Why I hate trying to buy books on the internet, a story in one part.

[theweaselking]

So, John Scalzi's got a new book out. He's serialising his new novel in $0.99 chunks. I want to read it.

It's supposed to be for sale, as an ebook.

But!

Scalzi didn't include a link to buy it[1], only a link to the audiobook. I don't like audiobooks and I really hate audible.com audiobooks, so I googled it, and the SECOND hit is his announcement blog post, the first hit is Tor's website.

I click Tor's website. An announcement! No link to buy.

So I click the "get Tor books here!" link and it takes me to Tor/Forge. And it's forgotten what I was looking at, so I'm on the Tor/Forge home page, not the page for The Human Division. I check "new releases", it's not there.

I eventually find a search button, put in "the human division", and find THE OTHER THIRTEEN NON-AVAILABLE BOOKS WITH THAT NAME (because this is the first serial and all the rest are showing up) before finding the only one that's actually been released.

I click that, and there's a "buy now" link, which I click. It takes me to something that says the book is 99 cents, available from "other".

There's no "buy" button.

"Other" is actually a drop-down menu, with options like "amazon" and "kobo" and "apple store" on it.

Selecting any of those doesn't open the page for this book on that site, no. It opens that site's home page.

Seriously, Tor? Would it have killed you to make ANY of the announcements, or ANY of the "buy now" links, ACTUALLY GO TO A PLACE WHERE I COULD BUY THIS BOOK SPECIFICALLY? Without running me around half your website before dumping me off at the home page of amazon.com and telling me that you were wasting my time and I shouldn't have bothered even TRYING to buy directly from the publisher who has a "buy now" link on their page?

I am trying to GIVE YOU MONEY. Why are you making this DIFFICULT? Why do you even *have* those links?

(Choose retailer first, go to retailer, give money to retailer: That works. But why the fuck wasn't the "buy now" link A SET OF LINKS TO PEOPLE WHO WOULD LET ME BUY NOW AGH. And now I'm so annoyed by the experience that fuck it, I'm not buying this book. I have enough other books and my impulse-purchase impulse has worn off. Maybe when the rest of the book comes out I'll try again.)

PS: Yes, I did find links to download it, even links to less-asshole companies. But forget it! It has annoyed me and now it suffers and does not receive my dollar.


[1]: ETA: Scalzi included a bunch of perfectly good links to buy it but I missed those because they looked superficially like facebook/twitter/g+/whatever "share this article on" buttons and I ignored them because that's what you DO to button rows on websites. That's my bad. Everything I said about Tor's website still stands.

Comments

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

This is something I hate that a lot of publishers and even self-pub authors do -make it hard for me to give them money (and don't even get me started in the "sorry not available in your country yet because the net doesn't cross the Atlantic because REASONS!" crap). Authors/Publishers, if I go to ANYWHERE on your site that shows a book, it should also let me buy it! simples!

Since i do a lot of ebook reading and battling author websites it's something i fight a lot. And authors who decide it's more important for you to read excerpts, their blog, the weather in Kansas, whatever before actually letting you get near the book? AAAAARGH

My rant: http://www.fangsforthefantasy.com/2012/02/what-we-wish-from-authors-in-internet.html

And this is becoming relevant to ebooks: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I checked, for comparison: Pirating the book was one website, three words, two clicks.

I'm still not doing that, because 99 cents is a perfectly reasonable price and I LIKE paying authors to write books.

At the same time? What a pain in the ass.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I want to give the author money, especially when it's so reasonably priced - whyyyyy are they making it so hard?! When i'm sat there, credit card in hand, it should NOT be EASIER and quicker to pirate than it is to buy. Why make giving money so difficult? I boggle I do

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much always going to be easier and quicker to pirate - for one thing, no money has to change hands, so several orders of magnitude of problem are removed. However, despite it being "easier and quicker", that should NOT stop paying for it from being "easy and quick" - and once I've set up my payment method, it really should not be harder to buy a book than it is to buy a game on Steam.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

exactly. On stream I can easily get my hands on a game - and not just stream. If I go look at a computer game's website it will give me at least 1 link right there where I can buy. I think mass Effect gave me several. But so often for ebooks I have to jump through hoops and check several sites. Or I see books that are priced higher than their paper copies. Or it's not available in my country. or all the buy links are posted on page 977857 of the website behind the cat macros. It's vexing

[cleodhna.livejournal.com]

Even more vexing is to purchase an e-book, with actual money, only to find that the file one receives is not usable, by anything, including the specific device for which it was purchased. It was a new book, too, so I paid premium hardback cost for it. I don't feel particularly bad about subsequently pirating it so that I could read the book I'd legally paid to read.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

That's not quite a fair comparison. You didn't do "one website, three words, two clicks" for trying to buy the book, you specifically said you wouldn't. (cf. "Choose retailer first..." section.)

