So, as you may have heard, on Sunday (or possibly Saturday, as this tweet from Mark Waid seems to indicate) a bunch of large comics collected editions that normally cost between $50-125 were suddenly offered on Amazon for $8.24-$14.99. Rich Johnston and Bully seemed to get the ball rolling, and Twitter and excitement did the rest. For a time, Omniboo and other deluxe hardcover collections from Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, IDW, Avatar and other publishers dominated the Amazon bestsellers list — Madman, Ultimates, Wolverine, X-Men and so on. A few of them are still there even, but at the more sane price of $62.99.
Since then Johnston has followed up with a host of posts, Johanna Draper Carlson has analyzed the matter, strange conspiracy theories about Diamond have been floating around, and amazingly, a lot of the bargain books seem to be actually shipping.
According to Johnston, some 14,071 volumes were sold through his Amazon link alone. This link has a sales chart of sorts on what sold, for those who like this kind of thing, led by The Ultimates Omnibus with 1121 copies sold. It’s possible that the title near the top of the chart sold more because there were more in stock — a few books we had our eye on were available at 10 am and not by 2 pm — but it’s still an interesting mix of old and new classics.
Of course the big, unanswered question is “Wha’ hoppen?” The publishers represented all go through Diamond Book Distribution (Not DC, which uses Random House), so the idea of some Diamond related glitch is popular. According to a brief report by Calvin Reid:
A source at Diamond Comic Distributors, which supplied the comics to Amazon, said the mispricing was a data error and that it was being fixed. It is unclear how many items were ordered during the period of mispricing although there is speculation that there were thousands of orders. It is also unclear how many—if any—of the orders Amazon will honor.
For the record, we ordered some books we’ve been hankering for for a while now, and so far Amazon seems to be shipping them. A poster at Bleeding Cool even posted the above pic of his first order arriving, so someone somewhere is eating the cost, which as Johanna suggested, could be in the order of six figures.
Adding to the intrigue: Diamond Book Distribution laid off three employees last week, including one who had been at Diamond 22 years. Diamond’s Roger Fletcher acknowledged some rejiggering at ICv2:
“We are integrating some DBD functions which had been separate from DCD into the larger DCD structure,” Diamond Vice President of Sales and Marketing Roger Fletcher told ICv2. “Those functions include order entry, customer service, and new product info gathering. We think this will result in a stronger foundation for DBD going forward.”
As we understand it, Diamond (and other distributors) supply Amazon with a large database (an Onix file) of titles and prices. Bully and others have guessed that Amazon somehow imported a faulty file, and the discrepancy wasn’t caught by the usual methods. But this is pure conjecture.
A couple of points that have been raised. We received some correspondence concerned that, as an Amazon Affiliate, Johnston was pimping this for his own profit. Johanna estimated that he could have received $18,000 from the books sold through his links, but Johnston says it was more like $200. Most folks who try to scrape out a living via the web (including both Johanna and myself) have Amazon affiliate programs, so having one isn’t really a badge of shame, as we see it. Johnston was definitely all over this like white on rice, but so was everyone else.
However, Johnston also suggested that the learning point was that Comics are too expensive, You make them cheaper, much cheaper, and people will buy them. Buy lots of them. Buy them more than anything else on Amazon. which Chris Butcher declared was “utterly stupid. We’d tend to agree. $100 for the first 30 issues of Lee-Kirby’s Fantastic Four in an oversized, quality format is certainly not cheap, but it’s a reasonable price for all that paper and ink. There are already thick, cheap reprints series out there — Marvel’s Essentials and DC’s Showcase Presents series which offer around 500 pages for $16.99. Those are available every day and they aren’t soaring up the charts,
It does seems to have led to an orgy of extreme bargain hunting at EVERY level of the industry. (Those deluxe editions don’t go into the average comp box.) Knowing that it was a screw-up does make it seem a bit guilty though. If our books ship, great. We can’t say we won’t enjoy that Howard the Duck Omnibus. If they don’t…so be it. We’ll just save up for a rainy day.
I just received a cancellation notice from Amazon. They aren’t shipping any of the eight or nine books I ordered on Sunday morning.
Disagree on the point about the Essentials etc. The missing color is what stops me from buying them. It’s a shame as there’s some wonderful stuff in the Showcase Presents material. Especially the House of Mystery and Secrets material. Some fantastic art but it needs to be in color before I’ll buy it.
I’m the opposite. I like the black & white on the Essentials and Showcase collections. I like seeing the work of Ditko, Kirby, Kane, etc… uncluttered and clean. It’s about as close to seeing how their work originally was that I’ll ever get to.
The discounts definitely hit on Saturday. I was home watching movies and noticed it while browsing Amazon. Spent way, way too much money. Woke up the next morning and saw the post on Bleeding Cool.
For what it’s worth, none of my orders have been canceled, though several books I ordered 2-3 copies of were reduced to one copy. So far.
Ditto, all books cancelled this morning. Yesterday was the “orders reduced to 1″ e-mails.
