safetycap's dashboard

This is the best response I've seen to O'Reilly's eBook pricing imbalance I've seen!

But you're losing me as a prospective ebook buyer. ... you're losing the additional ebook sale and you're losing the markup to Amazon.

You had a captive customer! You had a customer who showed up, typed "SNMP" into the search bar and tried the buy the first item that showed up.

Instead, I'm annoyed, frustrated, and trying to find somewhere else to spend my money. Something must have gone terribly wrong to turn a perfect customer into this.

The explanation that Amazon's dead-tree books are significantly less expensive than Ora's is understandable. The *excuse* that Amazon's dead-tree books cost less than Ora's eBooks is ludicrous. "Oh, but you'll get all the changes and corrections!"

I get all the changes and corrections on my dead-tree book. It's called "using a pen."

I don't know about you, but paying MORE for an eBook from Ora's site over the Amazon dead-tree price is laughable. What does it cost O'Reilly to produce that second, third, ..., fiftieth copy of the eBook? The answer is somewhere between $0 and ... $0. That's much less than the cost to produce a book; even a one-page pamphlet has to be printed, packaged, and shipped.

I love O'Reilly books. I've been reading them since "vi" second edition (i.e,. a looong time). It really burns me up that you folks are---basically---GOUGING us eReader folks.

If you treat your customers right, they will keep coming back and you will do well. Of course, there's always the Wrox Press way (before Wiley bought the charred remains)..

Look at the sequencer source code file BlinkMSequencer.pde, line 114-5:

// number of slices in the timeline == number of script lines written to BlinkM
int numSlices = 48;