A plea: Display post publication price for ALL PrePub resources

I love the concept behind Prepubs and I can see how it benefits both Logos and Logos users. I personally have used PrePubs to build up my collection of Logos resources.

However, the information currently given in PrePubs is somewhat confusing to say the least. I recently purchased the Expositors Bible Commentary on PrePubs only to find that it's price did not increase after it was published (I now understand this because of the agreement that Logos has the Zondervan). I subsequently cancelled my order for the Berkhof collection as I assumed that it since it only displayed the PrePub price it would not increase after publication. However, it's price increased from $119 to $199.

My plea is that three prices (i.e., Suggested Retail Price, Logos Special Price, and PrePub price) be shown for ALL PrePubs regardless of their pricing agreement. This will make it clear to all potential purchasers how much they will save (if anything) by purchasing a resource on PrePubs. They will then able to make an informed decision on whether to preorder the resource or wait until after it is published.

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Comments

Mark Barnes

You can be pretty confident that if the Logos Special Price is not mentioned, it will be the same as the PrePub price. The system was actually changed to remove the Logos Special Price when it was identical to the PrePub price because people complained.

William

I subsequently cancelled my order for the Berkhof collection as I assumed that it since it only displayed the PrePub price it would not increase after publication. However, it's price increased from $119 to $199.

I will suggest calling logos tomorrow and ask to be reinstated for that Berkhof price. If first denied...I might take it up the food chain.

You can be pretty confident that if the Logos Special Price is not
mentioned, it will be the same as the PrePub price.

In this case it is not. Logos needs to indicate that this pre-pub price will go someplace. whether to full retail or not. Maybe not Logos "special" price but Logos Sale price if it is something other than the Retail price.

Simon Pleasants

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107357#Comment_107357

You can be pretty confident that if the Logos Special Price is not mentioned, it will be the same as the PrePub price.

What'd I really like is for this to be made explicit so that there's no absolutely no grounds for confusion, especially for those who are new to the system.

Justin Gill

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107379#Comment_107379

I would have to agree. It would be nice to have all of the information before i give a sum of money. Especially if i can pay the same amount later. Thanks for bringing up the issue.

Matthew C Jones

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107382#Comment_107382

There may be situations where Logos does not readily know what price a title will be sold for in the future. If we want a price to be fixed I am afraid it would result in less bargains available. Price regulating ALWAYS results in higher prices. Deregulation allows prices to find their true level.

There is a general practice on Logos published resources that elevate the price when a Pre-Pub goes "LIVE." The Zondervan pricing is set by Zondervan. I am not privy to their plans but unless they have bound themselves contractually, they could theoretically double their prices, hold them at Pre-Pub prices or even reduce them by 90%. Whatever they choose to do is their business. Matthew 20:1-16 seems to apply here. (I kind of doubt they reduce them 90%. But I never thought a certain soda company would change their original formula.)

All that being said, you might go ahead and call Monday morning and see what they can do for you on the Berkof package.

Ronald Quick

I subsequently cancelled my order for the Berkhof collection as I assumed that it since it only displayed the PrePub price it would not increase after publication. However, it's price increased from $119 to $199.

Call Logos and ask to speak to Jim-Ray. I have worked with him for over 2 years and he has been very helpful.

Ron

Jim VanSchoonhoven

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107408#Comment_107408

I agree Jim-Ray has always been more fair with me, and if you explain things to Him, if it is possible for the order to be reversed, I am confident that Jim-Ray will find out how to do it and get it done!

In the last 2 years I have spent over thousands of dollars with hiim and he has always bent over backwards for me, I hope to spend thousands more with him in the next few years.

In Christ,

Jim

William

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107393#Comment_107393

I just want to know of a policy that I can keep in mind.....I have shown 4 products above here.

Product 2 is Retail 299 Sale 259 prepub 169

Product 3 is Retail 49 no sale prepub 29

Product 4 is Retail 109 Sale is 79 prepub

Product 1 is Retail 21?? Sale 21 prepub 21 ????

Can we assume a prepub will go to retail.????...it might seem yes from product 1 and 5. However, product 2 indicates not and product 4 is just ambiguous from the "starting" price. I just want to understand pricing.

Price regulating ALWAYS results in higher prices.

That is a misconception. Prices cant go higher they are regulated....Degregulation allows movement YES!!!!!

