Several days ago I wrote an article about the astonishing price hikes inflicted on Australians by French usurers Hachette Livre. So large, in fact, that the average of the prices samples was: 164%. Macmillan’s hike? Much larger.
Astoundingly, believe it or not, there are even bigger ripoff merchants at work. Most ebook readers will easily be able to guess the villain here. In fact, Macmillan jacked up their prices not long before xmas – ONLY IN AUSTRALIA.
Unlike Orbit, Macmillan’s websites are absolutely terrible from a reader point of view, without even an obvious book list, except in the case of the Australian site, where they have links to ebooks – but every single one returned a ‘page not found’ message. One wonders at such incompetence in their biggest sale season. Merry Christmas MacScroogmillan.
To have a look at their pricing I decided to search for Tor UK books while logged into my Australian Amazon account. There were 50 or so book listings available quickly, which is a good sized sampling for comparative purposes, in this case, I used a the UK logged-in price.
For comparison, the Orbit sample had these averages:
USA – $8.42 and Australia – $13.82
The Macmillan/Tor UK sample
UK – $8.66 and Australia – $16.42"
Full article at teleread :-
http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/ma...by-blue-tyson/