Quote:
Originally Posted by edbro
Do you guys really feel that the 100% rebate is worth it? I did it a few times but when I went to spend my rebate, I found that most of the books were grossly overpriced. Books that were under $10 at Sony or Amazon were going to $26 or $27.
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Typically new books are overpriced compared to Amazon. However they are usually competitive for backlist stuff. But, once you take Micropay into account they are far cheaper than any other store.
They occasionally have sales where you get a big Micropay rebate, even if paying with Micropay. For example in December 2009 every secure ebook had a 40-60% Micropay rebate, even if you paid with Micropay dollars.
Say a book was initially $20 with a 60% rebate -- you'd use 20 Micropay dollars to pay for it, but then you'd get 12 back, so on net you'd only spent 8 of your Micropay dollars. If you belonged to the buywise club, the book would initially be $17 and you'd get $10.20 back for a net cost of $6.80. For typical backlist books that were originally $7.99, you'd get them for $3.20 or if you belonged to buywise $2.72.
And to top it all off there were several unlimited 25% off coupons around in December '09. This brought that $20 book down to $6 without buywise or $5.10 with it. Even a book starting at $30 ended up at $9/$7.65. And that $7.99 backlist book was a ridiculous $2.40/$2.04.
You just have to watch and wait for the sales. They offer 100% rebates on the buywise memberships too, a couple of times/year.
Finally Fictionwise is a *great* place for any magazine subscriptions. They are way cheaper than amazon, especially if you get a 2 year subscription, and they sell the issues as DRM-free multiformat.
The only real downer is that they are geographically restricted so those outside the US can't always buy a lot of their books. Some people have found successful work-arounds for this but others haven't gotten them to work.
-Marcy, Fictionwise addict