Books-A-Million (BAM) has a one day – November 15 – sale of 20% your entire purchase, except BAM Millionaire’s Club Member ship for $25 that gives free shipping plus random in store and online discounts all year. If you’re not a member and pre-order lots of dead tree books like me, it’s worth going, joining and placing a big order.
Now BAM ships the day a book is released, not so the book arrives at your house on the release date. But guess what? Amazon is changing their shipping policy to ship when ‘Books are in stock’. Is this new? Yup. Go to a ‘to be released book’ that you HAVEN’T ordered and a little drop down will appear at the top of the listing with the new policy! It’s easy to miss, but take time and read it. One of my pre-orders is already going to be 4 days later. I thought it was the publisher till today.
So for anyone who finds they don’t make enough use of their Prime Membership and just wants free shipping, take a look at BAM. The website is nowhere near a match for Amazon, and certainly can’t compete in the ebook area with Amazon’s CreateSpace platform, but for dead-tree-books, they’re fine. And you can easily do what I do, use Amazon to find what you want, put it on a wish list, then buy from BAM. In fact, I just moved a bunch of pre-ordered books over as well! Now I have to go cancel the Amazon orders. Hey, it’s my money. I paid for the $25 BAM Millionaire’s Club with what I saved today, so the rest of the year is a gift.
$7.99 mmpb’s are $5.75 (BAM automatically prices them at $7.19, so it’s 20% off that existing discount)
Trade size varied depending on list, but averaged around $9.30
Hard cover also varied, but one dropped all the way to $16.63 from $20+
If you join BAM’s Millionaire Club today, the 20% whole order discount will apply. Good way to get calendars as such too! Happy shopping! BUT HURRY!
PS – I just cancelled over $200 in pre-orders from Amazon and moved them to BAM and saved enough to order 4 more books + the pay for the BAM Millionaire’s Club Membership!
Tour's Books Blog 
Amazon Raises Prices on MMPB
Tags: Amazon Alert, Book prices, commentary
Since eliminating their 4-for-3 deal, Amazon used an across the board 10% discount on all Trade and mass market paperbacks. Well, no more. Books-A-Million still has the 10% off, but not Amazon. Add in the sales tax and suddenly books that were $7.69 with tax are now a whopping $8.55. (Actual totals would differ depending on sales tax. I used 7%.) So, from just early 2013 to now, the price per mass market paperback has gone from the 4-for-3 with no tax, per book cost of $5.99 to current per book cost of $8.55. An astonishing $2.56 MORE per book!!!!!!!!!!! No wonder sales are falling.
Yes, they are still offering some books with good discounts, but now not even to-be-released are getting a break. When did this happen? This week. Apparently those big losses on their Firephone are to be paid by us.
And we’re back to Books-a-Million looking like the paperback source of choice. As much as I like Amazon, I think raising Prime and playing with mmpb prices has just about reached its limit. With $20 more for prime and nearly a dollar more per book since just last year, $2.56 more if you go back 2 years, that’s nearly $200/year for since 2012. That’s insane. Amazon is making itself non-competitive in that market segment, but maybe that’s what they want. High volume, low profit books out the door in favor of higher profit books, media and internet services. This war on mmpb readers is getting old fast.