Over on the WWWAC list, there’s a bit
of discussion on Amazon ascendant, particularly now that they’ve taken
over CDNow.
You’ll forgive me for dissent, but they are not perfect. In fact,
there’s one section where they suck worms– electronic books. And this
is an area on I have no small amount of expertise, having been involved
in e-books longer than Amazon’s been in business.* I was doing a lot of
Christmas shopping on Amazon, picked up a few DVDs. As an impulse buy,
I decided to pick up an e-book as well, Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible—
it looked good, and I wanted to read it right then and there.
But after I placed the order, I wasn’t allowed to download the book.
Nor was I allowed to for nearly twelve hours.
And when I was allowed access, I wasn’t given the option of actually
downloading the book to my hard drive– it opened up the Acrobat viewer
in my browser, and I had to save it from there.
Horrible. For a company that prides itself on customer experience and
not wasting the customer’s time, this was completely inexplicable. Next
time, I’ll check with FictionWise
first.
* By the way, I had actually considered starting up a book business
like Amazon, but I figured that was an interim step that would be blown
away by e-publishing. Seems to be a heck of a business in interim
steps, eh?