{"id":12711,"date":"2012-02-14T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=12711"},"modified":"2019-11-09T21:56:26","modified_gmt":"2019-11-09T21:56:26","slug":"decisions-to-be-made-on-this-years-baseball-prospectus-annual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=12711","title":{"rendered":"Decisions to be made on this year’s Baseball Prospectus annual"},"content":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t long after one item in my baseball budget <\/a>became available to buy that another popped up to join it.<\/p>\n

Flicking through the satisfyingly hefty Baseball Prospectus annual for the first time each year has become a ritual for me. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another signpost along the road to the baseball season springing to life.<\/p>\n

However, this year I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m contemplating changing this ritual slightly.<\/p>\n

After the initial joy of gazing on 600 pages of baseball commentary and stats, the book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s weight and size does become an issue. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s simply not made to be portable and if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not blessed with a lot of space in your home, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another significant item to find a spot for.<\/p>\n

So, the news<\/a> that various electronic versions of the annual will be available this year really caught my eye. It won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be quite the same at first, but the positives outweigh the negatives. A big part of the book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s appeal for me is that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something I dip into on a regular basis all season long and dipping into it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c wherever I am \u00e2\u20ac\u201c will be much easier in electronic form.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n

When I saw a tweet today<\/a> from the book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s publisher, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, that the Kindle version was already available at a bargain $9.99, I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t click through to Amazon.com quickly enough. However \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as you may have already worked out \u00e2\u20ac\u201c my joy was short lived.\u00c2\u00a0 It might be available to Americans at $9.99 (\u00c2\u00a36.40), but when the site picks up that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re from the UK, that price more than doubles to $22.50 (i.e. the \u00c2\u00a314 that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s listed for on Amazon.co.uk).<\/p>\n

Because VAT is payable on e-books and not on print books, if you opt for Amazon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s free Super Saver Delivery it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually cheaper to get the print version from Amazon.co.uk \u00e2\u20ac\u201c think of all that paper, ink, and work to deliver it – than to click a couple of buttons and download it in minutes. That seems a bit mad to me, but there we go.<\/p>\n

Currently that means the choice comes down to waiting until at least 15 March (its listed UK release date) and paying a bit less for the print version, or buying it now, enjoying the benefit of its greater portability but dealing with the pain of paying more for an e-book than the good old paperback.<\/p>\n

Decisions, decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t long after one item in my baseball budget became available to buy that another popped up to join it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-12711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12711"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21426,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711\/revisions\/21426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}