Sunday, February 03, 2008

Amazon.com Sells Book For Less Than The Publisher

I got an email from Amazon.com the other day offering to sell me a book for abut $14. It is a baseball book by Bill James, the well known stat guru. The book is published by ACTA Sports. A couple of hours later I get an email from ACTA sports wanting to sell it to me for $21.95 and they charge more for shipping than Amazon.com. So, of course, I ordered it from Amazon. It made me wonder, does ACTA sports know that I could by it for alot less at Amazon? Maybe not everyone gets that offer from Amazon. Maybe I got it because I have ordered other books from them and people who have not ordered much from Amazon before would not get the offer.

One way this might make sense for ACTA is that their email might simply alert me and others that a book is available. They might even know that some of us will head over to Amazon to buy it, but some won't and they will get a few extra bucks from them. In any event, the email might be a pretty cheap way to advertise.

1 comment:

champ said...

Well, this actually works out perfect. Its not good for the publisher, inasmuch they are losing sales to lower costs. Perhaps they should have a group dedicated to pay attention to resellers.