Free/Bargain Science Fiction & Fantasy in December 2013

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by slex

I think their platform is buggy. I tried 20% on a book. It went down from $11,99 to $11,91. I tried 30% and it went down from $11,99 to $1,99. I tried 50% and it showed $6,99. I also managed to bring the price down to zero.

Clearly - a bug. I am undecided if I should make use of it.

It was not obvious to me that it was a bug. There's no way to keep track of all promotions, and I reckon that any reduction from entering a voucher code is fair, providing that one's not deliberating coding something to break a badly written parser and inject new code!

[Fbone]

I tried it with several books and they all were reduced to free. I didn't complete purchase.

[Katsunami]

WHAT! I just bought a(nother) Forgotten Realms book that was US-only, using PayPal as I normally do, and it came through. Coupons are indeed buggy. It seems specific percentages get converted into specific coupons. I entered "50%", and got a discount of 50%, but other percentages such as 10% actually reduced the price by 75% or some other percentage. Weird. I don't understand things over there anymore.

[slex]

I've submitted a ticket through their contact form. Let's see what they have to say about these codes.

[Fbone]

I tried 10% - 100% and every one gave a discount. Usually $5.00 off.

Tried 15% - 95% and $5.00 off.

[itisbomb]

The Bone Season: A Novel
by Samantha Shannon

is $1.99 at Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Bone-Season-Sa...ds=Bone+season

Below is the blurb
A major event—the first book a seven-part series of dizzying imagination. Welcome to Scion: No Safer Place.

It is the year 2059. Several major world cities are under the control of a security force called Scion. Paige Mahoney works in the criminal underworld of Scion London, part of a secret cell known as the Seven Seals. The work she does is unusual: scouting for information by breaking into others’ minds. Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare kind of clairvoyant, and in this world, the voyants commit treason simply by breathing.

But when Paige is captured and arrested, she encounters a power more sinister even than Scion. The voyant prison is a separate city—Oxford, erased from the map two centuries ago and now controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. These creatures, the Rephaim, value the voyants highly—as soldiers in their army.

Paige is assigned to a Rephaite keeper, Warden, who will be in charge of her care and training. He is her master. Her natural enemy. But if she wants to regain her freedom, Paige will have to learn something of his mind and his own mysterious motives.

The Bone Season introduces a compelling heroine—a young woman learning to harness her powers in a world where everything has been taken from her. It also introduces an extraordinary young writer, with huge ambition and a teeming imagination. Samantha Shannon has created a bold new reality in this riveting debut.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by Fbone

I tried 10% - 100% and every one gave a discount. Usually $5.00 off.

Tried 15% - 95% and $5.00 off.

Further investigation reveals that Diesel thinks they are "gift certificates." I added several books to my cart and went to checkout. Entire order including tax was reduced to ZERO and website states certain gift certificate numbers were redeemed.

I cancelled order before confirming.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by slex

I've submitted a ticket through their contact form. Let's see what they have to say about these codes.

Indeed... I've just bought some books, but I did look for "decent" codes. They are different for each book. I also managed to get one book for $0, and I wager that I could get a lot more of them, but I won't.

Now I've gotten a few books for a decent price (average discount is ~40% compared to the normal price), but I don't dare to go on a spree misusing the $0 loophole. Getting one or two books at $0 while buying multiple books could be explained as a system glitch and luck on my part; getting 50 books would be clearly a misuse.

First, I'm not that kind of a person, and second, I don't want to be banned at Diesel.

I'm just glad that it seems I can buy US-only books again. (Many of them are cheaper than Kobo by default; for some I'd need at least a 30% code to match Diesel's price.)

[slex]

Diesel are cheaper for me than Kobo (without coupons) because Kobo charges VAT and for Bulgaria it's 20%.

[Katsunami]

Diesel has many of the Forgotten Realms books for $4.50 (€3.29) or thereabout, but they also have a lot of them at $7.99 (€5.84). Obviously, I go for the cheaper ones.

Kobo sells most of them for $6.59 (€4.82). If I'd buy them at ebooks.com or the Dutch Kobo store, I'd pay €5.91 and €6.04 respectively. Another source is Feedbooks, at €4.38 for many of them. Amazon is the most expensive: they want to have $9.18 (€6.71) for many of these books if you're outside the US.

Therefore I was quite ticked off when Diesel wouldn't sell me those books anymore, because I'd need to have 30% discount codes at Kobo to match their price. (Of course nobody can match the 75-85% discount codes that Kobo had the last few weeks, causing many of us to raid their store...)

I've also bought the US-only Mistborn trilogy for $2.93 without using any codes. Three books for €2.14 is a very nice deal.

[murg]

Here's what's happening at Diesel: Basically incompetent software developers.

The coupon entry value is not being filtered before being passed to the database. And, the check in the database for the coupon is not correct.

The technical explanation: It looks like they are using a SQL LIKE to check the coupon, rather than an =. In conjunction with the % in the coupon (% is a wildcard), this is bringing up all of the coupons that start with 20 (using '20%' as the example), which means that coupon 200000000000123, 200000000000124, 200000000000125 are being brought up. Then they select which ever one of these is at the top. It looks like the list of coupons that match is not being sorted, so which coupon is at the top and selected is almost random.

[Katsunami]

LOL. That's actually a very plausible explanation. I should have thought of it myself.

Do you also have an explanation why at first many books were available to the entire world, later on only to US, which caused me problems to buy them, while it's now possible to buy them, even though they're still US only?

[murg]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

LOL. That's actually a very plausible explanation. I should have thought of it myself.

Do you also have an explanation why at first many books were available to the entire world, later on only to US, which caused me problems to buy them, while it's now possible to buy them, even though they're still US only?

Not specifically.

The ebook vendor sites seem to have the world split up into regions, based on the country you are connecting from and/or the country specified in your account:

• US Only
• UK Only
• Specific British CommonWealth only (Aus, NZ, etc)
• US Centric - English Rest of World
• UK Centric - English Rest of World
• English Rest of World - both US and UK
• Non-English (not explored much)

The US/UK centric categories mean that the books available are from the publishers in that country.

What may be happening is that the books are moving from the US Only to the US Centric - English Rest of World categories.

Even in a category, the pricing can be different from country to country. As can availability, for example some books by an author may be missing from a particular Rest of World site, but present in others. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this.

[hwlester]

Speaking of US/UK and ebooks... Do any of you know if I could purchase an egift card from nook.com (say $10) and send it to a "friend" in the UK to purchase ebooks from nook.co.uk? There are some scifi ebooks my "friend" wants that the NookUK store has that KoboUK is missing.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by murg

Here's what's happening at Diesel: Basically incompetent software developers.

The coupon entry value is not being filtered before being passed to the database. And, the check in the database for the coupon is not correct.

The technical explanation: It looks like they are using a SQL LIKE to check the coupon, rather than an =. In conjunction with the % in the coupon (% is a wildcard), this is bringing up all of the coupons that start with 20 (using '20%' as the example), which means that coupon 200000000000123, 200000000000124, 200000000000125 are being brought up. Then they select which ever one of these is at the top. It looks like the list of coupons that match is not being sorted, so which coupon is at the top and selected is almost random.