I received a coupon for 20% off of one item at Barnes and Noble over the weekend.  It happened that we were in the vicinity of a B&N store and stopped in for a few minutes.  A book on the “New Releases” shelf caught my eye:  it was titled One Year After, by William R. Forstchen, and the blurb described an American society that had broken down after an EMP attack.  It also described itself as a sequel to another book.

It took me about three minutes to look under the “F’s” for the previous book.  As I am a bit of a sucker for these types of post-apocalyptic novels, I read the blurb and checked the price.  Paperback, $9.99.

Now I had a 20% coupon and I get my usual 10% member’s discount, so I pulled up the Amazon app on my phone and looked up the ebook version of the book.

$9.99.

Let’s do the math.  80% of that is $7.99.  90% of $7.99 is $7.19.

So I paid $7.19 (plus tax, around 7%) for a paperback version of a book that in electronic form would cost me $9.99.  Even with tax, it was still less than $8.00.  Something around $7.70, I think.  I don’t have my receipt with me.

I also had a gift card, so no cash came out of my pocket and no charges went onto a credit card, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.  I paid less, and I have a physical object that I can take to Half-Price Books and resell if I choose to do so.  Or resell in some other manner.

And they wonder why ebook sales are down for them?

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