Guest guest Posted February 9, 2001 Report Share Posted February 9, 2001 Good evening All, > My 2nd edition is also from 1998. Is yours the first edition with the > incorrect glossary. I am sure bob felt will explain this to us when he > has a chance. Two definitions first: 1. ``leading'' is the space between lines of type. It is measured by ``points'' (1/72 inch) a unit of space that is imperceptible. But, if you take a couple of points out of every line, you can squeeze more on a page, pay for less paper and press time, and sell a book with more content at a smaller size and price. 2. Chinese characters use two ``bytes'' (a binary unit). If you look at Chinese with a program that doesn't recognize Chinese, you will see regular alphanumerics and graphics and ``control-characters'' (things that make something happen). Now the explanation: When we produced the text the leading squeeze encoding and the Chinese collided, shifting the two byte codes one byte. Because the new byte pairs were legal encodings, what came out was Chinese, but Chinese that was meaningless in that context. We are pioneering the use of these technologies and we paid the bleeding-edge price. > When I purchased the book from Redwing many months ago, > I was informed the > 1st edition was defective in that it had errors in the glossary: the > Chinese characters had been mixed up such that they did not correctly > match the pinyin. You should have also received an replacement for the single character list in the front matter with a discounted defective book. I find no record of buy.com purchasing copies. However, it could not be the defective printing because all the defective texts went to individuals who paid the reduced price (we stamped ``defective'' in those books). We saw the error as soon as we saw the book, so the only shipments that went out were those sent directly. If someone buys from buy.com, I'd love to know how long it actually takes for you to get the book. > this price is 30% off retail. since buy.com gets a 40% > wholesaler discount, they can afford to sell at this price and still make > a small profit. Well, maybe . . On-line discounters tend to list books that they do not have as being available in some number of days. I don't KNOW but I GUESS this is a money-losing competitive tactic that buy.com has aimed at amazon.com, which is selling the Practical Dictionary for $100.00. Barnes and Nobel lists the wrong publisher, so they say it as out-of-print or something weird. The books in the buy.com URL sent to this list are the Amazon bestsellers in field, and in the major chain and college stores, so they may be trying to grab Amazon's customers now that Amazon is laying off people and cutting inventory. Nobody selling at a 10% margin is even recovering their costs. In-coming freight is 4 to 6 percent, the charge card fee is 2.5 to 3 percent, so this is almost certainly more about market dominance than earning a nickle. It is part of the commercial wars. The ``book farms'' that Amazon once pushed were the same sort of tactic only based on dominating the search engine listing. The farmers got very little while collectively hurting the book sellers who lost those sales and helping amazon to the top of the search engine heap. This is exactly how the major chains devastated the independent book sellers in the '70s and 80's. By discounting other companies' ``best sellers'' (the main source of their income), they run them into the ground. Last week the trade writers predicted that the purchase of Harcourt by Elsiver would lead to much higher prices for medical books, so you can bet that CM texts will follow, and don't be surprised if this is the outcome when a couple of concerns dominate on- line. This too is exactly what happened in the 80's after the chains had consolidated into the current top five. > BTW, I wouldn't normally promote an item for sale on the list, but we > frequently refer to this book and many are unable to afford it at list > price. I make no money on this item and this is not an invitation for > other list members to promote their own business products for sale. > thanks. Redwing will give any CHA person the price of $87.50 on the new printing now in stock. Tell'em Bob sent ya! ( What a shameless merchant I am!) However, we do recognize people's need for a ``starter'' text and will release an inexpensive ``Introduction to English Terminology of '' sometime this year. It will have the most common terms and will be inexpensive. Bob bob Paradigm Publications www.paradigm-pubs.com 44 Linden Street Robert L. Felt Brookline MA 02445 617-738-4664 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted February 10, 2001 Report Share Posted February 10, 2001 Nobody selling at a 10% margin is even recovering their costs. In-coming freight is 4 to 6 percent, the charge card fee is 2.5 to 3 percent, so this is almost certainly more about market dominance than earning a nickle. It is part of the commercial wars. The ``book farms'' that Amazon once pushed were the same sort of tactic only based on dominating the search engine listing. The farmers got very little while collectively hurting the book sellers who lost those sales and helping amazon to the top of the search engine heap.>>>>Unfortunately they do care and will devastate the book industry. What is coming is that books are going to be available only directly from publishes for blownup prices Alon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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