I just want to understand pricing. I just want to understand pricing.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107472#Comment_107472

Can we assume a prepub will go to retail.????...it might seem yes from product 1 and 5. However, product 2 indicates not and product 4 is just ambiguous from the "starting" price. I just want to understand pricing.

No, a pre-pub will not necessarily go retail. Only if it reaches the minimum number of orders to make it financially viable for Logos to sell the product. That's the whole point of the pre-pub program. It's a way for them to gauge interest. For most, but not all, of the books in the pre-pub program, there is a discounted price offered to those who order it as a pre-pub (as an incentive to order it early). Certain publishers (Baker, Zondervan) don't allow Logos to offer any discount whatsoever (or at least not much of one) for pre-pub orderers.

If there is no "Pre-Pub" price shown (as in your examples number 1 and 4) that probably means you took those screen captures from books that are already shipping. Pre-pub books have not been produced yet. If it's a pre-pub book, there will be a pre-pub price, whether it's called "Pre-Pub Price" or "Pre-Pub Special." At some point they went through manually and updated a whole slew of those pages which had been unintentionally deceptive, because they said "Pre-Pub Special" when it wasn't actually a special price at all. Those ones now all say "Pre-Pub Price." They might be intending to change the terminology on all of them to "Pre-Pub Price" but they might also be inconsistent about how this is implemented. Remember that until they do their planned revamp of the website, all of this page editing is a manual process and there are literally thousands of product pages.

SRP is set by the publisher. If Logos can afford to offer a discounted "Logos Sale Price" (evidently sometimes inconsistently called "Sale Price" but it's the same thing), they will. If the publisher doesn't give them enough profit margin on it, they won't be able to. The sale price is what Logos sells the product for on their website. If a book is still in pre-pub and has a "Sale Price" that means it is the price Logos expects to sell the book at once it gets out of pre-pub, if it makes it out of pre-pub. It isn't a promise to sell it for that price. Just as publishers can change their SRP, Logos has the right to change its sale price once a pre-pub goes live, or to not offer it at a sale price at all, but just have a "Price." Financial circumstances in the production of a book can change between the time it goes up on the website as a "pre-pub" and the time it is released -- this time gap can sometimes be two years or more.

Another factor is that some of the works in Logos's catalogue are published by them from public domain works and thus don't have another publisher involves, so there probably isn't going to be a SRP in those cases. There's just the Logos Price, or Price.

Bottom line: look at the right-most price in any of those tables. That is the price you can get something for if you order it right now. Anything else is just a suggestion by the publisher or a prediction by Logos, and is no guarantee. The tables will always be in decreasing order from left to right, but there is no guarantee that any column will be less than the nearest column to its left. Logos is inconsistent about how they display the info (e.g., the "You Save" field is sometimes there, sometimes not, but it's totally superfluous; you could compute that yourself).

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107472#Comment_107472

Three quick points:

The retail price is normally the price of the book in it's paper version.
There are usually three prices, in descending order: Retail, Logos Sale, Prepub
Logos's new policy means Logos Sale and prepub prices are only displayed if they're lower than the prices above.

This means we can interpret your screenshots above in this way.

This resource is selling for $21.95. There's no plans for the price to rise after prepub or in the future.
This resource is selling for $169.95. After pre-pub it will rise to $259.95. At some point after than it may raise to $299.99. If, after prepub, you buy it on academic 25% discount you'll get it at 25% of retail, not of sale.
This resource is $29.99. After pre-pub it will go straight to retail at $49.95.
This resource is not on prepub. But it is discounted to $79.95. It could go up to $109.95 (but in practice probably won't). You can't buy it on the academic program because it's already discounted more than 25%.
See product 3.

TCBlack

Mind you, that in some (if not all?) instances, Logos does not have full control over pricing. Zondervan is a great example where the publisher (Z) has appears to have the final say in what Logos will and won't do.

EDIT: Had to fix my phrasing .

Matthew C Jones

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107472#Comment_107472

Price regulating ALWAYS results in higher prices.

That is a misconception. Prices cant go higher they are regulated....Degregulation allows movement YES!!!!!

Allow me to rephrase that;

With fixed-price controls, value ALWAYS goes down. That value can be in the areas of service, materials, quality monitoring, or features. If you could twist BobP's arm hard enough to get a fixed price on every title, you would either see higher prices across the board or lesser value in some of the aforementioned areas.

