Michael Eisen, a biologist and open access advocate, writes about science publishing, research and the occasional oddity.
HN commenters love his post on a book about flies priced at over $23 million by Amazon's pricing algorithms, and link his open access petition.
There seems to be two issues here being conflated as one (judging by the follow-up/updates):
1.) Two different items - because the same item is being offered by two different sellers. The $9 is Amazon's main one, the $12 is Macmillan's own specified price (note the "Sold by Macmillan" in that entry).
2.) Prices on the same item (identified by ASIN) do change at Amazon: sellers can change their prices, even to ridiculous lengths such as this from last year: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 . In the retail part of Amazon, Kindle books are treated in much the same way as physical items, so the same flexibility of pricing is offered. Physical goods have cost of holding stock and 90-day-invoicing cycles, hence pricing seem to fluctuate based on that 90 day window and items still on hand at payment day. Kindle ebooks, less so, but there's still A/B testing to consider.
Online, especially for non-physical items are tending to have fluctuating prices, trying to find the ideal price to maximise profits.
One of my friends recommends http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/ for price watching items on Amazon. I tend to keep an eye on the Lego-focused variant over at http://brickset.com/buy/uk/amazon/ -- price watching is proving to be an interesting cottage-industry.
Clearing cookies / incognito mode triggers re-selecting a different bucket - that's why you are seeing different pricing. So, if you want, clear cookies over and over, find the lowest price, and buy right there and…
Reminiscent of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [1] where there were and are ongoing patent disputes for the last 30 years.
The highly esteemed Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute, who recently got turfed out of the Whitehouse for being an asshole following testimony by 14 different staffers [2], wrote a highly biased reinvention of history around CRISPR published in Cell [3] which was severely criticised [4,5]. To this day, this highly cited 'review' still does not have a conflict of interest statement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction#Patent_disputes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lander#Science_Advisor_to_the_President
[3] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5
[4] https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/25/why-eric-lander-morphed/
[5] https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
A lot of this is because of 3rd-party sellers. To make things easier, I usually filter by "ships from and sold by Amazon". Some of the pricing and "styles" for 3rd parties are ridiculous because they're algorithm-driven. That's likely why the $9.99/oz price happened. https://www.fastcompany.com/3060803/algorithmic-pricing-is-creating-an-arms-race-on-amazons-marketplace has some context on why and http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 talks about how . TL;DR Amazon picks (using their secret algos, ofc) which selection should be the default among the sellers. Everyone wants to be that to get more sales. Sellers then fix the price to a different item which has the price sometimes fixed to that other item, or potentially a loop with more products involved. They then proceed to algorithmically price each other far beyond normal costs for the item.
This is such a tragedy. I think a couple of comments should be made.
First, we truly lost a fantastic member of the stem cell community. His lab produced some of the most ambitious and amazing directed differentiation of stem cells into neural tissues including the retina (see an old news story here [1]). Whether or not he was deeply involved in this latest STAP cell controversy is immaterial to the tremendous contributions his lab has made to the field.
Second, we should be more careful on how we as a scientific community react to scientific scandal. Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley DevBio Prof, HHMI, Founder of PLoS), who's father committed suicide in a similar incident many years ago, had some poignant comments [2].
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232
[2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1619
The article, written by Eric Lander of the Broad Institute, was widely criticized[1][2][...] at its publication for being a veiled attempt to reframe history to support the Broad Institute's patent claims. Note a number of their framing decisions - choosing to group Doudna et. al.'s contributions as #4 in a long list and setting Zheng's contribution by itself in a different color. Seems innocuous when skimming over it, but the choice of what to emphasize and categorize is not objectively deterministic, and this particular framing and coloring was no doubt chosen deliberately. Many think there was purposeful deception behind that deliberate choice.
[1] http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crispr/
[2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
Could be bots running amok. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358M
“A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
[…]
Once a day profnath set their price to be 0.9983 times bordeebook’s price. The prices would remain close for several hours, until bordeebook “noticed” profnath’s change and elevated their price to 1.270589 times profnath’s higher price. The pattern continued perfectly for the next week”