Ben Bova's THE EXILES TRILOGY - on 99cent special for a very short time

[djulian]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

...Otherwise, you end up preferentially skewing and biasing the test by cutting out the portion of the potential sales market which uses ePub and/or doesn't shop via Amazon...

I think they are intending to test the Amazon market; it's not a skewed test if all they want to test is the Amazon market.

Originally Posted by ATDrake

...I myself have a Kindle, but I consider Amazon's proprietary format to be technically inferior and really not worth paying for in most cases and I do not care at all for certain of their business practices, such as charging customers who happen to live in certain countries an extra $2 per Kindle title*...

I imagine (I'm not Amazon, so I can't confirm this) that it costs a bit more to do business in some countries than others. They have to cover those costs. That's not an inappropriate business practice--it's good business. Like paying more in the US for DVD's of BBC's better programs.

I'm curious, and this is off topic (so maybe PM me instead), but what do you mean by "technically inferior" when it comes to Amazon's format. I have no familiarity with ebook format issues, so I apologize if this seems like a dumb question.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Thanks, Andrew - I've bought it from amazon.co.uk. Why does it cost £1.02 in the UK, by the way? That's an exceedingly odd price!

99p + 3% tax

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by djulian

I'd think of them as five delayed sales. If you are currently willing to buy the book at 99 cents, then when (if) it becomes available at that price as an ePub, you may still buy it.

No, not necessarily. I'm interested now, but if enough time goes on, then I'm very likely to lose interest and stop caring enough to even bother thinking about buying even if it does show up in a format I'm willing to purchase at a price I'm willing to pay.

I know this because over the years I've passed on buying a lot of sale books which at first seemed interesting but were not then available on terms I was willing to consider and even when they sometimes dropped to an even cheaper level later, apathy had set in and I went and spent my money elsewhere.

Originally Posted by djulian

I think they are intending to test the Amazon market; it's not a skewed test if all they want to test is the Amazon market.

Actually, it says in the OP that "for a very limited time we're putting the price on this one down to 99 cents to see what it does for sales".

They are not testing the Amazon market per se, simply trying to test the sales at the 99 cent price point but limiting the test to being performed solely within the Amazon market, which naturally skews things.

Originally Posted by djulian

I imagine (I'm not Amazon, so I can't confirm this) that it costs a bit more to do business in some countries than others. They have to cover those costs. That's not an inappropriate business practice--it's good business. Like paying more in the US for DVD's of BBC's better programs.

BBC DVDs cost roughly the same as other non-BBC TV show DVDs with comparative prominence and discs-per-set, as far as I've been able to tell. Mind you, they can be somewhat cheaper in the UK where they're closer to the source, but that's mainly because Amazon UK holds deep-discount clearance sales on several categories of titles from time to time (and they do it for imported US shows as well, like those Buffy the Vampire Slayer sets which were selling for around half the price of the Amazon US version, so it's not like it's something that's particular to BBC-produced shows).

The rest of the argument's been covered before in another thread, but whatever additional costs Amazon may be using the Whispernet surcharges for, apparently they're not using it to cover the extra things they do in the non-surcharge countries, so Kindle device/app users in the non-surcharge countries where Amazon appears to maintain a minimal business presence essentially appear to get less while consistently paying more.

Originally Posted by djulian

I'm curious, and this is off topic (so maybe PM me instead), but what do you mean by "technically inferior" when it comes to Amazon's format.

Long story short: the Mobipocket format is not only proprietary and poorly documented, it's also very limited in its display features and functionality (no right-hand margins! text can't wrap around pictures and must start on a new line below! images size limited to 128kb which often results in nasty pixelated downconversion for maps in the front of fantasy novels!) in a way that reduces a lot of books to a very low typographical level of simple text display.

Much basic fiction probably isn't impacted very much by that, but it does make for a very bare-bones reading experience when it could be something much nicer, cf. MR member zelda_pinwheel's nifty illustrated version of Three Men in a Boat, which has some nice screenshots in the thread showing how simple basic ePub features (actually just plain HTML features, really) can make a tremendous visual impact in aesthetic terms.

And certain kinds of non-fiction are affected detrimentally, such as poetry and reference because Mobi doesn't handle indents or any but the most basic types of lists and tables very well.

The one thing it does have going for it is a standardized dictionary format that anyone can create their own lookup dictionaries for any language in, and that's really the best thing about Mobi, IMHO, which I wish the ePub people would get around to addressing.

Also, personally I find it's rather annoying to take apart and reconstruct to fix the inevitable typos and formatting errors that riddle just about every e-book and ePub is simply so much easier to deal with that simply I no longer consider Mobi format books worth buying when there's an ePub version available.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I just realized this thread is not in the correct forum as the OP is NOT Ben Bova.

No, this is the correct forum. According to the forum guidelines, publishers are also supposed to confine their promotion of their authors to Self-Promotion, since they have a vested interest in things, and anyone with a direct connection to the work (such as a blogger hosting a book giveaway from a guest author) is also supposed to use Self-Promo as well rather than putting it into the other forums.