I don't disagree with you that Tor/Forge and Scalzi should provide direct links, mind.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Plus, for Scalzi, I'm betting you went to the post titled "Five Things About the Audiobook of 'The B-Team,'" where if you went to the one titled "The Human Division, Episode One: The B-Team Is Live!" you'd see the full list of links at the bottom.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/01/15/the-human-division-episode-one-the-b-team-is-live/

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I actually missed the long list of links at the bottom of Scalzi's one - those are formatted so much like the standard "please ignore me" bar of facebook/twitter/pinterest buttons that I slid *right past them*.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

And of course that's Scalzi's fault.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Nope. That's mine, but my complaint really isn't about "Scalzi didn't include a link to buy it" - I was wrong, he did, I missed it. Oops.

My complaint is that, upon trying to buy it from the first google hit, the publisher? I hit "buy now" several times and still wasn't ever taken to a place where I could buy it.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Fair.

Ish.

When I google "the human division," I get Amazon first, then Scalzi's site, then Tor.com. At the bottom of the "read-along" post for "The B-Team" are buy links.

I grant that clicking the "Looking for Tor Books?" link gets one to MacMillan, and yes, there's the problem. But even then, when I went to the dropdown, it sent me to the individual page for the book at Amazon, iTunes, B&N...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The dropdown took me to the front page of Kobo and Amazon. I didn't check the others. I wonder if this is a country-of-origin problem and I'm getting redirected because I'm in Canada?

(I also didn't go to the read-along pages, because those seemed like they might have spoilers. I don't think this is an unreasonable decision, even if they do have direct links to buy - especially when there's the big link to buy books right there on every page.)

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Could be. Or are you really restrictive about things like cookies? Could be that too.

It's not an unreasonable decision, no.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Having now checked: All of Scalzi's links work to get me right to a buy page, although Amazon wants $1.17 instead of $0.99. So if I'd noticed those as significant and not mentally killfiled them that would have avoided the entire issue.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

The $1.17 must be country-of-origin. Though isn't the CAD worth more than the USD right now?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes, but you'll NEVER get a bookseller to admit that. Paperback prices are still, like, 30% higher in Canadian dollars, just like they've been for decades.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

That's fucked up.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

It's not the bookseller's fault, and not quite 30%.

Looking at a few books bought in the last year, the Canadian/American split is along the lines of $8/$9, $11/$13, $14/$17, $16/$18, $18/$20, $35/38, $35/$40, $40/$46. I did find one that was $8/$11, but that was The Gift of Fear, and the copyright page is '97; I suspect that price difference has been grandfathered in. (It was also one of only two paperbacks immediately handy; the others were all trades or hardcovers.)

You actually can get booksellers to admit it's a problem (occasionally loudly, in print, and AFAIK no-one have ever come out of the Canadian Booksellers Association saying it's a good thing). Usually they follow up with the fact that Canadian retailers who buy their books from Canadian distributors pay a cost based on the Canadian cover price, which the publishers set. (In fairness, some Canadian publishers charge at par or slightly less in Canada.)

As well, some booksellers (or stores selling books) make a point of, when they manage to get a book from an American distributor, passing any savings along. With regards to that, I have a smaller sample of books to draw from, but when I bought a book with only an American price listed (which may not be indicative of where it was printed!), the price difference was $15.95/$18.50[1], or $19/$19[2].

Not saying this isn't a problem! But it's improving a bit?
---
[1] This is the only pairing where prices are exact to the cent. For all other Can/US price pairs, knock off a nickel; e.g., $35/$38 is actually $34.95/$37.95.
[2]Edited because I found the receipt and it was $19/$19 not $19/$20.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Even before country filtering, Google already filters results based on what it knows about you and your past searches and clicks.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

We're talking about the link on tor.com pointing me to the home page of amazon.ca and to the home page of kobo.com, instead of directly to the book page, though. No Google involved in that one.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Actually, I *kind* of did, since the first website I used was "google" in the buy case and "a torrent search engine" in the pirate case.

So it's closer than not.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Maybe.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

If a company is going to hide the take-my-money link in with the social media clutter, it deserves great shame.

It also deserves sales lost to piracy. I wouldn't do it, but I've come to think of piracy as the only competition to media oligopoly. Piracy is far less a legal problem than it is, as others have said, a marketing and distribution problem. If you make it easier for people to give you money, piracy becomes far less of a problem for you.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

The one thing that loses the most ebook sales from me is not having a clear indication that they will be providing an epub that is not infested with DRM. I would be perfectly happy with my name watermarked into the file as piracy deterrence though.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Tor, at least, guarantees DRM-free ebooks.

[fearmeforiampink]

Reminds me of a band I saw at a Steampunk event I went to. I had a quick google; looked at their webpage, their facebook, and their twitter. I could listen to a few tracks of theirs on one or two of those, possibly download a couple 'em from one.

Could I find anywhere to buy their albums from? Could I fuck.

So, I went back to all that, tweeted at their official account (and possible also asked on the FB), "Hey, where can I give you money to get your music?"

Did I get any response? Nope.

Have they got any more money from me, have I listened to their music again? Nope, and not really (think I might've once or twice on youtube when other things reminded me.