Quote:
Originally Posted by kindlekitten
some of these books are free for mere hours. you have to be on the ball to go after the free books. free book hunting is indeed a full contact sport. someone is going to get dirty!
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Also, for those outside the US, a free book here is often not free there. There are two reasons for that:
(1) if Amazon is the seller, they add $2 for all international customers (presumably to cover fees and added costs of doing business there, including subsidizing the often much higher costs of wireless delivery) and must charge VAT on the full price (the amount depends on your country)
(2) if one of the big five is the seller, they often don't reduce the costs for other countries (I suspect they can set the price individually for every country on each book or do a single "US" vs "international" price). Which leaves those outside the US out of their promotions. I suspect one reason that do this is that a few nations actual prohibit "sales" pricing on books or ebooks (and you know who you are), rather than simply not wanting to promote their books internationally (or perhaps they feel that in the EU, people haven't gotten used to lower prices and they don't want them to).
But yes, one big reason is that sales pricing comes and goes. Sometimes a certain number of books has been set as the sales price, but also sometimes the price is in error (Amazon will honor it, though, so long as you get it while it is sale priced) and it rises quickly once someone notices it.