankruptcy?

I'm not suggesting they are likely to go bankrupt, but rather pointing out what happens if they do.

BoB is my preferred bookstore, but even I don't trust them that far. Too many people have gotten burned with gift cards when the companies go bankrupt, as wallcraft says. I did mention the offer to my husband, however, who smarted off that I should be able to spend it in about a week....

Andybaby, thank you for pointing me to this thread.

Thanks everyone for the postings and the commentary about our Sony offers. We're about to extend them until next Monday as there has been a great deal of very positive response, much more than we anticipated. This is an exciting offer, meant to provide another opportunity for value to many of our customers.

In partnership with Overdrive and Adobe, we were the first to offer ePUB titles from major publishers a year ago as well as the among the very first to offer MP3 DRM-free audio book downloads. We also introduced our Qik Clik (TM) technology. the first of its kind on the iPhone, in February.

The $99 Sony Reader is another first for our customers.

As with our customer support - where we keep a support team available 7 days a week - we are always seeking new ways to reward our loyal readers and to make it easier and more compelling for new customers to join the ebook fold. We constructed the Sony offers premised on some carefully calculated math that results in us losing a bit of money over the long run on the offers themselves, but coming out well ahead - along with customers and the entire industry - if they cause the kind of increase in ebook adoption that we would like to see. We view this as something that helps all ships rise including those of our existing customers, new customers, competitors, authors and publishers.

At the same time, we do not encourage customers to spend inappropriately to buy a Sony Reader now. If someone is going to spend $400 plus on eBooks in the next year or so, it's certainly a great value. But building personal debt to get something that is just "nice to have" is not what we want to encourage. If someone reads less than several hundred dollars worth of eBooks a year, this is probably not the right offer for that person. On the other hand, we have many, many customers who buy more than $400 worth of eBooks in a year that are still reading on laptops in their beds at night. This offer can be very worthwhile for them. These are also the customers who have done the most to help our business and it's appropriate to provide a win-win offer like this for them.

We find that most reserve their eBook device budgets for the holiday season and other significant gift giving seasons. This time of year - with Mothers Day, Graduations, and Fathers Day stacked up over six weeks - is probably the second largest season of the year for Sony Readers and other devices like the Cybook and Kindle. We stand behind both Sony Readers and Cybooks in large part because the manufacturers remain committed to open formats that are broadly accessible.

We do pay close attention to this forum and the thoughts and opinions of it's members, the vanguard of ebook technology users. Reader price receives frequent mention. This promotion is about progress in that direction.

Sincere Regards,

Kurt Johnson
BooksOnBoard