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Long story short: the Mobipocket format is not only proprietary and poorly documented, it's also very limited in its display features and functionality (no right-hand margins! text can't wrap around pictures and must start on a new line below! images size limited to 128kb which often results in nasty pixelated downconversion for maps in the front of fantasy novels!) in a way that reduces a lot of books to a very low typographical level of simple text display.

This remains a little off-topic and I ask for interest sake, but does the latest Kindle format address some of these concerns?

I'm interested because the Kindle is my main device so I would be curious what advantages I might get when books published to Amazon start to be in this new format and when an appropriate conversion plugin from epub to the new Kindle format might make an appearence in Calibre.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by caleb72

This remains a little off-topic and I ask for interest sake, but does the latest Kindle format address some of these concerns?

KF8 is supposed to bring Kindles up to speed with the basic display capabilities that ePub has had since 2009, and a commenter for the illustrated Three Men in a Boat e-book that I linked above says that it seems to convert and work very nicely with most of the nifty features (though no embedded fonts) into KF8 on his/her Kindle Fire.

I'd suggest testing ePubs with known advanced formatting by dragging them onto the new version of Kindle Previewer if you're running Windows or a fairly recent upgraded Intel Mac (download page with Amazon's own mini-blurbs about the changes, although it's very scanty and mostly implied via screenshots rather than giving solid details), which will auto-convert and display them in the new format so you can see how they look.

I do remain a bit concerned about included image quality, since the release notes for the new KindleGen have a bit about "improved image quality for comics and children's books", which seems to imply that they're still downgrading the originals in some way upon conversion to KF8.

Mind you, if you have an older model of Kindle you may be out of luck as far as the enhancements go, as AFAIK Amazon are only planning to upgrade the firmware to support it for the most recent generation of Kindles, which likely means just K4/Touch and above.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Fbone

99p + 3% tax

But why are people in the UK being charged 60% more than those in the US?

[Blue Tyson]

They made a mistake, thought you were Australian.

[piperclassique]

Well, I thought it worth £1.02 so I bought it. That is about one quarter of what the postage would have been from UK for the trilogy on paper and I like the author. Also I find the format perfectly acceptable for text. I can read without pictures, have been able to since I was five years old. Give the publishers a break here guys, they are supposed to be running a business and hopefully making money for themselves, their employees, an their authors ( change the order as required)
Rant over, off to do some reading in the garden in this lovely spring.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by piperclassique

Well, I thought it worth £1.02 so I bought it. That is about one quarter of what the postage would have been from UK for the trilogy on paper and I like the author. Also I find the format perfectly acceptable for text. I can read without pictures, have been able to since I was five years old. Give the publishers a break here guys, they are supposed to be running a business and hopefully making money for themselves, their employees, an their authors ( change the order as required)
Rant over, off to do some reading in the garden in this lovely spring.

I bought it as well. I was just a little curious about why it's £1.02 for us, but only 62p for those in the US. I'm not complaining - it's clearly excellent value at £1.02.

[JSWolf]

It looks like Andrew doesn't want to tell us why it is they cannot lower the price in their OWN store.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by caleb72

This remains a little off-topic and I ask for interest sake, but does the latest Kindle format address some of these concerns?

I'm interested because the Kindle is my main device so I would be curious what advantages I might get when books published to Amazon start to be in this new format and when an appropriate conversion plugin from epub to the new Kindle format might make an appearence in Calibre.

But in order to be able to read KF8 format, you'll need a Kindle Fire or one of the Kindle 4s. So if you have a K3/KK or below, forget it.

[HarryT]

Just a Kindle Fire or one of the Kindle Apps at the moment, actually. The K4/KT won't currently display KF8 format. Not that that particularly matters - Amazon's servers will send you either Mobi or KF8 automatically depending what device you're reading on.

[JSWolf]

Please don't anyone else buy this. We need to send a message to the publisher that they cannot screw with customers. Sure it's a good deal if you read Kindle eBooks, but we have to unite and tell the publisher that this sort of discrimination is not going to be tolerated. Also, if you've already bought it from Amazon, please try your best to return it. We need to get less sales for the publisher, not more.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

No, not necessarily. I'm interested now, but if enough time goes on, then I'm very likely to lose interest and stop caring enough to even bother thinking about buying even if it does show up in a format I'm willing to purchase at a price I'm willing to pay.

I know this because over the years I've passed on buying a lot of sale books which at first seemed interesting but were not then available on terms I was willing to consider and even when they sometimes dropped to an even cheaper level later, apathy had set in and I went and spent my money elsewhere.

This states exactly my buying habits. Fiction is an impulse buy for me. By the time the Bova books are available at 99 cents in ePub, my TBR pile will have grown some more and I am unlikely to care. At $8.99, I wouldn't even consider the ebooks; at 99 cents I would impulse buy them and add them to my TBR pile and not be concerned whether I actually got to read them in the near future.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It looks like Andrew doesn't want to tell us why it is they cannot lower the price in their OWN store.

Jon, sometimes I wonder about your comments. Andrew doesn't owe us an explanation. You made your point and this just comes across as sour grapes because someone isn't immediately responding to you.

Maybe he doesn't want to get into an argument with you over a business decision he has made. After all, it is his business and he can do as he wishes without getting your or my approval.