This price maneuvering is all pretty interesting. Normally, BooksOnBoard beats all with straight discounts. (There's always an exception - that's why you shop around.) For example, on the books listed in this thread, BooksOnBoard's straight prices were about the same as the FW rebate-club deals until this promo - and most of BoB's titles were less expensive. (BoB's Rewards Dollars go in as an adder to the discounts.)
I like the straight discount approach and am not crazy about managing rebates and rewards. But that's what we have here from both companies. And that's what this threads about. (If Amazon or Sony did this kind of pricing, the Washington Post or NY Times would make it a front page story. But independents like these two hard-working businesses don't get equal time from the media.)
This weekend, BooksOnBoard's ALL REWARDS deal and FW's bailout deal effectively attempt to match each other. However, if you play the game, you come out ahead every time I can calculate with BooksOnBoard - BECAUSE BooksOnBoard lets you use Rewards Dollars to get more Rewards Dollars. I thought this was a mistake they didn't catch, but they actually include it in their documentation. It takes a geometric progression to figure it out, but over the long run, you can consistently keep a net cost of better than 50% off if you're a student of this thing. (Not sure it's worth it for books that cost less than a gallon of gas, but that's another discussion.
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There IS a catch, however.
It doesn't look like BoB's advertising it, but I found this on the their site:
http://www.booksonboard.com/index.ph...ficate_rewards. BookOnBoard lets you use Rewards Dollars on top of Rewards Dollars with a gioft certificate deal. This is better than any buyers club I've seen, but it has a short fuse. Had to read it a few times to make sure I understood it because the deal's a little bit too good to believe. It's real, though. Much better deal than the FW club - and every nickel can be used to buy ebooks plus the audiobooks they carry. If I'm really planning to buy a pile of ebooks and audiobooks in the months ahead, I can easily save something like 70% plus now - and when BooksOnBoard goes back to its straight discounts next week, savings can be close to 80% plus.
Do they know this? (Maybe this page is a secret page or something that I wasn't supposed to find - but then who is it for?)
All that being said, one has to wonder why two independents are fighting each other - Amazon and Sony must be laughing in their Seattle coffee and Japanese beer. - I like both of these small independent outfits and hope they stay the course. FW makes me most nervous since they probably borrowed many millions to buy eReader.com a few months back.
With the market like it is, I have to wonder if they did this bailout to bail themselves out a bit to get cash in to pay part of the note.
BooksOnBoard is apparently very well-funded from reading other posts around the web, but all of it bears watching.
Of course, it was the big guys that deleted customer bookshelves in the past - Amazon and Barnes and Noble wiped out half a decade's worth of customer purchases with arbitrary corporate decisions a few years ago.
I'll stick with the two independents and hope they work with each other to protect us all from the big corps that don't seem to care as much about the ebook reading public.