Quote:
Originally Posted by skinmaan
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Just doing a quick filter, of the 7,514 titles available on Tantor.com, 6,599 of them are available for download. They typically have sales on downloads for $6.99. I see 355 titles available at that price. They have been offering 1 free download a month, a practice they had given up for a while until last year. They had their annual $4.99 download sale for Black Friday. I don't see much of a drop-off from them, if any.
<snip>
|
I based my thoughts about downloads available from doing a spot-check, as I mentioned. And that was just of titles that appeared on their homepage. Of course, that would never pass as a scientific study.
The bare minimum that I can say is that Tantor certainly is not touting their download selection. For example, I am on their mailing list. Going back to at least 6/13/16, I have not received a single email from them even mentioning downloads except for several free ones that they were offering--Edgar Allan Poe, Prince Edward Island, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
et al. (I do not delete Tantor messages, or move them to trash; I checked my trash just to be sure that I hadn't sent one or more there--I hadn't).
So, I haven't received any notice of any sale on downloadable books from them since well over half a year ago, at least. Or maybe I just don't remember seeing, the $4.99 Black Friday download sale in an email from them. I could go through my inbox and trash again to make sure that I didn't miss an email from them about it, but I'm not going to quibble about that--there are bigger fish to fry. I can start checking the O.P. of this thread for those sales, and at least be aware of them in the future that way. But, I shouldn't have to do that--I'm on Tantor's mailing list! There may be an issue with my account email settings with them, and I will check that as soon as reasonably possible.
When you go to
their homepage, it is
far from obvious how to find their downloadable books. I finally found a way to get to a webpage with the 355 that you mentioned (I suppose). I navigated away from that webpage to look around for things elsewhere. When I came back to the homepage, I couldn't remember or find the link that I had used earlier to get to the 355 downloads--that's how obscure the path to them is (I got back to the webpage by clicking the back arrow several times; I bookmarked the webpage so I could find it again (strangely, Tantor described the webpage's bookmark as having "Literary Classics," and that's, in fact, largely what they are. They looked like old books, classics or not. Where are the other categories? There is a filter on the left side with different categories, but almost all of them were old books (now, that's not all bad--sometimes it's hard to find a good narration of an old book, even some classics))).
I went back to the homepage and, even though this is not how I usually want to conduct a search, I clicked on "categories." I definitely wanted to see what they've got on sale for $6.99. Again, not a scientific study, but I started spot-checking the history category. They were filtered by "bestseller" (the first few pages didn't look like they had bestsellers to me, although some may be). I spot-checked literally 30 or more books, over several pages, and none of them offered a download. Finally, after about 9 or 10 pages, books did appear with a download option, and in great amounts!
What a mess. About the only thing that Tantor's website is good for (as far as downloadable products as concerned), IMHO and as far as I'm concerned, is if you are looking for a specific book, you can probably find if there is a download option for it by using the "search store" feature, then going to the product's webpage and checking "Buy Now." I don't know how anyone could browse, on their site, just the downloadable books. You may be able to tell me of a way, but even if you can, I don't know how anyone would be able to consider it easy to find out how to do it. That's ridiculous, and not a problem that I've seen with the websites of other audiobook retailers.
I'm not going to sit down and count them, but, frankly, I can't believe that Tantor has only 7,514 titles. If so, I can't believe that 6,599 of them are available for download. For that matter, I can't believe that Tantor has 6,599 downloadable titles, regardless of how many total titles that they have.