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Oh, geeze, teach me to read carefully! I missed that they were considering banning serialized novels.
And reading the first post more carefully, I can see why people were angry, at least about the concept of paying for a pig in a poke.
HOWEVER, if somebody offers a novel for a buck a chapter, and it's a hundred chapters, it's not like you can't figure out that it isn't what you like after the very first chapter. The length is listed on every story on Smashwords, and there are plenty of bad short stories - so any time you pay a buck for something 5000 words or so, you are taking a gamble.
If you actually got "tricked" into buying a dozen chapters that way.... Um. Why did you keep buying them if you didn't like them?
I can support clarifying and setting rules - especially in terms of people knowing exactly what they're getting - that would go along with their other rules about certain non-fiction restrictions that keep out the pure hucksters.
But other than proper labelling, how is selling something as a serial worse than any other bad writing that gets posted on Smashwords? There isn't an editorial board. The first thing you buy is a gamble. If you don't like the first, you don't buy the rest.
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