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Enjoyed the commentary on the forum. As noted by the posters, our Rewards program is unique in that you can use Rewards to buy eBooks and get Rewards on the new titles you buy. While our Rewards are not often at 100%, they are frequently available at some level on many of our titles, this in addition to our regular discounts. People do roll them forward as described in this thread. We expect that to happen, although that is not the purpose of the 100% Rewards offers when we do them. The primary purpose of any Rewards program is to keep it "interesting" for our registered customers. As the one poster pointed out, this was only advertised to subscribers of our mailer and our RSS feed. We did not put out a press release or advertise this elsewhere.
Between the unique ability to "double-dip" on Rewards and the fact that we do not charge extra for transactions below $5, and our straight discounts (like some of our competitors), we end up, on average, at a lower total cost than anyone else in the typical annual market basket of eBooks when one buys from us on a regular basis.
Two other notes: The first poster commented that she did not expect a response until after the weekend. In fact, as noted by her in a later post, she received a response early Saturday morning since we, unlike most others, keep support open 7 days a week. Our support is very customer-focused and very responsive. We have thousands of testimonial emails to that effect. We do this because we know that downloading an eBook or a downloadable audio book across the universe of formats and devices is not always an easy task, particularly when someone gets a new device or after an update to one of the formats. It's impossible to make things work for every customer with the technologies available, but we try very hard.
And, yes, on programs this aggressive, we typically post the Rewards after the close of the program so that the program does not become an endless bonanza of free eBooks. Rewards Dollars are designed as Rewards and incentive, not to be the figurative equivalent of an iceberg hitting the Titanic, but instead to be rocket fuel to launch our customers more readily into the world of digital content. We expect to be around for a very long time supporting our customers and their bookshelves, and will continue to steer clear of icebergs. We were founded in part as a response to Amazon deleting over a hundred thousand customer bookshelves in 2005 and Barnes and Noble doing the same thing about 18 months earlier. Keeping customer bookshelves intact for the long run is a core part of our mission. The bigger challenge on bookshelves is to deal with changing part numbers from distributors and publishers that occasionally withdraw eBooks from circulation. This is one of the reasons, we are the only ebookstore currently taking product from three major distributors as well as direct from publishers. It often allows us to provide an eBook from an alternative source when one fails to continue to provide the title.
To all who took advantage of our recent 100% Rewards promotion, Thank you for choosing to shop with BooksOnBoard.
Kurt Johnson
BooksOnBoard
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