Hi all,
I've just joined this forum as an owner of a Sony PRS-505 who is suffering from serious buyer's remorse. Between the amount of space in my house taken up by books and the amount of travelling I do, an eBook reader seemed like a good idea at the time. Not so much now.
Last week I contacted Waterstones in the UK about the fact that a new eBook I was considering buying was twice the price of the hardback from Amazon (including next day delivery, as a Prime customer).
By paying twice as much, I would have a book that only I could read. I can't lend it to my wife when I'm done (we only have one reader). She can't then pass it to her mother. We can't donate it to a charity shop when we're done. And for this privilege, I am being asked to pay twice as much.
The response I received from Marjaneh Miller on the customer services team is reproduced below:
Quote:
Thank you for your email.
I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the price difference between
ebooks and other formats online.
There are a number of reasons why the prices are different online but as
this is an exclusive product prices may vary, I would like to inform you
that in the future there will be reductions and promotions as the item
becomes more popular.
I do apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
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I'm now convinced that somewhere up the food chain, people
want ebooks to fail. How are these items expected to become popular when people can read exactly the same text (minus the horrible OCR mess I've seen in a few 'professionally produced' ebooks lately) for half the price ?
I can see a very near future where the same war on the public is going to be fought by the book publishers as we are seeing from the music industry now, caused by the same lack of understanding that the media companies showed. I guess some people just
have to widdle on the live rail for themselves
I'm honestly tempted to buy the hardback of the book at 50% of the ebook price, hand it straight to my wife and download a pirate copy of the ebook. I honestly can't justify paying twice as much to read as I was before, and that on top of the sunk cost of the reader.
Bah!