Agatha Christie

[andyh2000]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Yes, that's a commercial pirate site. They do not have permission to sell the books, they are ripping people off.

Usually, if a deal looks to good to be true, it is.

Don't be fooled by such sites into thinking that just because you've paid money for the ebooks that you aren't pirating the books. You're just paying some crooks for the privilege of pirating them.

How can one tell for sure though? If say the price for all the books was $50 or something, it might seem more plausible.

Andrew

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by andyh2000

How can one tell for sure though? If say the price for all the books was $50 or something, it might seem more plausible.

Andrew

How to tell? Well, look at the clues.

(1) An incredibly low price
(2) A big bundle of ebooks
(3) In multiple formats, include PDF (which almost no commercial ebook publishers use)
(4) Without DRM
(5) Also offered on CD-R

Now, any one of those wouldn't necessarily make the offer dodgy. All five? It's dodgy.

[GeckoFriend]

Thanks for the education on commercial pirate sites. I've never seen one before and now I know what to look for.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

How to tell? Well, look at the clues.

(1) An incredibly low price
(2) A big bundle of ebooks
(3) In multiple formats, include PDF (which almost no commercial ebook publishers use)
(4) Without DRM
(5) Also offered on CD-R

Now, any one of those wouldn't necessarily make the offer dodgy. All five? It's dodgy.

Yes, all those indications of providing the customer with a good deal is a dead giveaway. If you're not getting screwed somehow, then it's not from a BPH. (no, I'm not being sarcastic).

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Yes, all those indications of providing the customer with a good deal is a dead giveaway. If you're not getting screwed somehow, then it's not from a BPH. (no, I'm not being sarcastic).

All these are indications that a legit seller would be losing big bucks (unless they sign you up for a long term commitment). The BHPs are not screwing anybody who doesn't want to get screwed --- the seller sets a price and the buyer can chose not to buy. If the price is so high that not enough people are willing to pay it, then the seller is really only hurting himself.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Yes, all those indications of providing the customer with a good deal is a dead giveaway. If you're not getting screwed somehow, then it's not from a BPH. (no, I'm not being sarcastic).

If someone offers to sell you the Mona Lisa for £50 quid, you can be pretty sure that the Louvre doesn't know about it.

If someone offers you a bundle of 50 books that are retailing at Amazon for (say) £4 each for just £30, and what's more, without the DRM you'll get at Amazon, and in multiple formats, you can be pretty sure that the publishers and authors/copyrightholders of those books don't know about it and won't see a penny of the money.

It isn't someone offering a good deal to customers. It's a crook defrauding you. These people are not your friends. They are scamming you.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It isn't someone offering a good deal to customers. It's a crook defrauding you. These people are not your friends. They are scamming you.

I'm not on the side of the scammers and don't advocate buying from them. I was just amused by the fact that we could tell it wasn't legit because it wasn't a ripoff.

How much does it cost to put out the dead Christie's already published novels? I think they could put out her whole collection at the price of 50 pounds and still make money. People would buy it, even if they only wanted to read some of the books, at that price. But no, they'd rather no transaction than one where they didn't extract the maximum the market could bear.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by rkomar

How much does it cost to put out the dead Christie's already published novels? I think they could put out her whole collection at the price of 50 pounds and still make money. People would buy it, even if they only wanted to read some of the books, at that price. But no, they'd rather no transaction than one where they didn't extract the maximum the market could bear.

I certainly agree with this, as I think I've said earlier in the thread. Indeed, I think offering the complete collection for £50 or £75 is likely to net them a lot more than individual volumes at £4.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I certainly agree with this, as I think I've said earlier in the thread. Indeed, I think offering the complete collection for £50 or £75 is likely to net them a lot more than individual volumes at £4.

That's probably why I was so convinced they could do it (well, that and the fact that you can buy the complete works of Shakespeare for a lot less than that brand new on paper). Maybe, like with music and movies, we have to wait a few years for the impatient spenders to finish shopping before the "Value" editions start coming out.

[crich70]

She also wrote "Witness for the Prosecution" I believe. I remember seeing the movie wth Tyrone Power some time back. It was pretty good and had some nice twists in the plot.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by rkomar

That's probably why I was so convinced they could do it (well, that and the fact that you can buy the complete works of Shakespeare for a lot less than that brand new on paper). Maybe, like with music and movies, we have to wait a few years for the impatient spenders to finish shopping before the "Value" editions start coming out.

The big difference between Agatha Christie and Shakespeare (at least from a pricing point of view!) is that Shakespeare is out of copyright, and anyone can publish a book of his work.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The big difference between Agatha Christie and Shakespeare (at least from a pricing point of view!) is that Shakespeare is out of copyright, and anyone can publish a book of his work.

True, but I was trying to point out that if you can typeset and proofread all of Shakespeare and sell it cheaply, then it can't be horribly expensive to do so. I wouldn't expect the costs of digitizing all of Christie's work to be much more than that. So I was looking at it as a sort of baseline for the price of a large collection; the point they could go down to without going into the red.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by rkomar

That's probably why I was so convinced they could do it (well, that and the fact that you can buy the complete works of Shakespeare for a lot less than that brand new on paper). Maybe, like with music and movies, we have to wait a few years for the impatient spenders to finish shopping before the "Value" editions start coming out.

Shakespeare wrote far less, though. The whole of Shakespeare's canon amounts to somewhat over 800,000 words. That's equivalent to what? 10-15 average sized novels? Christie wrote many times more than that.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Shakespeare wrote far less, though. The whole of Shakespeare's canon amounts to somewhat over 800,000 words. That's equivalent to what? 10-15 average sized novels? Christie wrote many times more than that.

You sound right. Okay, I give up on the idea of a cheap collection. Four pounds each it is.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by rkomar

You sound right. Okay, I give up on the idea of a cheap collection. Four pounds each it is.

It's almost $9 Canadian to buy them, and it's not like they are put together very well either, they have Hyphens in the middle of the page splitting words apart (No matter where you view it) Harper Collins is selling a badly formatted product from a dead author for a huge price.

Some of the more popular books have less mistakes or are perfect, but some of them are pretty bad and the same price.