Targeted Advertising?

I receive Borders coupons in my e-mail way too often for the health of my budget, but an interesting one showed up in the inbox today.

I can get Stephen King's new novel, Under the Dome, for 40 percent off the list price of $35, with my coupon. Drops it to $21, if you're curious. And if I go ahead and buy it at Border's, they'll give me a coupon for 20 percent off my next purchase. Which will probably be a bottle of Advil or something; Under the Dome weighs in at 3.6 pounds and 1088 pages. Of King's books, only the vanity edition of The Stand, containing stuff edited out of his original 1978 bestseller, is longer. The manuscript King mailed to his publishers was reportedly 19 pounds.

Amazon will let me order it for half off, charging me $17.50. They also have a collector's edition available for $40.50 -- marked down from $75 -- but it weighs an even four pounds and that diminishes whatever interest the $40.50 price tag left behind, which wasn't much. It's printed on special paper, has printed endpapers, illustrations by a New Yorker magazine cartoonist and includes a deck of cards with those illustrations.

Of course, if I order the plain vanilla edition from Amazon I have to pay shipping, which ups my total from $17.50 to $21.49 and bumps me past my Borders coupon price. Had I wanted to pre-order, I might have gotten it for as little as $9 -- about what the paperback price will be when that's released -- as Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target fussed at each other for awhile with those ridiculously low numbers. And if I had a Kindle electronic book reader, I could have Under the Dome for $9 right now, no shipping, and that little device weighs about one-sixth as much as the hardcover version. But I'd have already had to drop $259 on the Kindle, so it kind of evens out. Barnes and Noble will part with a copy if I part with $21, same as Borders, and Hastings will do so if I give them $17.50.

Or if I wait awhile, this sucker will be clogging the remainder tables at several major stores and I can probably score it for maybe $5. If I want to, that is.

The novel is about what happens when a force field suddenly descends on a small town in -- remember, this is Stephen King -- Maine. In an interview with Time, King said he cast his villains in a George W. Bush/Dick Cheney mold. Doesn't the prospect of yet another aging Baby Boomer using the dusty, arthritic remains of his storytelling gift to creak out how awful Pres. Bush was and spending better than a thousand pages to do so excite you? I'm certainly covered with bump of goose myself.

And while all of the price breaks reduce the cover price considerably, none of them do anything to shrink that 1088-pages number or guarantee that this book won't do what nearly every King book since the early 1990s has done: Start off well, get tired about halfway through and then spend the last two-fifths of the book muttering repetitiously like an old guy cranky about the kids on his lawn but too stove up to do anything about it.

The search for the best price on Under the Dome did turn up something interesting, though. This isn't the first book with that exact title. Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, the Bishop of London from 1901 to 1939, apparently collected some of his shorter writings in a book with that name and published it in 1906. I may have to check into it.

Doesn't seem like Borders has a coupon for it, though.