Barnes and Noble Suied by three publishers.

Every day when I log on and see this thread in the list, all I can picture is three publisher reps sticking their heads in the door of my local Barnes & Noble and making "Sooo-EEEE!" pig calls.

Yes, I am easily amused.

 

You beat me to it, that's the first thing I saw just now. I was wondering if there's a paddock full of pigs out by the loading dock.

 

All of it is, because it was a GENERAL OPINION. As in, a comment based upon the contents of the thread, and events that have happened before, rather than knowledge of this particular situation. At NO POINT did I state that books actually WERE being pulled in this instance, and I'm not the one who mentioned a full refund or B&N being sued first. I have to go on the information that's provided, and based on the information that's provided in the first post, my statements are 100% factual. OK, so maybe I should've made it clearer that I was making a general comment about e-book retailers' policies, but hey, we live and learn.

 

I think it's just a misunderstanding. It's an end to Agency Pricing, not e-books. I'll explain.

Amazon was the "king of the mountain" with their Kindle. Then Narns & Noble came along with their Nook. The two competed for the same market, and both ran sales frequently with the price of their e-books. And then the iPad came along. Apple went to the publishers and said "Hey guys, you can set your own price with us." The publishers loved this idea, as it meant more profit for the same thing.

Amazon and Narns & Noble quickly went along with the same scheme, which has been called Agency Pricing. Under that model, the publishers set the price, not the sellers, and the sellers are not allowed to offer discounts on those titles. Another term for this model is price fixing. Which is illegal.

The Attorneys General of several states got together and sued the big five publishers as a group, to stop the price fixing scheme.

The result of that lawsuit is basically this: If you purchased one of the affected titles during the agency model timeframe, you will receive a partial refund. Agency pricing will stop. I've seen both January 1st and February 1st as official end-dates, so I'm not confident which one is correct. But after that, the sellers will set the prices. This means no more $15-$25 for an ebook. They will go back down to their $9.99 max price for new hardcover titles, and $5-6 for others.

The titles you already have aren't going away. If you are concerned about that, then tonight, back up your files. You should be doing that anyway, but make a special effort tonight to back up your ebook files on a cd or your hard drive somewhere.

 

Uhh, no, because an opinion based on incorrect data is not correct. It makes no sense to defend an opinion as "right" when it's based on a misunderstanding of the facts.

What you said was:

You were the one who introduced the idea of books being pulled into this thread in the first place, because the first post said absolutely nothing about that. All it said was, " if you bought ebooks dating back to 2010 you will receive a full refund in the form of a gift card." Which was untrue, because any refund is only partial.

That is a meaningless sentence. First off, conclusions drawn from false information can never be called "factual." They may be honest errors based on being misled by others' counterfactual statements, but they're still not factual. A fact is something that is objectively true, by definition. And second, there was absolutely no information in the first post about books being pulled off of e-readers. That was your own extrapolation beyond what was actually stated.

There's no need to get defensive about this. You were misled, you drew a wrong conclusion, that's all. It happens to the best of us. There's nothing wrong with it, nothing to be ashamed of, so you don't need to defend or justify it. Just abandon the mistaken idea and move on with a better understanding of the truth.

 

^ Good gods, could you bash the guy a little more? He may still have a tiny amount of self-esteem left after that post.

 

I have already admitted to not going into this beyond the first post. There was no "misunderstanding" by me, but by the OP. I may have gone off on a tangent with this:

But at no point did I state that this was what they were doing in this instance. It is, however, what they have done in the past, and based on the scant information available in the OP, I had no way to negate the possibility of this happening again. Also, key phrase: BEING ABLE. As in, "This is a statement about capabilities, not about what's actually happening."

OK, so factual is maybe wrong - I should've said "logical". Based on the OP and on previous experience of Amazon and other e-reader manufacturers pulling titles, my deductions could hardly be claimed to be illogical.

Anyway... moving on...

Valeyard: Thank you very much for the explanation you've provided (and for defending me), it's nice to see at least one person here can give corrective information without jumping down people's throats.

 

Sorta related:

http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/

Amazon can go into your reader and erase everything?!

 

Yes, they can. And they have in the past. A few years ago, they "discovered" that they did not have the right to sell the book 1984. Instead of sending out an email to customers who had purchased it, they simply went in and deleted the file from the customers' Kindles. It took at least a few days before they did any kind of press release or let people know what happened, and then it was only after customers complained publically. They offered a credit of whatever amount the customers had paid. That was it.

And ironic, considering what title it was.

That's why at least once a week, I back up any ebooks I've purchased. Since we're not actually buying anything, we are just getting a temporary license that can be revoked at any time. Which only feeds into the "ebooks are too expensive" school of thought.

 

what ? is going on. Just buy paper books for get em from the libraary. Same thing with music just buy the cd so have it forever instead of losing everything when the computer dies. That and theres a reason theres art work for both and a reason that tracks are put in order- to make an album.

I hate this e book things and e music and e mail. Corless phones and all this stuff. Arg not necessary.

 

^So what are you doing posting on a computer BBS?

Also: computer data can be backed up. My CDs could break and I'd lose them, but if I have copies of their music saved on my computer and my flash drive, then I'll still have it.

 

Not to mention the fact that, although I lived in Korea for the past two years, I was able to read every single new Trek release within minutes of the street date, along with several older titles. AND I was able to bring that entire collection home with me last month in the top pocket of my backpack. Don't get me wrong, hard-copy books are my first love and by far my first choice, but without ebooks my reading habits would have been impossible to maintain.

 

While checking my email today, I stumbled across an email from Barnes & Noble saying I'll be getting the settlement credit soon.