Sunday, May 17, 2009

Cool-er eBook Store: FAILing eBooks


Click = big

The Cool-er eBook Store is a lesson in utter incompetency.

See above screensnap with several listings for business reports -- priced at US$636.00! -- showing up in the Biographies/Memoirs category. This isn't isolated. I went up to about page 180 in the listings (which claimed there were 3,534!). I had to bail after hitting about twenty pages of these business reports.

In addition, there were several eBook listings that were duplicates.

There's no way to do any sorting.

There should be an Advanced form with checkboxes and fields.

The fields should allow someone to type in Author, Title, Year. The checkboxes should display the name of every publisher, so the entire selection is right there to see. Sorting should be done by date and price too.

The current dropdown/overlay to select eBook device is of no help. It still manages to list titles for which there are no compatible formats available. See this prior post for an example of that.

The general public who wade into this mess will wonder what they have done wrong.

Book discovery is going to be one of the hot topics in the next few years. This is a fine example of how not to do it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just noticed that the "business reports" you mentioned are probably by Philip M. Parker. Google him ;-)

Mike Cane said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mike Cane said...

Let me try that with a proper LINK this time:

Oh. My. God. What a SCAM!

Philip M. Parker