[Halk]

I've only bought one book from Fictionwise before (as a result I have a $9 micropay sitting).

I'm about to buy a pile of books and I'm trying to get my head around how their discounts work. In a simple sense of course I do understand...

You buy a book and they give you a micropay rebate.
You can then use your micropay rebates to buy other books.

However all of the books that I've searched for have been micropay only credit card rebates.

What this actually means is if a book costs $8 and there's a $4 micropay rebate then I'll look and think the book is $4, which seems reasonable. So intuitively I start thinking of the books costing $4... So I think I buy one, and use the micropay to get the next one. Except there's no micropay rebate if I use micropay to buy it. So if there's a 50% rebate then I need to actually buy two books before I can use micropay to get the third.

In other words you can't look at a 50% micropay rebate as the book half price. It won't work that way. There are some books with a 100% rebate... likewise you can't look at these books as "free".

So I thought I'd work out a simple equation to convert the micropay discount percentage into an actual discount percentage to make it easier to compare book prices. It's actually very simple... divide the micropay discount by two. So if there's a 33% micropay discount on 3 books and you buy em all.. you pay 200% of the cost of one book for three books, or you pay 2/3 of the cost. This works for any micropay discount percentage as long as it is the same for all of your purchases.

I notice that there are some books with a 100% micropay rebate, for those you should use real money to pay for them. They aren't so common though.

So in short...

Ignore the "Cost after Rebate" and the "You Save" fields in the shop, they are deliberately misleading. You have to work out the figure yourself by removing 1/2 of the micropay discount from the "You Pay". The simple explanation for this is that micropay money can only be used to buy books at full cover price, buying the book from a Fictionwise competitor would be at a lower price than this. The discount can only be used against an inflated price.

That aside though I've not been particularly observant of Fictionwise so I don't know if the discounts they have on right now change periodically. For example most of the books I'm looking at now have 45% micropay rebates, and credit card. Is this pretty normal, or does it vary? For example is it sometimes 20% and rebate regardless if you pay by credit card?