Apr 27 2006
The trials and tribulations of buying ebooks
Dear Ebook Publishers,
Do you people not want readers to purchase books from you? It certainly seems like it. I decided to buy 6 books, 2 from Samhain, 2 from Triskelion, 1 from Cerridwen and 1 from Liquid Silver. By the way Liquid Silver people, this is what is listed on your dl page
Liquid Siver Books
Imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing
10509 Sedgegrass Drive
Indianapolis, IN 46235
Copyright (c) 2003 All Rights Reserved
On to Samhain. Good Lord your site is hard to navigate. Harder than Triskelion but at least the purchase went through quickly. It’s just the downloading that was a pain. The confirmation page came through with only one dl. I had to try through the site and the email confirmation 2 times to get the second dl.
By now, I’m seriously pissed.
Cerridwen, you made it so much easier. Your site isn’t hard to nagivate and the purchase, with paypal, went through quickly. The dl was a breeze. Thanks for lowering my blood pressure a little bit.
Then I hit the road block. Liquid Silver or as the dl page says Liquid Siver. By this point I was through handing my credit card info to morons and went straight to paypal. They at least know how to do business. You took my money and as of yet I’ve still not managed to dl the damn book. I tried to click on the dl link three times only to be told that my browser can’t find your site. Then I tried to cut and paste the confirmation email link but that has, as of yet, gotten me nowhere. My blood pressure is soaring again and I can honestly say I doubt I will purchase ebooks from you again.
I think I need a drink or to pet my cat to reduce my stress level.
~Jayne
Send to Kindle
Apr 28, 2006 @ 05:01:38
Update: I finally got the Liquid Siver dl but eight hours later am still waiting for the download key for the second Triskelion purchase. I’ve never had problems like these buying ebooks before.
Did I just hit a bad bunch all at one time? Have readers had problems with these companies? Was the moon full? What?
Dear Author.Com » And the winners are . . .
Apr 28, 2006 @ 06:42:17
[...] Jayne and I both had problems getting our books from Liquid Silver. I was initially very impressed by Liquid Silver or Siver, however it is spelled, because of the nice, very professional covers. But when you can’t download your book after several hours, you start to panic and exchange profanity laced emails with your blog partner. In a word of defense for Liquid Silver, I did get a help desk response and workable link at midnight which is pretty impressive. [...]
Apr 28, 2006 @ 07:32:39
Gah, I hate that. I wish all of them gave you the download link immediately like Cerridwen and Ellora’s Cave. It makes things MUCH easier. Email is touchy.
Well, as a Firefox user, I had MUCHO trouble at Triskelion since you can’t see the bar across the page to browse.
Apr 28, 2006 @ 08:06:21
You poor mite, Jayne! Thank you for sharing your pain. I feel it.
Apr 28, 2006 @ 08:07:23
P.S. Sorry, yeah, I agree EC is the easiest to handle when comes to buying ebooks. I never tried Ebookwise [sp?] or similar. How was it, does anyone know?
Apr 28, 2006 @ 08:13:52
Yes, Jane and I were quite upset last night. I will say, to their credit, that Liquid Si(l)ver quickly responded to my distress email and I got the book downloaded soon after that.
I finally got the dl key for my second (and perhaps last) Triskelion book this morning. Well over 10 hours after I made the purchase. And to rub salt in the wound, they’ve stated that my credit card has been charged for the purchase. The same cc that they declined and forced me to use paypal to purchase the book. I have fired off a very upset email to their customer service people.
Apr 28, 2006 @ 08:16:58
Nicole, Triskelion is the only ebook company that I’ve had to wait to get the dl key. Most others let me dl immediately from the site or in the case of Amber Quill, have sent the key within minutes of the purchase going through.
This added to a hard to navigate site make me very wary of purchasing from them again. And that’s only going to be an option if the fools get my charges straightened out pronto.
Apr 28, 2006 @ 09:49:31
OK, Triskelion is now slowly responding to my complaints and has sent me another dl key in response to my complaint last night. I’m still waiting to get the charges cleared up.
The service person states that AOL is notorious for deleting Triskelion’s email to customers before they (the customers) ever get it.
Has anyone else found this to be true?
Apr 28, 2006 @ 09:52:57
Jayne,
Our most sincere apologies to you and all of our customers. Since http://www.mybookstoreandmore.com was switched to a faster server, it’s cart has been playing hide-and-seek with the links. We have been diligently working with the programmers to find out why, with little luck. We are now starting the process of finding a new cart and migrating over to it.
