A little help from our friends, 2.0

[kinzel]

Amended* -- the listing is to be removed ... so what's below is only part of what was orignally here ....

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I don't know what stupidity this is, but TSCbooks -- see someone with a bad idea and a bad sense of timing -- claims to be selling a copy of Fledgling for $1000.

This company is offering something that shouldn't exist. If they have it, you shouldn't buy it. The book isn't due until this summer, and if this is some kind of a leaked pre-production copy, it shouldn't be on sale. If it is something that they constructed themselves from our web serialization, then it shouldn't be available either.

So, we're complaining. TSCbooks, if you think this is a good joke, please explain it. Carefully.
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*I have amended this to take down the link to the former amazon listing of this book; we've been informed that the listing was in error.

Note to Liaden readers, fans, and friends: if you come to us at Worldcon asking us to sign a Fledgling you bought in the spring we'll be more than a little disappointed.

Comments

[debmats.livejournal.com]

Hi Steve -
Michelle Sagara msagara has the same issue with TSCbooks. She says she found a listing for Maria V. Snyder book too.

[spiffikins]

they're doing the same to Laura Anne Gilman...

I AM TSCBOOKS

[(Anonymous)]

I do not have this book, this item was listed for sale on Amazon.com in error.

When an item is back-ordered, unavailable, or otherwise "Out of Stock", the quickest way to prevent someone from buying that unavailable item is to simply raise the price of that item (the book in question here) to some point where the item is so expensive that no one of the planet earth would buy it anyway.

Why is such a big deal being made about an item that I listed for sale in error? No one would have ever attempted to buy this item, if you checked out my Amazon account, you would see that I have over 190,000 different titles for sale - and with such a massive inventory spread out across 36 warehouses from coast to coast, is it that hard to conclude that the listing of this book was a simple error? Please forgive me for my mistake. This book was not listed intentionally, it was listed when one of my inventory servers uploaded a database file into the Amazon servers, and one byte of data in a 17MB text file was apparently corrupted and caused an incorrect ISBN to be offered for sale. This was in no way done intentionally. If I had to manually list 190,000 books myself, it would take a lifetime - this is all done with computerized inventories, and dozens of ICM's scanning local inventory into local databases - those local databases merging into Corporate databases, then that corporate database being fed to Amazon..... the error could have happened anywhere along the chain...

I did not intend to offend anyone, I did not intend to cause any trouble for anyone, I certainly was not trying to defraud anyone and I never intended to list this item for sale.

Re: I AM TSCBOOKS

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Three things:

First, you have no understanding of the community you are dealing with.

For example, you have no clue as the problems such thoughtless "systems" have caused us -- that is, Lee and Miller -- in the past. We're regularly hounded for one book that hasn't appeared -- a book that was never written but which, for convenience,was listed by booksellers when announced by a publisher who then went out of business. We constantly are told that someone knows someone, or has seen on Library Thing that someone they know, has a copy of Web of The Trident. Once something hits the internet listed as being available, it is assumed to be a fact.

Second: you apparently have no understanding of the community you are dealing with.

I can't speak for other writers, but for us, we have readers and fans worldwide. We have readers who have offered us $500 and more for PDFs of books that we haven't turned in yet; and we have fans that have spent $$hundreds so they could have bragging rights on owning a particular rarity. At a World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore a few years ago one of our advance reading copies went for enough money to buy a drivable used car. $1000? There are people on the planet Earth who would pay that, I assure you, having seen battered mass market first edition paperbacks sell for significant fractions of that amount.

Third:

You have no understanding of the community you are dealing with.

This is a community of fans, readers, writers, and geeks. We're interconnected, and I say "we" because this is a community I've been part of since before there was an online community of any kind. We understand databases and bits, and even checksums and parity bits. We also understand that once is an accident, twice is a pattern, and that more than that means you are making an offer to sell things you don't have. It may be convenient for you, but it is not a database error, and it is not convenient for writers.

I note that this single bit transmission error phenomenon you report also apparently happened to others in the blogosphere. See interconnected readers, fans, geeks, and writers above.

So, simply apologize and don't do this. It is a mistake, and the blogosphere never forgets. Really.

Re: I AM TSCBOOKS

[(Anonymous)]

Hello Authors and Readers,

I do now understand how troublesome this error was. I never thought about the cascading problems caused by my little computer glitch. I will take steps to prevent anything like this from happening again.

I sincerely apologize for the trouble, and I will resolve this ASAP. For the record, I want everyone to know, I never had any of the books in question in my possession, I never saw any of these books, and I never intended to list them for sale.

I apologize to the authors and anyone affected by this mistake.

TSCBOOKS