Valuable tip from a Commenter

You may have noticed the post where I recently said that Amazon was listing McKillip’s The Bell at Sealey Head with the ebook’s price as $13 and the hardcover’s price for $6.

That is true, and if you click through the link that’s what you’ll find right now.

However, Yaron commented:

I wasn’t familiar with the McKillip book you mentioned, so decided to take a look. And… figured I should share an eBook buying tip that, while not useful very often, does sometimes comes in handy, as with this book.

The thing is, Amazon, for eBooks that have/had multiple published versions, sometimes only returns one of them on search results of the title (or author, or series…), even though technically the other(s) is fine and valid and available for sale.

So, check other eBook stores. Even if you want to buy from Amazon. Especially for old books, but this does sometimes happen with brand new ones.
Searching “The Bell at Sealey Head” on Amazon returns just the one 12.99 eBook. Searching on Kobo shows two results, one for 12.39 and one for 5.39 (which is already an improvement if you’re fine with the alternate DRM, but merely comparing prices is sort of obvious, so not my tip).

Now, the tip: For *each* result on Kobo, go to the book page, scroll down, copy the ISBN, and search on Amazon for that ISBN.

In this case, the 12.39 Kobo book is the same one that is 12.99 on Amazon. But the 5.39 one on Kobo is sold on Amazon right now for… 3.38 .
So really worth checking. Note that, as I wrote, check all results, not always the cheapest on the other store will be the cheapest on Amazon.

Now, your mileage may vary. I find, when I look for Bell on Kobo, only the $12.99 edition. I suspect that first, this sort of thing may change rapidly, and second, depending on what country you’re in, you may get different results.

Regardless, this is certainly a strategy worth keeping in mind for ebooks that seem vastly overpriced compared to paper edition prices.

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