1) The Showcase and Essentials books tend not to chart on the Diamond Top 300. I suspect that stores order a shelf copy, and reorder when it sells. However, note that DC (2005) has 90+ titles in the series, and Marvel (1995) has 150+, so apparently the books sell.
2) We all know that people won’t read comics without color, so why publish these volumes? (If MAD Magazine and Calvin & Hobbes didn’t disprove this, then Pokemon sure did.)
3) Do you think a title like “Secrets of Sinister House” would be viable in a $9.99 color volume printing 128 pages? Or a $50 archive volume? Since DC is digitizing these stories as they publish the trades, I expect they’ll be available online someday.
4) There are many sites online which sell bargain-priced graphic novels. Tales of Wonder actually is a remainder wholesaler to the book trade, and one can find the occasional Fantagraphics or Marvel overstock on BN.com. (MAD’s Greatest Artists: The Completely MAD Don Martin, was $150, now $22.50!) Looking at the bargain bins at conventions, it seems that Marvel has a similar program via the Direct Market. (Or perhaps they are offering a bigger discount up front when the book is first published.)
5) DC, Image, and other publishers price introductory volumes at $9.99 to encourage sales for the other volumes in the series. Unwritten Volume 1, which charted #2 on the January Top 300 (after the latest Walking Dead volume), is priced at $9.99 for 144 pages (seven cents a page).
6) When pricing the cost of a graphic novel, compare it to art books. Placing a picture on every page is going to be more costly than printing monochromatic text blocks. Did anyone complain about the $40 Kirby hardcover from Abrams being too expensive?
7) This is karmic retribution for #amazonfail and the “artists aren’t authors” debacle.
I too received my cancellation notice today – oh well.
And this had happened with other books that I’ve ordered from Amazon – they ran out of stock and couldn’t guarantee when they would, so they canceled the order. Disappointing but the opportunity cost is quite low.
Delivery estimate: March 19, 2010 – March 24, 2010
1 “Wolverine Omnibus, Vol. 1″
Chris Claremont; Hardcover; $8.24
I hate the late delivery estimate. It makes me think that Amazon still might cancel the order. Who knows?
The “Free Omnibus Day” was posted on the marvelmasterworks.com boards Saturday night. That is how I learned of it.
I placed an order for two Omni that night, but they were listed as shipping within 7-13 days. Amazon canceled those today, so I think that Amazon is only fulfilling orders for those things that they have in stock in their warehouses, and limiting folks’ orders to only one per item. Don’t know how they will approach pre-orders, as a number of items that have yet to be released also experienced precipitous price plunges.
Even my pre-orders were canceled.
I placed two orders on Sunday morning and so far haven’t received a cancellation notice, but then again, they haven’t shipped any of the books either.
Something like this just goes to show why brick and mortar stores are still better than the dot com alternatives. If I walked into a physical book store and found many of the books they sell to be drastically reduced, I could simply purchase them and be done with it. I wouldn’t have to twist in the wind for days waiting to learn if I was one of the lucky few that actually got what I paid for.
I was messing with my Amazon Wishlist Saturday evening and noticed that the ginormous Secret Wars 2 Omnibus had been discounted from $100 to $14.99. I figured they had too many of them in stock or something (I mean, who else besides me had the Secret Wars 2 Omnibus on their wishlist?) and were trying to get rid of them, so I ordered it. I got it in the mail today. Having said that, though, it is hard to feel bad for people who were trying to take advantage of what they knew to be a mistake (after it was pointed out by Rich Johnston) by ordering multiple copies of a large numbers of “discounted” books.
“If I walked into a physical book store and found many of the books they sell to be drastically reduced, I could simply purchase them and be done with it.”
If you walked in and found items obviously mispriced, and bought a load of stuff before anyone noticed (including, as one person above has said, multiple copies of some items – to sell on elsewhere?), wouldn’t you feel you were being unscrupulous?
“If you walked in and found items obviously mispriced, and bought a load of stuff before anyone noticed (including, as one person above has said, multiple copies of some items – to sell on elsewhere?), wouldn’t you feel you were being unscrupulous?”
As someone who did order a lot through Amazon [no multiple copies], I don’t feel bad or unscrupulous but this before I knew it was officially a glitch. Now that I know, I don’t feel bad. Then again, I didn’t order and receive 100 copies of The Ultimates Omnibus.
I had originally assumed that it was Amazon trying to clear out inventory for the space, and they had done a cost comparison analysis. After all, this is a HUGE corporation with sophisticated computer software using complex algorithms to analyze and parse every action and transaction to maximize profits. They have multiple failsafes and redundancies to prevent pricing mistakes…or so you would think.
I guess I would feel bad if it happened to a local comic book store or mom-and-pop store, but a giant corporation like Amazon or a Wal-Mart, I have no guilt.
BTW, the photo of the arrived package is mine. The New X-Men: Ultimate Collection V3 TPB was scratched on the cover and the binding in the back is a little loose. But for $14.99 [+ tax], it’s still a bargain.