The current enviroment fosters the best value for the money. Logos goes all out with producing feature rich products and sometimes (for good or bad factors) they drop the price. We end up enjoying a high dollar item for a low dollar price. If Logos knows from the "git-go" they can't realize reasonable profits, there is little incentive to try.

I scour the Logos.com Products pages regularly for good deals. It is like an Easter-egg hunt. I know of more good deals than I presently have money for. I'm talking about huge savings. (Sorry, I'd tell everybody where but they would sell out before I get my order in. [:^)] ) These savings come and go. If we had fixed pricing they would always be "retail."

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107643#Comment_107643

I scour the Logos.com Products pages regularly for good deals. It is like an Easter-egg hunt. I know of more good deals than I presently have money for. I'm talking about huge savings. (Sorry, I'd tell everybody where but they would sell out before I get my order in. )

I've found what I thought were some "huge savings" this way too, where the Logos price was a fraction of the retail price. Here's one for example:

But someone burst my balloon and told me that SRP is outrageously and artificially inflated (e.g., for Libraries or Institutions that have big budgets and lots of people using the material), so the apparent savings for an individual purchaser are deceptive. I bought it anyway. [:)]

I've found some others that really were great huge savings. I'm not sure there is a quota on how many they'll sell before they change the price back up. The notion that they might "sell out before I get my order in" makes sense for physical media, but now that most everything is sold in download format, I don't know if that would be the case anymore. Of course they might limit the number of people who could get some deep discount price to cut their losses.

Matthew C Jones

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107684#Comment_107684

I've found what I thought were some "huge savings" this way too, where the Logos price was a fraction of the retail price.

Yeah, I know how that works. I enjoy using the high "Suggested Retail" prices to brag what a good deal Ianded. But I'm talking about cases where the title comes out of Pre-Pub and the actual "sale price" is significantly lower than the original "Logos Sale Price" - which was lower than the "Suggested Retail Price."

Some things are beyond Logos' foresight. John Piper and Mark Driscoll announced they hope to make all their materials available freely from their websites.. or soimething like that. Harold Wilmington made a lot of his copyrighted material available freely. Watchman Nee's works are online. Coffman's Commentaries used to be. The Bible Study Textbook Series by College Press is out there in PDF too. When a publisher has invested a sizable sum producing material it would hurt to have no return on the investment. I am not saying that has happened here but you see how it could. It is even theoretically possible a copyright holder has an agreement with Logos to charge a certain price for a title until it has reached profitability and then drop the price significantly beyond that time. There are a plethora of scenarios.

William

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107643#Comment_107643

These savings come and go. If we had fixed pricing they would always be "retail."

I am thinking that we are on the same page...just looking at the page from opposite sides. I am happy to see the prepub price and I would like to know where it is going. If all else fails, just show two prices that we can understand what we are paying for at the time. The two prices that I want to see are the "max" cost and the prepub cost. If we can assume these two prices this would be ideal. Now, if in the final pricing we see the prepub rise to a value less than that "max" that would be great. I just want to know where things are. The page that I can use as the perfect example would be the Hebrew and Greek video series published by logos. It has the Retail (max) price. It has the "Post-Pub" price and the current "pre-pub" price. If logos does not want to show this everyday price that would be less than desirable but workable.

Simon Pleasants

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/107785#Comment_107785

Thanks everyone for all your comments. They've helped clarify several things for me.

However, I still stick by my original proposition that all resources listed in PrePubs should display the price that you will get if you purchase it through PrePubs and the price that you will have to pay if you purchase it the day after it is published. There is no need for these prices to be set in stone. But they will give purchasers an indication of the saving they will receive if they preorder.

At the moment, some resources do not display the price that users can expect to pay after the item is published. In some cases (e.g., Zondervan and Baker), the prepublication prices remain the same after publication, so that is no incentive to preorder unless you want the resource immediately. In other cases (e.g. Berkhof collection and Thomas' Commentary on Revelation), the price increases significantly after publication.

My plea is for there to be a transparent system in which both the prepublication price and the post-publication price are displayed for all resources. For Zondervan and Baker books these prices will be identical - this will make it very clear to the purchaser that there is no saving to be had in pre-ordering (it might also persuade these publishers to offer cheaper prices for PrePub resources).

