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Originally Posted by jenifer.ezread
My goal is to give users a "small bookstore" experience. Yes, you're temporarily going to be paying more. But any intern or staffer working at our eBookstore can talk to you for at LEAST three hours about the significance of hair-color in "Less Than Zero". I can recommend a "next favorite book" to any stingy reader.
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I can deal with paying a bit more for more personalized service. (Two-and-a-half times more? No, but I wasn't going to pay $10 either, so that's pretty much a null issue for me. $6.50 is my current limit for novels; between Baen, Samhain and Smashwords, I'm not hurting for reading material.)
I don't expect to buy *anything* from ezread.com because I don't buy DRM, and the store is either entirely DRM'd, or doesn't bother to indicate what isn't. I don't buy from any store that requires ADE to read its books.
But if that weren't my hangup--there's no reviews on the site. No publisher info, no filesize, no date of publication. Every page has the same title. The advanced search engine doesn't tell you when you've picked an empty category, and you can only search for one at a time. Books don't show what category/ies they're sorted into. Can't search by price or format. Can't even open a book, then click on the author's name to buy more from the same person.
Individual guides to good books are a great thing... but you can't run an online international business by guiding each customer personally to what they want to buy. It's currently set up so people almost *must* interact with the staff to find what they want.
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I do struggle with managing the forums because honestly, I don't understand what is being asked.
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1) When will the *hardware* be available again? ... and in the meantime, what's the holdup? Are they being phased out--should people who want an EZReader give up & go looking for something else? (I know these are questions you might not know the answers to, or be unable to answer. But that's a lot of what's being asked here.
2) Is Astak going to drop support here in favor of publicity on Facebook? (You've answered that: yes. They/you aren't pulling out entirely, but you're not planning on maintaining an active presence here, not planning on taking part in the discussions of "what makes a good ebook store" and "which PDFs work on what readers" threads. Which is fine; we just wanted to know. Ignore the grumbling; it isn't likely to have any notable impact on sales.) (Not maintaining a presence here is likely to have an impact; the number of complaints, and whether or not you respond directly to them, isn't.)
The rest is general device chatter that you're not expected to participate in. People stating what they like or don't like about their EZReaders aren't looking for official company interaction; support would be nice, but it's not like Amazon sends reps to random "My kindle broke and that sucks" or "which ebook reader should I buy?" threads around the web. *Not* providing that level of support is, at the moment, sharply noticeable because RobertB was involved in those threads--but that's not what's expected.