Fourth Edition largely unavailable at Amazon.com

[Warunsun]

Anyone else notice that fourth edition has quite suddenly become largely unavailable on Amazon.com? Some new players in my group were wanting to order some handbooks and nearly everything is listed as "Temporarily out of stock. Order now and we'll deliver when available." This includes even the more recent products released. One of my new players bought some things in November without issue and two others wanted to order around Christmas and told me it was all "out of stock" much to my shock. Heck, I bought some third edition books well after fourth edition's release. Seems a bit strange. You can't even order any essential books.

 

[Rygar]

Alot of retailers, especially big ones, will have a clause in their distribution contracts that the Publisher has to buy back unsold books (video games, movies, etc) after a certain time period or below a certain threshold of sales.

I don't know if that's what happened, but if suddenly all 4th edition material is unavailable it sounds to me like that is a possibility. It's entirely possible all remaining 4th edition material sold out for Christmas too.

 

[Warunsun]

Alot of retailers, especially big ones, will have a clause in their distribution contracts that the Publisher has to buy back unsold books (video games, movies, etc) after a certain time period or below a certain threshold of sales.

I don't know if that's what happened, but if suddenly all 4th edition material is unavailable it sounds to me like that is a possibility. It's entirely possible all remaining 4th edition material sold out for Christmas too.

I guess it is possible that Christmas cleaned them out. I don't believe that Amazon would unload D&D books back to Wizards. Amazon does amazing sales in them.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Oddly enough, the premium reprints seem to be unavailable as well, at least, some of them.

 

[Warunsun]

Oddly enough, the premium reprints seem to be unavailable as well, at least, some of them.

Your right. I just checked and everything by the "Wizards RPG Team" is now "Temporarily out of stock."

Even widely available books like Ed Greenwood's unstated Forgotten Realms book. Could there be a Dungeons & Dragons product recall underway?

Could everything sell out simultaneously?

 

[Rygar]

Your right. I just checked and everything by the "Wizards RPG Team" is now "Temporarily out of stock."

Even widely available books like Ed Greenwood's unstated Forgotten Realms book. Could there be a Dungeons & Dragons product recall underway?

Could everything sell out simultaneously?

Yes, potentially. With 5th edition becoming imminent, it's entirely possible that D&D is back in the public's mind. Some may have asked the the recent stuff for Christmas, it's also very possible the reprints were a common christmas list item.

4th edition may have had a run on it out of fear that DDI is going to be cut, I've also heard rumors that alot of the later material had low print runs, so that would make it prime speculator product. Very low availability D&D items go for large amounts, like the Silver Anniversery products in the hundreds of dollars and Palace of the Silver Princess going for thousands. Remember, apparently alot of 4th edition fans were dependent on DDI for playing the game instead of books, so it's *very* likely that should WOTC kill the Character Builder, those books would skyrocket in value. So many 4th edition fans seem to have eschewed the books for DDI that it's a near certainty that there aren't sufficient books for the dedicated 4th edition playerbase if the Character Builder disappears.

 

[fjw70]

Maybe 4e is finally running out of stock. I have seen quite a few 4e books get snapped up at the local used book store.

 

[Dungeoneer]

I picked up quite a few 4e books and products from Amazon a couple months ago. They were available then. I suspect Christmas has just cleaned them out.

I don't know how Amazon's back-end business works, but I suspect they don't remainder books. Their strategy is the opposite of stores that only stock best sellers. They will keep a book around forever because, why not? And then that one day someone goes searching for that out of print book, they have it and they make a sale.

 

[isidorus]

I hope Amazon is not totally out. I just started picking up D&D 4E books the past week or so.

 

[Erik Mona]

Standard Amazon practice is to hold a reasonable amount of a given book (for some, that may be "3", while others would be in the hundreds or even thousands). When they run out, they order more from the book's distributor, with a quantity-per-book based on sales projections (Amazon in particular has tons of metrics for this). Generally with a mid-list book (at least for us) this would be in the high double digits or low triple digits, but with a core book it can be higher.

It's possible that increased interest from the holiday season coupled with declining warehouse stock levels near the tail end of an edition more or less "cleared Amazon out," but if so they probably were stocking fewer than 50 copies of any of the books we're talking about (again, except the core). It will be interesting to see if this trend continues for more than another week or so, because if so that could be a sign that 4e is sold out on the direct distributor level and also sold out at a secondary book distribution safety net represented by companies like Ingram, where B&N (and I assume Amazon) often goes to restock their shelves if primary distributors are out of stock.

It's an interesting scenario because right now "4e is completely sold out at distribution" and "Amazon is temporarily out of stock due to the holidays" are both plausible theories based on the books' current Amazon status. In a week or two, that will no longer be the case.