I hope you’ll give us another try when we get this bump-in-the-road settled. :)
Crissy
http://www.samhainpublishing.com
http://www.mybookstoreandmore.com
Apr 28, 2006 @ 10:25:27
Triskelion has now issued me a credit for the double charge so my little world is right once again.
So, now that all that is taken care of, on to reading more books!
Apr 28, 2006 @ 11:16:21
I no longer buy books at Triskelion for this very reason. I sent them an e-mail absolutely ages ago, complaining about how user unfriendly their website is, when it comes buying. I didn’t hear anything back. I recall telling them that I felt they must lose out on a lot of sales due to their crap system, but I guess they don’t give a rats arse.
As for LiquidSilver, I can’t remember the last time I bought anything from there either, although their books usually aren’t bad.
Apr 28, 2006 @ 11:34:58
Karen you reminded me of another little problem I had with my order. Triskelion gave me 7 points with my first purchase which, I understand from reading their FAQ section, is worth 70 cents off another book. So, when I was buying book number two, I applied all 7 points towards its purchase price, only to be told that I’d exceeded my points. Huh?
I did manage to use 6 points during that transaction but I still don’t understand why if they gave me the points in the first place, they didn’t let my use them all.
Apr 28, 2006 @ 11:36:11
Crissy, thanks for explaining what went wrong with my downloads. I do hope that things smooth out as Samhain appears to have quite a few interesting books in its lineup.
Dear Author.Com »Blog Archive » Tsk, tsk Triskelion
May 12, 2006 @ 21:35:09
[...] Earlier I wrote about the bad experience I had buying 2 ebooks from you. Now I’m sorry to say but the reading experience for one of them has been less than wonderful and it’s not due to the author’s voice or style. It’s due to your poor editing. [...]
Jun 04, 2006 @ 15:02:03
When I look for a new publisher, I go through the whole process to make sure the buying etc works for me. Triskelion did, and this was the old site which was much more difficult to navigate.
So this weekend, I did it for the new site. Neither time did I have any problem that wasn’t of my own making. I typed my email in wrong, but once I contacted Triskelion about the problem, it was corrected in 15 minutes.
I really wanted to come across some problems, because I wanted to know what people have reported to me.
Well I didn’t. But I have looked into it, and it seems that people who have the most problems are on AOL or who run Norton as their antivirus. Norton’s problems are increasing daily. I had to junk it because it slowed my system down to a crawl and denied me access to numerous websites. AOL users seem to get on fine if they run through the buying process again.
The Triskelion site is highly secure, so you won’t have your credit card or your purchase stolen, and for me it was much easier than some other sites, notably Amazon, which I’m always having problems with.
Also, some ISP’s are worse than others at arbitrarily banning whole sites. My ISP recently decided to block all yahoo mail, but forgot to tell us, its customers.
If you’re having a lot of problems with many sites, the problem might not be with the site.
Triskelion is in business to sell books, and the management appreciate letters helping them to improve their site and the process. People asked for author pages, so – they’re being worked on (Triskelion has 80 some authors on its books, so they’re taking a bit of time). If there’s anything else the company can do to help, I’m sure it would be only too glad to do so.
Keep reading!
Jun 04, 2006 @ 18:54:23
There are publishers I’ve had consitent problems buying from and others that have never given me any problems. Triskelion has consistently given me problems. And each book I’ve bought from them has had editing problems. After I wrote this post and the other about Triskelion, I’ve gotten off site emails from other readers telling me the same thing. Yes, I’ve seen mistakes from other lines but the biggest problem was the weird font changes in one book. Another person emailed me an example from a book she had purchased from Triskelion and it was even worse than in mine. Keep in mind that these font changes just appeared then disappeared out of nowhere and had nothing to do with the story. Her book also had strange paragraph breaks.
I would still like to try some of the Triskelion stories I’ve read blurbs for and if I could buy them from another site (such as Fictionwise), I’d do that. I try to buy from the original publisher so that the author gets the most royalties but in some cases, I’ll go straight to Fictionwise to save myself hassle and headache.
I’m glad to hear that they are working on the authors page since this is generally how I look for books when going to a publisher’s website. Thanks for stopping by and letting us know that. ;)