Again, these prices do not have to remain fixed - they can vary during the prepublication process and after the resource has been published. However, they should not change between when the final confirmation email is sent and when the resource is finally published. After the resource is published the price is then free to vary again depending on the what Logos and the publishers decide.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/108094#Comment_108094

However, I still stick by my original proposition that all resources listed in PrePubs should display the price that you will get if you purchase it through PrePubs and the price that you will have to pay if you purchase it the day after it is published. There is no need for these prices to be set in stone. But they will give purchasers an indication of the saving they will receive if they preorder.

Simon, I agree with that request. However I have never seen a pre-pub that didn't list another price to the left of the pre-pub price on its description page. Unfortunately since Berkhof has shipped now, I can't go back and check whether it did or not, but I'll take your word for it.

One thing that might be confusing you (and others) is that Logos has recently added the pre-pub price for each pre-pub to the Summary page of all the pre-pubs (http://www.logos.com/prepub), after that was requested by us users. In that summary view, you cannot see what the price of each title is expected to be after pre-pub. But if you click on the title, it will take you to the full description page, which shows more details, including (in my experience) always the anticipated price after it gets out of pre-pub (whether it be Logos's Sale Price or SRP, whether it be higher than the pre-pub or the same). I am willing to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I don't think Logos ever intends to hide the future price from us. If it is missing, that's a goof on an individual page and it should be brought to their attention.

Maybe they should also add the rest of the price chart to the summary page, but that page is already slow enough to download, so I'm not eager to see them do that. Another thing that's somewhat troublesome about the recent change to the summary page, is that you can't be sure whether clicking Preorder or Easy Preorder (buttons which they've recently added to that summary page) will order you the download version or the CD version. On the product detail pages, you get a choice and it's obvious which one you're choosing. I presume the pre-pub summary page ordering buttons would always get you the download version, but there's no text to reassure users of that. While it's nice to be able to click Easy Preorder on that summary page without having to go to the product page, in reality I would never decide to buy a product after seeing only that brief summary of it. I'd want to explore the whole product description page.

Simon Pleasants

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/108095#Comment_108095

Rosie, you're right that there are always at least two prices displayed on the product summary page - the SRP and the PrePub price. But neither of these prices reflects the price you pay after publication.

Most product pages also include a third price - the Logos Sale Price, which is the price you will pay after publication. But not all product pages include this price. In particular, Zondervan and Baker books do not include this price because the PrePub price is the same as the post publication price. However, there are other products that don't display the Logos Sale Price but whose price decreases after publication.

My experience with the Berkhof collection was not an isolated case. Just today, I received Thomas' Exegetical Commentary of Revelation. The Logos Sale Price was not displayed on it's product page prior to publication so I had no way of telling what would happen to the price after publication. It turned out the price increased from $49.99 to $69.99 (Phew! I'm glad I didn't cancel this order!).

What I'd like to see happen is for both the pre- and post-publication prices to be displayed on all product pages even if these prices are the same as each other. This removes any potential confusion and allows the purchaser to make an informed decision.

Simon Pleasants

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/108098#Comment_108098

However, there are other products that don't display the Logos Sale Price but whose price decreases after publication.

Sorry, that should read "increases after publication".

Matthew C Jones

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/108098#Comment_108098

What I'd like to see happen is for both the pre- and post-publication prices to be displayed on all product pages even if these prices are the same as each other. This removes any potential confusion and allows the purchaser to make an informed decision.

From a consumer standpoint it would be nice to know what direction gasoline prices are going too. Over the past year we have seen Word Biblical Commentary go on sale at least 3 times for very short periods. If it had been posted when prices would drop there would be no sales inbetween. We were repeatedly warned the L4 sale prices on base packages would come to an end. The March Madness codes will expire too.

When the 12 Days of Logos sale was extended http://blog.logos.com/archives/2009/12/12_days_of_logos_sale_extended.html the reason given was to allow another chance for those who might not have placed their orders for whatever reason. If everyone had known there would be an extension the procrastinators among us would have waited and missed the extended deadline too. If Zondervan's EBC had jumped significantly upon release, some other users would not have the opportunity to buy it. I look at cheaper than expected sale prices as a gesture of kindness towards the stragglers, not as a deceitful ploy towards the faithful. Besides, the quicker you buy a resource, the longer you get to enjoy it. [:P]