Sadly, some prices are going up….

Between the Lakes Group has been in business since 1999, and some of our offerings, particularly downloads you’ll find at www.betweenthelakes.com, date from CD-ROMs of historical material we have sold for a couple of decades now. Unlike everyone else, we’ve never previously increased prices on what we sell.

In those intervening years a lot has happened, some of which have increased our costs in ways that aren’t visible to our customers. For example, web hosting (paying an internet company to maintain these websites and provide world-wide connectivity to them) has gone up substantially — at least doubled.

As well, expenses we never incurred back in those blissful days to enhance web security have now become a necessity. Individually the costs aren’t large, but taken as a group, these services cost nearly what it cost to host the whole website back in the beginning.

PayPal, as you probably realize, charges us a fee plus a percentage of the purchase price for each download we sell. When you’re selling downloads for less than $2 those fees eat up most of the price you pay. We don’t begrudge paying PayPal to streamline this function; indeed we’re grateful to them for being there.

What this all translates to is that sadly, some prices are going up on our downloads of historical material.

NOTE: We’re NOT raising the prices of our printed books that Amazon handles for us. As far as we can tell, these are competitively priced, and our costs there have remained stable.

The way we’re handling the price increases on the downloads in incremental. We’re doing the increases a page at a time. For example, if you are looking at a page like Connecticut Miscellany (found at http://www.betweenthelakes.com/CT/connecticut_Miscellany.htm) we’re adjusting all the prices on that page at once.

We sell several hundred different downloads, spread across around a hundred individual pages. As you might guess, it will be a while before we get them all adjusted.

But we did want you to know that we are in this process, and you may find that the interesting download that was priced at $2 you were thinking about buying but didn’t may not be selling for the same $2 the next time you check on it.

Yes, we know that merchants raise their prices all the time. So, we’re going to raise ours. But we’re letting you know that it’s in the works, and why we’re doing it.

If you want to review our array of downloads (some of which have been and will remain FREE), we invite you to have a look at the front page of our downloads section. You can find that at http://www.betweenthelakes.com.

And, just a word to say that we’ve been procrastinating for a while about this price increase because we appreciate your loyalty.

Sincerely,

Geoff Brown, Principal Partner, Between the Lakes Group LLC

p.s. While you’re here, why not take a look at a couple of books we’re recently written: Trinity Lime Rock in Context – a History and Lakeville Crucifix.