I ordered five omnibi for the $8.24 price. If I get them I’ll be thrilled; if I don’t I won’t mind. I went through a similar thing a few years ago when Amazon had some sort of “best silent movies” 10 dvd set on sale from a couple hundred bucks down to $40. I ordered it and a day later got a note saying they canceled the order due to an error but I was of course welcome to reorder it at full price. I would have loved it for $40 but didn’t need it for a few hundred. Same with these books. It’s hard to be upset if I don’t get them since I didn’t go online that morning looking to buy these.
If you walked in and found items obviously mispriced, and bought a load of stuff before anyone noticed (including, as one person above has said, multiple copies of some items – to sell on elsewhere?), wouldn’t you feel you were being unscrupulous?
No, not at all. I didn’t price the books, Amazon did. It’s up to each retailer to set the price of what it’s selling. Amazon for whatever reason priced these books at a price far lower than the norm. Was it a mistake? I don’t know, but if it was a mistake, it was a mistake on Amazon’s part, not mine. It shouldn’t be too hard to have safeguards in place over at Amazon that would stop something like this from happening. Evidently they chose not to have any of these safeguards.
What I find to be the most ridiculous thing about this is that it’s been over two days and I still have not received a “sorry” email or had my two orders canceled.
I’ve occasionally bought mispriced grocery items; several months ago, I saved $6 on a one-ounce package of dried Morel mushrooms. That’s the store’s mistake. I wouldn’t do that with mispriced books because I have too many books as it is. I only buy what I use.
SRS
One cannot assume that just because one sees a highly-discounted price on Amazon, it’s an error. There are books that apparently reach legitimately 80-some percent off list price for whatever reason. For example, last month for weeks various books by Eisner, Feiffer’s Harry The Rat With Women, and a few other books were 80%-85% off. When Stephen King’s $35 Under the Dome was part of a price war, Amazon priced it at $10, more than 70% off. And I think the last thing Amazon would want is for folks to think “I see a good price on Amazon, I better not order it”.
I checked my Amazon status list and my order has been erased…vanished…never happened. Ah well. I think, in the long run, I feel better about this, as it was an obvious mistake and honoring the orders might have caused financial problems for all involved.
I never received a cancellation email, but the “sale” books from that particular order did quietly disappear from the invoice, so I think it’s safe to assume they were indeed canceled. C’est le commerce.
Regarding the laid off Diamond employees —
One report said they were fired. I think it is important to note that you fire an employee for being a bad worker, but you lay off an employee when there is a lack of work. There is a difference.
I posted about it on Twitter and at my site on Saturday night. Judging by where I got the news from, the news of the price mistakes dropped somewhere between 5-6pm PST.
I order a lot from Amazon, and stumbled across the discounts without the help of tweets or blogs. I bought quite a bunch of stuff I was interested in, including much I wouldn’t buy at the normal price (even the amazon-discounted price). They all got cancelled. I’ll re-order the ones I really want, and let that Magicman archive slide. No harm done.
The two Marvel HC’s and two Image Compendia have vanished from my order without any notice from Amazon.
The DVD set I threw in because I was paying international shipping anyway is now processing and the order cannot be changed.
I can understand cancelling the erroneous orders, disappointing as it is, but if I don’t at least get an apologetic email about it, they can expect a cranky email from me.
My order was deep-sixed without any notice at all from Amazon.
C’mon, they were Herbie Archives. How many are you really gonna sell? It’s not like it was the 116+ dollar discount on the Invincible Omnibus or anything.
I just got my cancellation email.
Which reads in part, “Unfortunately, due to a pricing error, we sold many more than expected. In fact, we completely sold out — we don’t have any in stock right now, and we’re not even sure if we’ll be able to get more. As a result, we’ve had to cancel your order. I realize this is disappointing news, and I’m so sorry for any inconvenience this causes.”
Oh well!
Hello,
Our records indicate you recently ordered ‘Wolverine Omnibus, Vol. 1′. Unfortunately, due to a pricing error, we sold many more than expected. In fact, we completely sold out — we don’t have any in stock right now, and we’re not even sure if we’ll be able to get more.
As a result, we’ve had to cancel your order. I realize this is disappointing news, and I’m so sorry for any inconvenience this causes.
You may want to check our website from time to time to see if this item is available. If anyone is selling it, you’ll see a “More Buying Choices” box on the product detail page; if it’s not available from any sellers, you might see an “Order it used” or “Alert me” link. “Order it used” allows you to place a pre-order for the item in case another seller lists the item for sale later. “Alert me” allows you to sign up so we can e-mail you when Amazon has stock available for purchase.
I’m sorry I don’t have better news. We hope to see you again soon.
Y’know, more than anything, I’m a little irked because the cancellation e-mail feels like an outright lie. Many of the items I’ve heard of getting cancelled were still listed as being ‘in stock’ on-site.
Now, if you’re going to cancel my order because of a pricing error, fine. I don’t have a problem with that. But just own up to it being so you don’t lose shitloads of money, rather than blaming it on being out of stock when you clearly aren’t.
So is this like the trickle before the Levee breaks?
I’m hankerin for Zeppelin now.