Where to even begin? I was unexpectedly without internet access since Saturday, and I was hoping I wouldn't come back to a tie where people were waiting on me to start a tie-breaker poll. Though similar in a way, I wouldn't have ever expected coming back to this!
The answer to everything is very easy - Buddenbrooks won fair and square and it will stay the winner. There never would've been any doubt for me, and I'm glad many posters have come to a similar conclusion during the course of posts. Though I do wish I could've been here to answer immediately to clear up any doubt and let people get on with accessing a copy and reading.
As to availability, this has come up before and I've been very consistent - there are no availability rules in this club, and won't be while I'm still running it. However, people are free to vote however they want, and if they want to factor in e-book availability or price, that's up to them. I want to encourage people to be able to nominate what they want without worry. Half the fun of nominations is discovery itself.
With that said, being the person who nominated Buddenbrooks, I do feel badly for those of you who are having such a hard time accessing it!
While I've nominated books that are expensive in the past, and books that are only available in pbook form in the past, I thought Buddenbrooks was generally available as an e-book. My go-to search to see if there's an e-book, Amazon, had turned one up. I don't know if I would've nominated it anyway if it hadn't. I remember when Mann's Magic Mountain was nominated awhile back, and, as someone mentioned upthread, it wasn't available at all in e-book form. I wasn't the one who nominated it then, but I was interested in it and I personally have no qualms about ordering a pbook and waiting for it to arrive; I've done it. However, I know that some do and as I'd nominated Ulysses too this month and it was a non-starter, I wanted to use my last nomination on something that I thought would generate more interest, which it did obviously, but if I'd known the availability problems beforehand I might have reconsidered how much interest the book might generate.
I hope some of you that may sit out because of availability difficulties reconsider if you're interested in the book. If you're worried about getting started late, I have a feeling with such a long work that this will be a long conversation, such as Conquest of the Incas and Middlemarch were. Personally, I'm only just about to get started on Fanny & Stella now and won't start Buddenbrooks until after.
I think the main thing I feel badly about is that there's an inequality in availability for the book. If I also had to order the pbook, I'd feel we were all in the same boat, but since I have access to the e-book I feel for those of you who don't. I love how international we are, but different members can have quite different experiences with availability and price for our selections. I also feel badly that many of you second-guessed your vote once looking into availability. I can't change the votes, so all I can say is that I hope that those of you who do read it enjoy it and get something out of it. The only Mann I've read so far is Death in Venice and I thought that was superb, so I'm very much looking forward to this.
The discussion thread will be up within a day.