W.H. Smith's selling Gen3 for £149.99 (now £179.99)

[ErwinOtten]

Originally Posted by anahid

And don't you all feel a bit cheated???

Nope, not cheated at all. I think it's normal for a gadget in an early adaptor stage to be sold at more than 50% of its production costs.

I feel a bit sorry for NAEB though, they could still be in business if Bookeen had done something with their margins.....

Do you have any ideas on this Derek, or is that a company secret?

[ErwinOtten]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

My Bookeen CyBook arrived today from W.H. Smiths.

I've attached the obligatory unwrapping photos. There are four things in the box

1. CyBook
2. Black Leather Case
3. USB Cable
4. Quickstart Instructions

In short, everything you need and nothing you don't. (USB Chargers, headphones and SD Cards being completely standard items.)

Getting the leather case included is wonderful. A great bargain. I wonder how long it'll take them to get more stock in hand.

Paul

Although the leather case isn't leather at all But I don't mind I love my black case all the same, a very good cover.

Does anybody know what the last numbers on the small sticker on the back mean? pdurrant has 5328 and I have 4943....... Just wondering, should they have sold about 5000 pieces by now ???

[anahid]

Originally Posted by DDHarriman

Hurra!!!

About the “too much cost” issue…
We are in an open market… things cost what one accepts (in the second) he/she is able to pay to lay hands on the “thing”, any “thing”.

Being an early adopter for ages… I’m used to pay zillions for stuff that gets 10 times less expensive in less time then… well you know…

My state is: price is… well… what we accept to pay… in the moment we pay it…

There is just one thing we can do:

1) train ourselves to wait until it’s time, and just buy when it’s time (even if it’s too much “several months/year/whatever after we want to buy”);
2) just buy. Nothing pays the fun of having the gadget we are wanting…

As you can imaging: I’m in the 2) group all the way! (or at least I try)

Of course you're right, and I also usually am in "group 2", my first computer, about a trillion years ago, was a 086 with 100 megas harddisk and cost about 3000 USD at the time, but this time I bought my Cybook only last month...

[anahid]

I think I just sold one... a client and friend of mine who reads about a book a day, I told him about it, showed of my cybook, and he said he'd buy one through W.H. Smith


They should pay commission to the person who started this thread.

[pdurrant]

I Don't know about the small numbers. My old CyBook has a completely different styles of numbers there. Serial number might give a better clue.

My old CyBook has serial number 210XXXX

My new CyBook has serial number 583XXXX

Presumably the serial number includes some check digits, but that seems to suggest that over the past six months or so, they've sold 370, 3,700, 37,000 or 370,000.

Or they mean nothing :-)

Originally Posted by ErwinOtten

Although the leather case isn't leather at all But I don't mind I love my black case all the same, a very good cover.

Does anybody know what the last numbers on the small sticker on the back mean? pdurrant has 5328 and I have 4943....... Just wondering, should they have sold about 5000 pieces by now ???

[DDHarriman]

As we are in the mood, my serial number is: 171XXXX
Bought in the end of January, and it's a 64 MByte one.

[ErwinOtten]

Originally Posted by DDHarriman

As we are in the mood, my serial number is: 171XXXX
Bought in the end of January, and it's a 64 MByte one.

My serial number is 480XXX.
It seems there is a correlation with the number on the little sticker .... My guess is that there are about 5000 units built.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ErwinOtten

My serial number is 480XXX.
It seems there is a correlation with the number on the little sticker .... My guess is that there are about 5000 units built.

We know that it's WAY more than that. We had a spell of looking at order numbers a while ago, and they were taking about 3000 orders per month at that time.

[ErwinOtten]

Originally Posted by HarryT

We know that it's WAY more than that. We had a spell of looking at order numbers a while ago, and they were taking about 3000 orders per month at that time.

C'mon Harry, do you REALY believe that ??? NAEB had very much difficulty to sell 260 units in a year and they were by far the cheapest vendor in the USA.
No way they sell 3000 units per month.

