Banned
Posts: 39
Karma: 6106
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Vancouver BC
Device: Many, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Pocketbook, Sony etc.
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The website in question had purchased a link from us, which we have promptly removed, thanks for letting us know. We also do sell links on our blog or on our website to help pay for our server fees, CDN and so on. Most companies we deal with are graphics design firms and so on. We in retrospect should be more careful in who we sell links to and will impose a mandatory investigation of all prospective companies who want to advertise on our website/forum or blog.
For Shop e-readers, many people do not have access to the the e-readers that most people in the USA enjoy and take for granted, the selection in the USA is virtually unparalleled anywhere.. Amazon does not even ship to most countries, shop e-readers bridges the gap between where you can get it and where you cannot. The gulf in price in places in Australia is huge where many people purchase e-readers from. For example a Kobo in Canada is about 149, in the USA its around 129, and you can get deals for as little as 99.99, in Australia Kobo wireless is around 189 to 229. Also allot of companies are only USA based, for example Barnes and Noble, they do not even take online orders from outside the USA, sure you can buy from Ebay at crazy fees, or you can buy from shop e-readers and have it delivered worldwide. No one is twisting your arm to buy from shop e-readers, but some people would rather have it in hand that day, and pay a bit more, then wait for long shipping times.
Also in terms of our technical support someone brought up we get sometimes 50 emails a day from people asking for help on their e-readers and tablets. From faulty rooting techniques to first time users not knowing how to setup their wireless network, how to use their device or problems with specific devices such as the Pandigital Novel. We then offered technical support for people who wanted one on one help to resolve their problems. I know this community is very tech saavy, but you are the exception and not the norm. Some people do not know enough to google their problems, visit a bunch of forums and find their answer out. Many people are busy with jobs, family, kids and don't want to wait on the phone with tech support, to get bounced around from tier 1 to tier 2 and then be told to call back later or they'll call you. We offer the technical support to solve problems soon, and many people pay for the service.
Our website and blog is our highest priority. We are very focused on news and reviews, previews, podcasts and shooting our own videos. We actually have in our hands the gadgets we review, such as the today's review of the Motorola Xoom. We are not into shady stuff after the fiasco of a shady webmaster and his cronies. We have learned from our mistakes and do not host anything on our servers that is not legit. We are even Proudly Canadian based and Canada located for our servers, we certainly would not be if we had anything to hide.
We want to apologize to anyone that might have been offended by past deeds beyond our immediate control, but we implore you all to judge us by what we have evolved to, not from. I know personally that I am saddened that our reputation was tarnished via the actions of the initial webmaster we had hired to design our infrastructure, and while we labored super hard on the blog and developing content there was shady actions via the coding and outsourced team. Again, once these details came into the light we immediately took action, removed all of the offending content along with the public domain books and have not looked back.
Obviously not everyone will be understanding or appreciate where we are coming from or even believe what we have stated here, and that's fine. You cannot please anyone and we are tremendously aware of this. It is the internet after all, but we felt like we wanted to further elaborate on our position and necro-post an old thread to let people know where we are coming from.
Simply put, it would have been easier to just ignore forum posts like these and duck our head into the sand and pretend like none of this happened. We felt like we owed the community at large to try and explain our position.
In closing, we appreciate everyone's support over the last year, it has been a learning curve in learning how to do the back-end stuff that in the past was handled for us, now we are firmly in control of our own destiny. We work VERY hard writing 3 to 9 new articles a day and have a daily writing staff of around 5 people. We are working to be the authority on reviews and hands on videos. After all, we are content makers, not content takers. If you even search our name goodereader on this forum you will see 98% of all posts have to do with our articles and news that people found interesting.
I don't want this thread to turn into an inquisition or us having to defend our current position to every single person who comments, but we will check in from time to time to see if anyone has anything interesting to say.
Last edited by goodereader; 03-04-2011 at 08:52 AM.
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