Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Barnes & Noble stretches the truth

Lots of OSR publishers would like to get onto Barnes & Noble ... oddly enough, Rappan Athuk seems to have gotten there without agreeing to be there, on terms that not only weren't authorized ... but wouldn't be approved.

Someone pointed out this link to Rappan Athuk at Barnes & Noble, and it caused a bit of confusion over at Frog God Games, because it is completely and utterly unauthorized. We have no idea why Barnes & Noble is offering the book, since they don't own any and haven't bought any.

The price they are quoting is below the price we would sell the books wholesale, so don't expect that they will honor any orders put through their website. If this turns out to be a third party seller rather than B&N, and we can track who it is, that third party seller will NOT be getting any copies.

In summary, if you hear that you can get a cheaper price at Barnes & Noble, don't expect that B&N will actually come through. This is also technically endangering our agreement with Kickstarter, which is why we are trying to make it absolutely clear to everyone that we have not authorized B&N to sell the books at ALL. Much less at bargain-basement clearance prices.

So unless you're 100% confident in your ability to sue Barnes & Noble to sell you a book when it's at a loss to them, I wouldn't pre-order from them.

EDIT - the only place to get it is from Kickstarter, here.

5 comments:

  1. That is just . . . mindbogglingly strange. I can't wrap my head around how that would happen.

    - Ark

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  2. The only thing I can think of -- and it doesn't seem to fit perfectly -- is that they got some information from wherever you file information about a book's ISBN number. It does have an ISBN. However, that doesn't explain how they know that there's a pdf involved.

    My first reaction was that it had to be a reseller, but it doesn't look like it ... and neither B&N or a reseller would get the right to sell the pdf. That's limited to Paizo and the FGG website. And how they came up with pricing on something that's only being sold through Kickstarter??? Makes no sense.

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  3. I wonder if it's this...

    http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/16/amazon-knock-off-bestsellers/?source=cnn_bin

    ...going on with B&N? Someone might be using B&N to sell knock-offs (probably through buying the PDF and having it POD through B&N or some other 3rd party that deals with them, like LULU.

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  4. They know about the pdf because it has a separate ISBN. The fact that they call it an "e-book" confirms your suspicions as that's the exact term used on the ISBN forms.

    - Chuck Wright

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  5. Unbelievable but true someone made a major error. I hope they do the honorable thing apologize to all involved, find those responsible and not do it again.

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