[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by djulian

I'd think of them as five delayed sales. If you are currently willing to buy the book at 99 cents, then when (if) it becomes available at that price as an ePub, you may still buy it.

No, not necessarily. I'm interested now, but if enough time goes on, then I'm very likely to lose interest and stop caring enough to even bother thinking about buying even if it does show up in a format I'm willing to purchase at a price I'm willing to pay.

I know this because over the years I've passed on buying a lot of sale books which at first seemed interesting but were not then available on terms I was willing to consider and even when they sometimes dropped to an even cheaper level later, apathy had set in and I went and spent my money elsewhere.

Originally Posted by djulian

I think they are intending to test the Amazon market; it's not a skewed test if all they want to test is the Amazon market.

Actually, it says in the OP that "for a very limited time we're putting the price on this one down to 99 cents to see what it does for sales".

They are not testing the Amazon market per se, simply trying to test the sales at the 99 cent price point but limiting the test to being performed solely within the Amazon market, which naturally skews things.

Originally Posted by djulian

I imagine (I'm not Amazon, so I can't confirm this) that it costs a bit more to do business in some countries than others. They have to cover those costs. That's not an inappropriate business practice--it's good business. Like paying more in the US for DVD's of BBC's better programs.

BBC DVDs cost roughly the same as other non-BBC TV show DVDs with comparative prominence and discs-per-set, as far as I've been able to tell. Mind you, they can be somewhat cheaper in the UK where they're closer to the source, but that's mainly because Amazon UK holds deep-discount clearance sales on several categories of titles from time to time (and they do it for imported US shows as well, like those Buffy the Vampire Slayer sets which were selling for around half the price of the Amazon US version, so it's not like it's something that's particular to BBC-produced shows).

The rest of the argument's been covered before in another thread, but whatever additional costs Amazon may be using the Whispernet surcharges for, apparently they're not using it to cover the extra things they do in the non-surcharge countries, so Kindle device/app users in the non-surcharge countries where Amazon appears to maintain a minimal business presence essentially appear to get less while consistently paying more.

Originally Posted by djulian

I'm curious, and this is off topic (so maybe PM me instead), but what do you mean by "technically inferior" when it comes to Amazon's format.

Long story short: the Mobipocket format is not only proprietary and poorly documented, it's also very limited in its display features and functionality (no right-hand margins! text can't wrap around pictures and must start on a new line below! images size limited to 128kb which often results in nasty pixelated downconversion for maps in the front of fantasy novels!) in a way that reduces a lot of books to a very low typographical level of simple text display.

Much basic fiction probably isn't impacted very much by that, but it does make for a very bare-bones reading experience when it could be something much nicer, cf. MR member zelda_pinwheel's nifty illustrated version of Three Men in a Boat, which has some nice screenshots in the thread showing how simple basic ePub features (actually just plain HTML features, really) can make a tremendous visual impact in aesthetic terms.

And certain kinds of non-fiction are affected detrimentally, such as poetry and reference because Mobi doesn't handle indents or any but the most basic types of lists and tables very well.

The one thing it does have going for it is a standardized dictionary format that anyone can create their own lookup dictionaries for any language in, and that's really the best thing about Mobi, IMHO, which I wish the ePub people would get around to addressing.

Also, personally I find it's rather annoying to take apart and reconstruct to fix the inevitable typos and formatting errors that riddle just about every e-book and ePub is simply so much easier to deal with that simply I no longer consider Mobi format books worth buying when there's an ePub version available.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I just realized this thread is not in the correct forum as the OP is NOT Ben Bova.

No, this is the correct forum. According to the forum guidelines, publishers are also supposed to confine their promotion of their authors to Self-Promotion, since they have a vested interest in things, and anyone with a direct connection to the work (such as a blogger hosting a book giveaway from a guest author) is also supposed to use Self-Promo as well rather than putting it into the other forums.