Quote:
Originally Posted by Poppaea
I did so only once regarding ereaders at my local bookshop. The customers wanted a gift for their 70yr old mother and were afraid if anyone of them would be able to handle the software to upload books.
Also I had noticed that the salesperson was not learned enought to explain the difference between the screen technology of an Aluratek Libre and a Sony PRS650...
A couple of days later when I revisited the store the salesperson expressed her gratitude for the piece of knowledge she had gathered as these things were never properly explained to the staff and the training they had for the readers was scarce. Most bookshops still regard ereaders as unwanted competiton for their booksells and do not train their staff to sell them. Which is a shame because this particular shop has its own ebookshop and a happy customer will very likely buy there.
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Oh, I'm well aware that a lot of people in the bookstores just don't "get" the ereaders. I've seen a goodly percentage of staff that exhibit thinly veiled resentment or even hostility towards them. Silly, but there it is. You'd think that anything that got people reading more would make them happy, and that anything that made the book biz more sustainable for the future would inspire confidence.
I did say 90% of the time. You're the sort who's few & far between- you know what you're talking about and genuinely mean well. Most people who step in can only say half of that...
My favourite was the woman who was trying to dissuade a man with his 90 year old mom that she should not get one of our readers, and get a Kindle instead- because its incompatibility with the local library system was easy to "work around". Maybe for her- but what 90 year old gramma and her 70-something son wants to deal with working around that? The simpler the better.
Myself, I'm realistic enough to know the right reader isn't the same one for everyone. Last thing I'm going to do is pressure someone to get a reader that they're unsuited to. I do encourage people to go look up other readers and reviews if they're unsure. Most of the time, they come back to us. If they didn't, it wasn't meant to be and it's just as well.