Be careful when buying from Kobo

[lainey98]

I bought my Kobo in October, after borrowing one from the library. Thought I was going to really enjoy it... It took an hour to load a book from the Kobo site, then there was an error so I had to reload it. After all that I discovered the file from Kobo was corrupt! How great is that?!

The ereader itself was so frustrating to operate (compared to the Kindle), that I decided to return it. Chapters refunded it no problem, but when I call Kobo to get a refund for my $10 book, I was given the run around, saying they were not authorised to offer refunds and someone will call you back. Another call a few weeks later in November will more follow up, since the first call was not entered into their system correctly... still no follow up.

It's now December 23 with yet another call to find out what's up, and
Oh! Sorry! We don't offer refunds of any kind for any reason!

Are you serious?! I know it's only $10, but its the principal and the SERIOUS lack of customer service at Kobo that I find the most irritating!
So lesson learned - buyer's beware! If you buy something from their site, AND it doesn't work, too bad for you! They have your money and that's all they care about.

I will never encourage anyone to buy a Kobo

[ATDrake]

Welcome to MobileRead, lainey!

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with Kobo. But yeah, their CS has tended to suck as of late, and unexpected growth is no excuse for handling cases so badly as well as belatedly.

Perhaps you might like to contact your credit card company and file a dispute, if you haven't already. Services or merchandise not received or not as advertised or incompatible or something like that, especially if you also have a non-Kobo reader now.

I'm having a similar experience, in part involving one short story that was mispriced as a full-length (and full-cost) book (they've since fixed it in the listings) that also happened to be included within another book that was purchased on the same day.

I phoned up the helpline within 15 minutes of "purchase" once I realized the mistake and deleted said mistake from the Purchased list to the Trash in my account without downloading. And the phone lady was very nice and helpful and said "Sure we can cancel that, just let me set up a web ticket for the people who take care of these things".

A month later and no response to any of the follow-up status requests I sent once a week, they finally show up to say "oh noes, that's (gasp!) against company policy!!!!!" after I got fed up and turned the case over to my credit card company.

Guess it takes the prospect of the money going away to get them to respond.

Really, if the phone person got it wrong and they do an immediate apologetic "Sorry, it turns out we can't do that for these reasons" on the web ticket, that's one thing.

But to keep customers in limbo for weeks on end (months in your case), ignore all queries to at least check on how things are going, and only bother to reply in order to try and weasel out once it looks like they're going to be called to account…

I used to recommend Kobo all over the place as a great store to buy books from, what with the frequent coupon deals, among other things. And I suppose I still will, given that the coupon deals are pretty good.

But it'll come with a definite caveat emptor rider from now on and as for myself, I'll only get free books and perhaps use up the Chapters gift cards I've received when there's the rare 50%/$3 off coupon available, always provided they don't shut down my account once the CC chargeback goes through.

Or maybe I'd be better off spending them on the sales table in the physical stores, given that Kobo's website may be glitchy when applying them, and their CS response to errors is certainly not inspiring confidence.

[taming]

As others have said, CS has been slow and complaints/problems seemed to get dropped all too often. Their new support site http://getsatisfaction.com/kobo seems to quickly attend to these issues and seem especially quick to respond when there is an open ticket that has been ignored.

I have purchased 52 books from the Kobo store, and while I have had CS issues (all of which were resolved) none of them have been related to problems buying through the kobobooks.com store.

[MrsJoseph]

I originally had no intention of buying any DRM'd books, but while reading a blog post about a week ago I found out about a new sword & sorcery anthology (ok, this is my major weakness - I LOVED the Sword & Sorceress series edited by MZB as a kid).

I bought "Swords & Dark Magics" from Kobo since I couldn't find any DRM free copies. It took me over 3 hours to sync it to my reader since the Kobo app kept freezing and timing out. I would have loved to download it & side load it via Calibre but DRM prevents that (doesn't it?).

[pholy]

I believe others have mentioned using Calibre to sideload infected books successfully. You will not be able to do any format conversions, and I am not sure about updating the metadata.
And for sure you could download the epub version to ADE and use ADE to sideload the book.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

I originally had no intention of buying any DRM'd books, but while reading a blog post about a week ago I found out about a new sword & sorcery anthology (ok, this is my major weakness - I LOVED the Sword & Sorceress series edited by MZB as a kid).

The Sword & Sorceress anthologies are still going, now edited by Elizabeth Waters, Bradley's former assistant. Diana L. Paxson still seems to contribute, and lots of other MZB "standards" among the authors.

