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As far as posting in the deals section goes, I suggested a while back that we might want a split into subsections:
device deals
book deals
bookstore deals
Device deals would be for sales on ebook reading devices, like when Woot had refurb 600s for sale. That one's pretty obvious.
Book deals would be for discounts/freebies on individual books, which is where "My book is half price on Smashwords this weekend" would go. Those wouldn't necessarily have to be posted by the authors; any deals that someone spots that are specific to a specific book or books would go there.
Bookstore deals would be for more general sales and discounts from the bookstore end, like "all romances half price for Valentine's Day on BVC". An easy rule of thumb would be that if the post includes the titles of specific books or the names of specific authors it would go in "book deals" while if it only mentions the store, genre, whatever, it would be in "store deals".
The big advantage to this, aside from satisfying my obsession to classify things, is in time on the front page. The "deals" section is so busy that any given post gets pushed off the front page rather quickly (this also tends to encourage bumping). If someone's trying to find a deal on a new ebook reader, it's buried under book discount notices. If someone would jump on a discount on Steve's books, they might never see it because it got flooded out by ... um, how many people posted about those 600s on Woot? ... device and bookstore sales. And if someone is looking for cheap books by authors who don't hang out on MobileRead, they'll have to dig for the bookstore sales among the other two categories.
For instance, I don't care in the slightest about device deals. I have my 505, it does what I want, and I'll be happy with it until it wears out (that's just the way I am; I drive a car that's old enough to vote, too). On the other hand, there are some ebook stores I buy from whose deals would interest me, and I'm even more interested in deals (especially of the free sample variety) by indie authors. Sorting the three types of deals out would make it a lot easier to find the ones I want. And, just by having the extra sections, it would keep new posts of each category on the front page of that section longer, which would be good for everyone.
That way, the Book Fair would be for announcements of new ebooks (whether or not they had a special deal attached), and Deals/Books would be for special deals on ebooks (whether or not they're new). And, yes, the same book could be posted to both of them if it was both new and discounted. It might also make sense, if the MR forum software is capable of it, to set the deals sections to auto-purge posts after a set period of time since nobody really cares about deals that expired a month ago.
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