Comments on: If everything is on sale, then the sales price doesn’t look that enticing

By: Unstressed Syllables › Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Unstressed Syllables › Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:24:16 +0000

[...] was already a significant decline. That decline will continue for several weeks, probably, until it settles at a new plateau (which will still almost certainly be higher than anyone’s pre-Christmas [...]

By: ABeth

ABeth — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:34:10 +0000

*is happy to live in a state with no sales tax*
(We do have “Room and Meals” tax, aka “Tourist Tax.” Hotels and restaurant/prepared food get(s) taxed.)

By: Lance Greencastle

Lance Greencastle — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:07:53 +0000

Actually VAT is levied by individual countries not the federal government. There is no federal government in Europe as there is in the USA. We don’t pay any federal taxes, all VAT, income tax, duties on alcohol, tobacco and fuel etc. are all set by and paid to the national governments.
All attempts so far to harmonize taxes (make every government charge the same rate) have failed. So VAT here in Ireland where I live is 21%(soon to be 23%). But because Amazion sells their ebooks to me via their Luxenbourg subsidiary I am only charged 15% VAT, as that is the rate in Luxenbourg. So a $0.99 ebook costs me $1.16 (For some reason Ireland escapes the $2 surcharge for which I am grateful)

I don’t know why amazon make me buy ebooks from the US kindle store, paying in US$, but won’t let my buy from the UK where I get my paper books. And why do I have to pay in US$ when Amazon now have four Euro priced stores? Especially as Luxenbourg itself uses Euros, as we do in Ireland.
But at least the FX rate on a $0.99 ebook is not going to bankrupt me

By: mark williams international

mark williams international — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:33:38 +0000

Sadly a classic case of poor journalism on all sides with this one, Dave. This article in wallstreet-online.de is typical.

http://www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/4110183-more-than-twice-as-many-kindles-sold-at-amazon-co-uk-this-christmas-compared-to-the-previous-festive-season-as-amazon-s-e-reader-becomes-the-biggest-selling-product-of-christmas-2011-at-amazon-c

“Amazon´s Kindle has replicated its 2010 success to become the biggest selling product of Christmas 2011 at Amazon.co.uk. It is the second year in a row that Kindle has been the festive bestseller beating this year´s big DVD releases including The Inbetweeners Movie and Harry Potter and the Death Hallows Part 2 as well as the latest release in the ever-popular video games series, Call of Duty. Amazon.co.uk received orders for more than twice as many Kindles in the run up to Christmas this year compared to the same period in 2010.”

The report goes on:

“Amazon.co.uk took orders for more than 3 million items on its busiest day of the Christmas period – Monday 5th December -which is often termed ´Cyber Monday´. That represents a rate of around 35 items ordered every second over the 24 hour period with the number increasing significantly from the 2.3 million items ordered on the busiest day of 2010.

“At its peak, Amazon´s seven UK fulfilment centres shipped over 2.1 million units in one 24 hour period, which represents around 1124 tonnes of goods and means that on average a delivery truck was leaving an Amazon fulfilment centre once every 2 minutes and 45 seconds.”

Nowhere claims those 2.1 million “units” were Kindles.

If we have an accurate figure for December 2010 and double it we can get a fair estimate of Kindle sales in UK this past month

By: Camille LaGuire

Camille LaGuire — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 07:55:55 +0000

You know, Cora, sales tax is a completely different thing. See, it’s levied by the states, which is a states’ rights thing, and therefore not bad at all. The VAT is a horrible awful thing levied by the _federal_ government! And that makes it totally evil.

By: David Gaughran

David Gaughran — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:59:53 +0000

I read the article and enjoyed it. Kris always draws together a number of strands then pivots in an interesting way.

There was one stat that caught my eye. NamelyL “More than 2.1 million Kindles sold from the end of November through Christmas in the United Kingdom alone.”

The article she links to just beforehand is this one: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/More-Twice-Many-Kindles-Sold-prnews-660964602.html?x=0

Now, I’ve read Kris’ article a couple of times – and the article she links to – and I can’t see the reference. Maybe I am missing it (I did lose a few brain cells there over the last ten days), or maybe it’s from somewhere else.

Can someone point me to a source (or put a neon sign over the part of the existing sources)? I would just like to be sure of this particular stat before quoting it.

(Especially because that rate of sale of Kindles in the UK would be roughly half the rate of the US in a country with a fifth of the population.)

Aside from that… what she says.

By: Cora

Cora — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:36:02 +0000

I totally agree with you on the Amazon surcharge BTW, which is also the main reason why I’m not going exclusive with Amazon. I have readers outside Amazon’s favoured zone (even some in countries where Amazon doesn’t operate at all) and I don’t want to abandon them.

By: Cora

Cora — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:34:18 +0000

As a fellow European, I don’t really get the complaints from Americans about VAT either. Besides, it’s not as if there isn’t a VAT in the US, only that it’s called sales tax there and that it isn’t included in the listed price but added to the purchase price afterwards, which is even worse IMO. Whenever I’m in the US, I still get a mild shock when I buy something and the cashier charges me more than what is on the price tag. I think that the fact that VAT/sales tax is added on top of the listed price in the US is actually at the root of the VAT problem with the European Amazons, because Amazon does not give you the option to set a gross price including VAT (which e.g. the much smaller XinXii does) but adds the VAT on top of whatever price you entered. This means that indie authors have to manually calculate the price they want, often unsure which VAT rate applies (so far the Luxembourg VAT of 15 percent for all e-books at all European Amazons), since it’s not exactly intuitive.

By: DDW

DDW — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 23:02:51 +0000

I’ve definitely been feeling the “too much” aspect of things. Part of my regular morning routine is to check eReaderIQ for new-to-kindle and free or very cheap deals mostly from authors I haven’t read before but might be willing to try if there are freebies or very good deals. Since amazon started allowing indie authors to do the “free” thing, the number of new bargains to sort through daily has become unmanageable. I’m hoping it will slack off after the holiday season runs its course. If not I expect I’ll just quit looking, or limit myself to specific genres.

By: mark williams international

mark williams international — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 22:27:58 +0000

“In fact, all of the European Union has pricing issues, which I’m not going to go into here. But suffice to say what it has done is slow the e-book sales in Europe, so that only the hardcore reader and/or computer user adapted to the new format.”

Actually Kris, the biggest pricing issue in Europe is Amazon’s arbitrary $2 surcharge, so your 99c ebook costs someone in Hungary or Poland $2.99 ($3.44 with the European tax).

Europeans are not particularly bothered by the VAT tax. That’s part of everyday life. Buying a book from Amazon and paying $2 extra for the privilege is not. Which is why, while many, many Europeans read ebooks, few do so through Amazon.

The surcharge disappears, miraculously, when a Kindle store opens. But Germany only opened in summer, France in fall and Spain and Italy just weeks before Christmas. Europeans have meanwhile been busy buying other e-reading devices and buying ebooks from other platforms.

They didn’t like Amazon before and aren’t too impressed now.

Imagine if a foreign company came to the US and opened a store, but only a fraction if its books were in English. All the rest were in the language of the store’s home country.

Imagine if they then said, if you live in Kindle State A then you pay 99c but if you live next door in State B where we haven’t got a store yet you pay $2 extra for the same book for no good reason (of which the author gets precisely nothing).

That’s what Amazon is doing across Europe (the surcharge remains in all countries except those with Kindle stores) and why, unlike Kindle UK with its American English back-upmarket, the newer Kindle Europe sites are stillborn.