Ebook Buying Addicts' Support Thread

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Tarana

I am currently $66 over my $40 per month goal. Sigh. As usual, it is the very cheap audiobooks through the Whispersync program that puts me over. Fortunately, I bought no fabric/yarn this month, so the extra cost is covered. Better next month.

Sneaky little things, aren't they? And too cheap to waste a whole credit on!

[pdurrant]

Since my LightSpeed magazine backissues haven't turned up yet, I've moved them to March.

Which means that for February I bought only two subscription titles (Analog and Asimov's) and a total of $9!

Of course, I am going to be significantly over budget in March.

[Yapyap]

Hmm. I wonder why I thought I'd bought eight books in February.

Looking at Calibre, my Google spreadsheet and Amazon Manage My Kindle (I don't think I bought books for myself anywhere else in February), it looks like I bought seven.

Well, that's all for the better, then.

So... seven books (out of the ten-per-month or 120-per-year I'm allowing myself) at an average cost of $2.87 - that's as high as it is due to one book over $6 and another near $5, both pre-orders in series I've been enjoying and both books I read immediately - and both would have been more expensive if not pre-ordered, as the price fluctuated quite a bit during the pre-release period and Amazon kindly locked the final price in at the lowest it was.

Also acquired five free books (three of them eARCs I'm going to have to read and review soon - all are books I would have bought otherwise), so I did fairly well in not expanding the overall pile of unread books, too.

Three pre-orders for March so far - again, the real challenge will be to keep impulse buys down, but I trust/hope I can stick to the pre-orders + possibly any good deals on those already on my wishlist.

[pdurrant]

Congratulations, Yapyap. It sounds like you did well in February.

[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Congratulations, Yapyap. It sounds like you did well in February.

I think so, too. There were a few cases where I had to check my trigger finger and not buy something of the "never heard of this before but looks interesting" variety when it was a case of "I'd stick it into the pile of will maybe read some day when/if I get in the mood for that genre". I have too many of those already!

It gets easier to resist every time, though.

[issybird]

Peccavi. 90%-off, multi-use coupon! A girl's not made of stone. I'll spare you the particulars, but it's very bad indeed.

So, back on the wagon. What I'm going to do is draw a line under my purchases and pretend they all happened yesterday, i.e., last month. Now, my aim for the remaining ten months of the year is to reduce my TBR by five books a month. It is probably overly ambitious, but I'm going to take a shot at it.

Only 24 hours ago, I was patting myself on the back for having made it through the second half of February unscathed! The gods will have their little joke.

[Lazybones]

I've pretty much worked through my local library's Overdrive selection in the genre I read most (fantasy/sci-fi), so Amazon's been getting more of my money lately. I wish publishers would lower the prices of their back list titles, I've been revisiting some old favorite series but most of them are very overpriced (IMO) for their age.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by issybird

Peccavi. 90%-off, multi-use coupon! A girl's not made of stone. I'll spare you the particulars, but it's very bad indeed.
....
Only 24 hours ago, I was patting myself on the back for having made it through the second half of February unscathed! The gods will have their little joke.

Well... I think you can be cut a little slack if a 90% multi-use coupon comes along. That doesn't happen every day, you know. I don't buy too many books at once normally (mostly 3-4, one series), but in cases like this, I'll spend an entire evening buying, downloading and fixing metadata.

I bought multiple times ten books up to now. Hey, who am I, to disdain books at these prices? These are books that would have cost me $8.99 a piece in paperback.

Without this coupon, I would have spend $350. Using this coupon, I spent $35, or about €25. (OK, maybe it'll be €27 or €28 because of Paypal exchange rates.)

Fortunately, I'm not on a budget because normally, I don't spend more than $15 a month on ebooks... if I spend anything at all. Having a huge TBR built by insanely high Kobo discount coupons causes me to just keep waiting for a deal on one or more of my wishlist books

[Fbone]

I swear someone from Kobo watches this thread with the sinister intention of initiating total support group relapse. Let's just say, for myself, it was quite ugly. My only saving grace was I didn't spend the entire gift card amount.

[BelleZora]

Yesterday I was resolutely planning to actually pay money for a book only after reading the last book for which I paid money. Last night the Kobo feeding frenzy began when all such thoughts conveniently disappeared. After stopping myself and going to bed, I awoke with new books to buy that had presented themselves during dreams. The really good part is that I now own books I planned to buy at full price this month.

[PurpleStar]

Well, I went on a little book buying binge again. Between the 90% off Kobo code and having amazon credit, I just couldn't help myself! Oh well, at least I'll never run out of books to read.

[Yapyap]

That 90% off Kobo code seems to have got a lot of us.

I just got eight books (all had been on my wishlist for some time) and now I'm not even sure whether to count seven of them as bought or free, since Kobo credited me back nearly $7 recently (for a 2012 purchase where a third of the content turned out to be missing) and between the 90% off and the store credit, seven of the eight books ended up costing me $0.00...

I might just put them down as free, I suppose, since, well, at a stretch, you could say I paid that money back in 2012, and I really can't find a way to mark that down in a sensible way in my spreadsheet!

ETA: Never mind. Found that a whole lot more books from my various wishlists (Amazon and Goodreads) do work, and, well, I think I'll definitely need to stick to just the books I'll want immediately for the rest of the year! But that 90% off code was really far too good to let it go to waste, especially with my long wishlists...

The final one was $0.65. And then I stopped, as all the other books I'd have wanted were not couponable in any new check-out country that allows PayPal. Possibly a good thing, all things considered.

[pdurrant]

A 90% unlimited use code is far too good to pass up.

35 books for £16.51 ($24.88 in my accounting method).

All from favourite authors, books or series I was waiting for a good offer on. And all downloaded, stripped (where necessary) and loaded into calibre.

I'm now well over budget for March, but I could still make my yearly total, even counting all the books I'm planning to buy this year.

I don't think any of us need feel guilty about indulging in a spending spree with a 90% off code. 90% off is twice as good as 80% off, and five times as good as 50% off. They don't come around very often!

[PurpleStar]

Anyone know how long the 90% code lasts? I might put some money on a gift card tomorrow to take advantage of it some more! I don't really want a bunch of little charges in my bank statement.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I don't think any of us need feel guilty about indulging in a spending spree with a 90% off code. 90% off is twice as good as 80% off, and five times as good as 50% off. They don't come around very often!

It's still February here, February 30 in coupon terms. Why shouldn't there be a February 30? March and abstemiousness will start when the coupon goes paws up.

I don't really feel guilty about the wishlist books I've bought; they'll never be cheaper. I continue to think, despite evidence to the contrary, that Kobo will get its act together at some point and sprees will be a fond memory.

I do feel somewhat guilty about purchases of newly discovered wants and ebooks to replace pbooks that I may never reread (although having them in ebook increases the possibility). I had a small victory today; one of the Kindle Daily Deals sounded interesing and I'd have been able to get it for about 55¢ net at Kobo, after the coupon and ebates. But I would have been able to resist it at the Kindle price of $1.99 (I've developed some chops in that respect, finally), so I realized that it'll probably never appeal enough for it to be my next read.