[HarryT]

Given that peoples' order numbers were sequential on the time they ordered, yes, I certainly believe it. Why so cynical? My Gen3, ordered on the first day they opened the store, had an order number of 17xx. A few weeks later, order numbers were over 5000, then over 10000. Unless you're suggesting that Bookeen are not assigning sequential order numbers, it seems reasonable to assume that order numbers correlate, at least roughly, to sales.

[ErwinOtten]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Given that peoples' order numbers were sequential on the time they ordered, yes, I certainly believe it. Why so cynical?

I think I'm not cynical but realistic, but I know that saying you are realistic is the trademark of a pessimist

But since I have my ereader there is at least 1 person a week (total strangers) who talks to me in the train and asks what it is and how it works and if I like it.... Why do you think that is? I think it's because everybody has heard of it, but NOBODY has got one. I see every gadget there is in the train, from iphone to micro-laptop, but no e-readers.
Face it, for 99,9% of the people they are still too expensive, and they are not easy to attain. There is only a very limited amount of shops (at least here in the Netherlands) where you can look at the device, and most people won't buy a device from the internet they never saw before in real life.

I really believe that in 10 years time the e-reader will have a very large chunk of the book market. But for now, no I can't see any signs proving me wrong.

[David Munch]

You have to give thought, that serial number could have nothing to do with sales. Actually, its quite common that they don't have anything in common..

Originally Posted by NetSlut

If any non-UK people want to get one of these while the price is still pretty good, I don't mind receiving them and forwarding them on to your respective countries, as long as it doesn't get too overwhelming.

Obviously you'd have to pay for the postage+insurance from here to you, and of course it means that you'd be paying the VAT (i.e. it wouldn't be any cheaper than the list price, since it would be being delivered in the UK), but if you really want one and it's just the delivery that's stopping you, then I'm prepared to help.

I'm very close to taking you up on this offer. Im situated in Denmark, so if Im not mistaken, I don't have to pay danish VAT since im located in a EU country, right?

[NetSlut]

Originally Posted by David Munch

I'm very close to taking you up on this offer. Im situated in Denmark, so if Im not mistaken, I don't have to pay danish VAT since im located in a EU country, right?

My understanding is that you would pay the 179.99 pounds sterling listed on the site, plus whatever delivery charge they make.

It would then arrive to me, a UK address, so no further charge is payable there.

I would send it to you in Denmark, so then you shouldn't pay any more than the cost of the delivery to you.

Sending parcels from one EU country to another should not attract more VAT or import charges, so it should be ok.

Obviously, if I'm wrong about this, you would end up liable for whatever other charges there are.

I send stuff from eBay auctions internationally quite a bit, and that doesn't seem to have attracted any other charges, so I think I'm correct.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by ErwinOtten

But since I have my ereader there is at least 1 person a week (total strangers) who talks to me in the train and asks what it is and how it works and if I like it.... Why do you think that is? I think it's because everybody has heard of it, but NOBODY has got one. I see every gadget there is in the train, from iphone to micro-laptop, but no e-readers.
Face it, for 99,9% of the people they are still too expensive, and they are not easy to attain. There is only a very limited amount of shops (at least here in the Netherlands) where you can look at the device, and most people won't buy a device from the internet they never saw before in real life.

I have the same experience. Total strangers that come up to me and ask 'Is that one of those electronic book readers?' They have heard of them, but nobody I've ever seen actually has one, other than myself.

And yes, there are too few brick & mortar places to look at one in the Netherlands. Waterstones in Amsterdam now has the Sony, Selexyz has the iLiad (I've seen it in the shop here in Almere). The Cybook isn't sold in any stores AFAIK.

[Duodora]

Originally Posted by ErwinOtten

think it's because everybody has heard of it, but NOBODY has got one.

I can't really comment on how many people have cybooks--then again I'm part of the world where there IS no public transportation, so I'm not sure when I really would have seen one.

But I beg to differ--publishers aren't going to even publish ebooks unless they have a reasonable chance of making a profit off of them. Since the availability of ebooks has been increasing--it seems that the people with ebook readers must be going up accordingly. I'm sure some of it is sort of preparing for the future--but if there was almost no interest now, the publishers wouldn't be doing anything with them.