Never Buy a Book from Prevention Magazine

Prevention Magazine and Rodale Books are ripping off consumers with slick and expensive marketing of health-oriented books. Once you get on their mailing list you can expect frequent solicitations. The latest for me is a 40-page mailing hyping a book that has been around for some years in various editions.

It is "The Doctors Book of Food Remedies" that offers a huge amount of material on countless foods offering specific health benefits. It may be a fine book. But the issue is whether Prevention and Rodale are offering a good deal for consumers. In this case, the deal requires "four installments of just $8.74 each, plus shipping and handling." That totals $34.96, but how much would shipping and handling cost? These days, the business world is obviously using "shipping and handling cost" as a sneaky gimmick to get a lot more money from consumers, far beyond what actual costs are for any kind of mail or delivery option. In this case, who knows? It might be $5 or more.

But my bigger point and important advice for all consumers is to check the cost of the book being marketed at Amazon.com. What I have consistently discovered is that the cost from Prevention/Rodale is markedly higher than what is available at Amazon. Another problem is that there are often various editions of the same basic book, and what Prevention/Rodale offers is often not the latest version of the book.

In this case, I discovered very quickly that the book illustrated in the sales brochure is not the latest version of the book, and that it is available at Amazon for $17.16. At worse, it might cost $3.99 for shipping at Amazon, although there are ways to avoid that cost. But look at the basic book cost difference: $17.16 versus $34.96. The Amazon cost is less than 50 percent of the Prevention/Rodale cost!.

Wait, guess what else I quickly discovered at Amazon? There is a new version of the book being released at the end of this month, May 2008. And it is available from Amazon for $14.93. The book being pushed by Prevention/Rodale is more than a year older.

I have seen this exact situation before with books being marketed by Prevention/Rodale - incredibly higher prices than are available from Amazon for books that are published by Prevention/Rodale! But instead of offering consumers lower prices than retail outlets, they charge higher prices!

Just imagine the incredible profit levels obtained through these slick promotions when consumers are paying double or more than the price available from Amazon and probably other booksellers. All this from a business enterprise that seemingly concentrates on providing consumers with information to aid their health, but that is screwing consumers in terms of their financial health!

Never underestimate the ability of companies to fool consumers and take advantage of them.