Barnes and Noble has one of the worst websites (for such a large company) that I've ever had to deal with. Right now, I'm trying to make decisions about what to put on my Nook. Do I put new books that I'm interested in reading but that are untried—and therefore possibly not something I'm interested in keeping permanently—or do I put beloved, already-read books—and run the risk of having nothing new and interesting to read on my fairly expensive piece of tech?
My decision was to do a little bit of both; to take a chance on some new books that had promising samples and also buy a fair number of old favorites that I haven't re-read in a while and am interested in reading again. However, there are a lot of "old favorites" that I will be interested in acquiring at some point and so I've been tagging them to my ebook wish list.
B&N has deemed this different from my (regular) wish list and, at the same time, has made it infinitely harder to get to from their website. I can't do it directly from the home page. I can't get to it from the eBook page. It's nearly all the way at the bottom of the page if I go to "My B&N".
(Note: most of the "My B&N" page doesn't work with ebooks. For example, the "My Library" function seems to think I haven't bought anything for the last 18 months, while my eBooks Library is a different module and not entirely visible. There really needs to be greater integration between the two, imo. Stop stigmatizing ebooks if you want people to invest in them! Also, giving me the option to reorg the "My B&N" modules as will be most useful for me would be a lot more attractive/useful than the current format)
It's also reachable from the very bottom of the "My Account" page, where they've stuck all of "digital management". Which is basically everything that has to do with my Nook and ebooks. It shouldn't be that hard, man.
In the last thing I wrote, I talked about the inconvenience of buying ebooks; there's no option to sum up your purchases in a shopping cart like you would/could with regular book purchases; each ebook has to be bought individually and buying it takes you to a different page than the one you were browsing. And they don't even give you a link option to go back to the page you were previously browsing. Your options are to go back to the ebook home page or DIY.
If you are interested in getting back to the page you were browsing (say, to buy another book from your already filtered search) it's strangely difficult to do so. Just hitting the back button on your browser will take you, not to the page you were just looking at/shopping from, but the page you were browsing before that. So you have to either re-search/re-filter, or you have to jump forward another page. Just clicking on the author's name isn't very helpful, either, because that will bring up all formats by that author, not just ebooks, and you have to filter down again. It's ridiculous, and ridiculously frustrating and it says to me that B&N hasn't thought this out very carefully, which is further frustrating to someone who has (by proxy) invested in a system they couldn't even bother to think through.
Sidestep: In the last post, I think I was fairly critical about the way B&N has organized it's "collections" because it excises 90% of what I read. And that's still true. OTOH, it struck me last night how far we've come that Romance, as a genre, has become acknowledged, legitimized and accepted as "proper" or "real" reading material, that it's included in their collections as something that will be interesting to the greater majority of owners. Ditto YA. Both of these genres have been disparaged a lot and they've really opened up to the reading community at large. (And they're not always tucked in the back corner of the store anymore!) It feels like the Virginia Slims tagline: you've come a long way, baby. /sidestep
Another problem that I am unsure where to place the blame is the availability of the books that I do read. A comparison of PoC (specifically black) authors/books in the B&N store vs. Amazon's Kindle store: B&N has a single Alice Walker book and a Sparks Note (like Cliff Notes) book for The Color Purple. Amazon has 3 Alice Walker books: 2 poetry books and an anthology. B&N has no books by Gloria Naylor, just a Sparks Note for Women of Brewster Place. Amazon has no books by Gloria Naylor. B&N had three books by J. California Cooper, a pleasant surprise. Amazon has the same 3. B&N has 10 Toni Morrison books and several Spark Notes. Amazon has 12(ish) books by Toni Morrison. B&N has 3 fiction and 1 nonfiction book by very mainstream author Terry McMillan. Amazon has the same books, plus 1 more fiction book. Amazon has 7 books & 3 anthology type books by romance author E. Lynn Harris. Amazon has 7 novels and 1 anthology. Amazon has 16 books by Eric Jerome Dickey, B&N has 12. For Walter Mosley, B&N: 19, Amazon: 21.
I'd be interested to see how it holds up against authors of other ethnicities, though I don't think I'm experienced enough with authors of other ethnicities to do a comprehensive search. Amy Tan, who is arguably the best known Chinese author in the US has 5 books on Amazon and 4 on B&N, with a couple Spark Notes thrown in. Lisa See has 7 books on Amazon and 6 on B&N.
I don't think that can be or entirely is a PoC authors versus white authors problem: neither service has To Kill a Mockingbird, for example which seems like a huge oversight. Neither service has the Harry Potter books, which I think has more to do with Rowling and her publisher than a desire to exclude her, given how much money the Potter series can and does bring in.
A lot of authors' older series have not been given ebook treatments in favor of their new stuff. Sometimes, as in the case of Barbara Hambly, it seems pretty hit or miss. B&N have part of her Benjamin January series…but not the whole thing. At the same time, they have all three of her Star Trek tie-in novels…but neither of her Star Wars books. Her most famous books are arguably the Darwath novels and the Windrose Chronicles, neither of which are on B&N and it seems like a huge oversight, given the vampire craze, that neither of her vampire books are carried. Though Amazon seems to carry Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books (or some of them, I'm not sure) in ebook format, B&N doesn't have any (which means I should've bought that paperback,
Obviously, the technology is new and profit focused. Obviously, this is the main problem with allowing corporate entities control what books are "worthy" of conversion and sale, which, as usual, overlooks the obscure, genre and niche offerings for the powerhouses that are likely to make them more money. And I can only speculate on the legalities of authors (theoretically) getting their rights back and being able to convert and offer their own back-list, even if they had the time, skill and willingness to do such a thing. I'm just dipping a toe into all of this, obviously, and I don't have my ear on the pulse like masters of the ereaders like
Getting back to the Nook itself. For those that might have missed the edit, there is a search function in the library and it's possible to organize the data by author, title, etc. I wish there was a way to collapse the data to, for example, just list the authors (with the option to expand a given author) instead of a list of each author and their books.
I also reiterate that I really really wish the "go to" function had an option to go to a specific page, since ALL the other go-to functions require the Nook to remember where you were last and that's not always working for me.
Relatedly, a little bit about buying books from samples. One problem that is not specific to B&N is regarding the samples themselves. Out of a 17 page sample, 8 or more pages may be given to the cover, title page, copyright page, dedication, etc. That means I have 9 or less pages of actual book to make my decision from. Some books catch you on the first page and that's not much of an issue. Other books, I still don't feel strongly enough about it to lay down my $10 and I'd like a little more time with the book to see if it's worthwhile. I like the books best that give 42 (or so) page samples.
But let's say that you decide you like the book and you want to buy it. It downloads to your Nook, you open it back up…and you're back at the beginning. And, because the go-to function doesn't allow you to go to a specific page and the Nook has no "memory" of you having read the book before, you have to manually toggle through all the pages again. Which is enough of a pain with 17 pages (8 of which are useless crap anyway) but it feels interminably annoying with 42 pages (8 of which are useless crap). I'm not sure if it's because the full ebook is a completely separate file that replaces the sample or what, but it doesn't make it less aggravating to me, the end user.
Despite all my criticism, I'm still enjoying the Nook very much. I'm excited about books, new and old. I'm excited about the possibility of reading some old favorites that are currently inaccessible in storage. I'm reading more than I have in a while, I'm making time for reading more than I have in a while. These are all good things.
No comments:
Post a Comment