Smashwords Gifting Feature...finally!

[mish]

Looks like Smashwords has finally gotten up to speed on the ebook gifting front and has a feature in beta now. About dang time!

ETA: There is now a Give as a gift icon below the Add to Cart icon on each book page.

http://www.smashwords.com/about/gifts

[Falbe Publishing]

I'm happy about this too. I've been emailing my readers all day to let them know about it. For some time I've been wanting a versatile gifting capability for my ebooks. Unless I get a computer science degree, I doubt I'll ever be able to add this to my own websites, but now SW has given me a place to refer gift buyers. I've been wanting this at SW because it offers multiple formats and international reach.

[mish]

And they did it just in time for Christmas, except a lot of Smashwords users probably won't discover it until after Christmas.

I've been wanting this feature for doing blog giveaways for a while now. Of course, it finally shows up now that I am transitioning off the blog. Oh well, it's great that readers will now be able to gift a book too, not just authors.

Now if they could just improve the horrible search engine, catalog, categories, tags, and make the "Library" feature actually useful...baby steps, baby steps.

[hajhouse]

Mish --- glad to hear that you like our new feature. We would love to hear from you what it would take to make the Library useful to you or how you think the categories, etc could be better. The limited amount of developer time we have means we can't implement every good idea right away but we do take people's suggestions very seriously.

[carpetmojo]

Originally Posted by mish

And they did it just in time for Christmas, except a lot of Smashwords users probably won't discover it until after Christmas.

I've been wanting this feature for doing blog giveaways for a while now. Of course, it finally shows up now that I am transitioning off the blog. Oh well, it's great that readers will now be able to gift a book too, not just authors.

Now if they could just improve the horrible search engine, catalog, categories, tags, and make the "Library" feature actually useful...baby steps, baby steps.

Fussbudgit ...............

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by hajhouse

Mish --- glad to hear that you like our new feature. We would love to hear from you what it would take to make the Library useful to you or how you think the categories, etc could be better. The limited amount of developer time we have means we can't implement every good idea right away but we do take people's suggestions very seriously.

Well, I've wriitten several times about how Smashwords, which happens to be my favorite ebook buying place, fails me and other readers. And saying you have a limited amount of developer time available is just another way to say "tell us what we are doing wrong, but we already have our excuses lined up to not make any improvements."

Rather than go through the list yet again, I refer you to my An American Editor blog articles Smashwords: Will It Ever Get Better Filtering?, Smashwords: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, Finding an eBook to Buy, not primarily about Smashwords but recounting the difficulty in finding a book on Smashwords, and Finding the Needle in a Haystack of Needles (II): eBooksellers.

In the 2 years I have complained about the exceedingly poor filtering and consumer experience at Smashwords, including in comments made to articles written by Mark Coker at places like Teleread, not a single improvement in the experience has occurred.

The reason Amazon does so well and no other ebookseller currently comes close is that Amazon puts the consumer experience at the head of the list and actually devotes some effort to improving it. Smashwords should be nipping at the heels of Barnes & Noble and Amazon but isn't because of its seemingly either inability or unwillingness to do what should be simple programming tasks.

[TheSFReader]

Thanks a lot Smashwords for having implemented gifting. It was definitely a missing feature.

Yep about the "Library" : No way to organize/filter once ebooks are bought.

And my own "Smashwords critics" post : http://readingandraytracing.blogspot...-dont-you.html