From:         SHEILA DENN <DENN.SHEILA@EPAMAIL.EPA.GOV>
Subject:      Faxon Subscription Agency query -Reply

No, you are not the only person having this problem. They sent us a price
quotation in May; we marked our changes on it and returned it to them, and
when we were invoiced for the titles, we were some $32,000 over budget!! I
asked what the purpose of a price quotation was if the actual prices
charged were going to be that much over, and I was only told something
vague like "We usually try to tell people to add 10 percent to the prices
listed on the quote." We were never told this, and I am unclear and what
purpose a quote serves if it is going to be that far off.

In addition, I will warn you that some of the things that were listed
correctly on our original quote were incorrect on our invoice. For
example, we had ordered a scholarly journal called "Toxicology; what
they ordered and billed us for was an abstracts journal called
"Toxicology" that was some $700 more expensive. We would not have caught
these if we hadn't gone through both the quote and the invoice checking
for ISSNs that did not match. This was an extremely tedious process, and
one I cannot understand our having to do. I don't understand why the ISSNs
as listed on the invoice should have differed in any way from the ISSNs we
confirmed in our quote. Sigh.

Sorry to go on at such length, but I guess I needed to vent a little . . .

Good luck!!

Sheila O. Denn
Library Technical Assistant (UNC Contractor)
US Environmental Protection Agency
Library Services (MD-35)
Research Triangle Park, NC 27711
(919)541-1370     Fax: (919)541-1405
denn.sheila@epamail.epa.gov