You can get 3 of them in DRM-free MultiFormat via Fictionwise, which seems to offer a 40%+ discount coupon every month or so which usually pops up in the Deals forum courtesy of any MR member still privileged to get the newsletter FW have mostly stopped sending out. The technically-expired 60% off Xmas week coupon here is still working as of right now.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

The Sword & Sorceress anthologies are still going, now edited by Elizabeth Waters, Bradley's former assistant. Diana L. Paxson still seems to contribute, and lots of other MZB "standards" among the authors.

You can get 3 of them in DRM-free MultiFormat via Fictionwise, which seems to offer a 40%+ discount coupon every month or so which usually pops up in the Deals forum courtesy of any MR member still privileged to get the newsletter FW have mostly stopped sending out. The technically-expired 60% off Xmas week coupon here is still working as of right now.

[ATDrake]

Oh, and if you're feeling extra-nostalgic, they've got some of MZB's own older works for sale, like Warrior Woman: The Adventures of Zadieyek of Gyre, which sounds right up your alley (apparently, this was MZB's response to Gor; can't go wrong trying it at at only $1.60 if the coupon's still working), a collection of her Darkover stories (same contents as the old paperback edition, as far as I can tell), plus various Darkover, S&S, and MZB Fantasy Magazine stories by some of her protégée authors.

There's an up to date list of all that's available at the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust website, and apparently they plan on putting more in DRM-free MultiFormat, which I encourage.

ETA: Hey, I can tame squirrels without the assistance of chair or whip now!

Guess I won't be needing this smiley any more -->

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Oh, and if you're feeling extra-nostalgic, they've got some of MZB's own older works for sale, like Warrior Woman: The Adventures of Zadieyek of Gyre, which sounds right up your alley (apparently, this was MZB's response to Gor; can't go wrong trying it at at only $1.60 if the coupon's still working), a collection of her Darkover stories (same contents as the old paperback edition, as far as I can tell), plus various Darkover, S&S, and MZB Fantasy Magazine stories by some of her protégée authors.

There's an up to date list of all that's available at the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust website, and apparently they plan on putting more in DRM-free MultiFormat, which I encourage.

ETA: Hey, I can tame squirrels without the assistance of chair or whip now!

Guess I won't be needing this smiley any more -->

*Runs off to download too many books at one time*

But before I go... Gor? You know I have a general idea what they are about but never read them. I've only gotten negative reactions from people who have read them. What about you?

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

But before I go... Gor? You know I have a general idea what they are about but never read them.

I've never read them either, and don't think I'd really care to, given what I've read about them. Not my style.

And it seems the quality really suffers as you go farther along, because the books more obviously become what TV Tropes calls Author Appeal Fetish Fuel kind of like Piers Anthony and his panty fetish, according to the people who've actually read that far. That Houseplants of Gor parody I linked above is said to be pretty spot-on.

But they are popular enough that there's an entire Gorean roleplaying lifestyle that's sprung up around them (mind you, apparently it's looked down upon by more mainstream BDSM practitioners because it lacks a safeword). e-Reads, which re-publishes them as e-books on Fictionwise (along with plenty of other sf/fantasy/mystery/romance backlist titles), has a blog post about them here (warning: NSFW because the Gorean lifestyle is supposed to involve customary nudity, along with the slavery, for women).

So it maybe it might be something you'd at least like to try once, just to know for sure.

But you might prefer to spend your money on Lillian Stewart Carl's (a friend of Lois McMaster Bujold) Sabazel series, for which the last couple of volumes are priced ridiculously cheap (you can get the entire set for maybe $5 on sale) and which the author says got its start in the Amazons anthology series edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, which may be a name you might recognize if S&S is your favourite genre, or Robert Adams' Coming of the Horseclans, which is apparently a minor classic.

Hope this helps.

ETA: I should mention that I've read neither Sabazel nor Horseclans yet, but I mostly trust the taste of other authors who've gotten involved with those settings in some way or another.

In fact, if you ever run across George Alec Effinger's hilarious Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson spoofs in a used bookshop, snap them up. They're well worth it.

[KPeoples]

Coupons always have some stipulations. I don't think its just with Kobo. Sometimes the publishers will not allow their books to be discounted. That's not on the part of Kobo but on the part of the book publisher which is usually on those newer books.

[taming]

Books that are subject to Agency pricing cannot be discounted. the Publishers that have that in place vary from country to country. You can generally tell if a book is agency priced on the Kobo site because only one price is listed for the book. If you get a discount code via their email list the publishers are generally listed. What you can't tell from that is the imprints that make up that publishing house.

In Canada, the Agency priced books on the Kobo website are published by HarperCollins UK, Hachette, Grand Central, Warner, and Little Brown.

[Readerlover2011]

I think if you ask everything clearly before your purchase, you won't experience what you have experienced. Once your money is given, it's hard to take it back.