Barnes & Noble Redesigned Their Website

[library addict]

Sometimes Google Play is cheaper. This year they've had a few coupons that could be used on any book over a set price ($5 off over $5, $3 off over $3, etc.) including Agency prices books. And they often have sales for strange amounts (which Amazon then usually price matches).

What I don't like about Google Play is that you cannot sort the search results. So even though they do a much, much better job than Amazon of bringing up books only by the specific author when you search by author name, there's no ability to sort by release date or alphabetically. Not a problem for fairly new authors, but for those with more than 15 or 20 books it makes it difficult to find things unless you know the title.

Ironically Kobo is actually easiest to search by author name. Amazon always returns books by multiple authors even when you put the author name in quotes. Amazon used to be so easy to search for books on, but their results have become very muddled in the past few years.

BAM (Books-a-Million) sometimes has agency priced books for less. But that's very hit-or-miss.

[Patchicat]

Thank you for all of your replies. I dislike and seriously distrust Google. I purchased an older Kindle so that I could download the books I purchased from Amazon rather than depend upon their reading app. I don't trust Amazon not to break the old Kindle for PC app and force everyone into the newer version. I have Calibre and keep up with Apprentice Alf's extremely useful tools. Nor do I do anything Apple, for reasons with which I will not bore anyone. I will be checking out the other suggestions, however. Some of them I knew about; others are new to me.

[fjtorres]

If your older Kindle is old enough you may be able to download the ebooks from the Manage Your Kindle page and feed that to Alf's tools and skip Kindle for PC. Used to be doable. Haven't tried it in a while.

[fjtorres]

Okay, I was curious to see how much worse B&N could've made Nook.com and, well...
It's not as bad as the lead standard, the S&S crashsite.
It is, however, almost as slow. Lots of extra clicks to get anywhere. And since it's slow...
But it didn't crash. Gotta count for something, right?

Of course, being B&N, the BPH new releases wallpaper the ebook home page and front and center, literally is Patterson's "It's not really an anti Bezos screed, really!" THE STORE.
With a review rating of 2.5 stars.
I had to dig through three clicks to find out the big brand release has only 5 reviews. The only useful one panned the ending.

At Amazon the rating is slightly lower (no shock) at 2 stars. Only 24 revews so the 5 reviews at Nook are actually more than one would expect from their ebook share.

Just one book but I sort of expected a noticeably better reception from Nook stalwarts.

Anyway, yup, the site is still marginal.
But it didn't lock up or crash, which it used to do.
Stability improvements are always good, right?

[gbm]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Okay, I was curious to see how much worse B&N could've made Nook.com and, well...

snip

But it didn't crash. Gotta count for something, right?

snip

Anyway, yup, the site is still marginal.
But it didn't lock up or crash, which it used to do.
Stability improvements are always good, right?

Did we visit the same store?

Spoiler:

{ "isSecureLogin": true, "isSoftLoggedIn": true, "bnLoggingEnabled": false, "signInHtml": " Welcome, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<\/a>", "accountLinksHtml": "My Account<\/a>\n

    \n
    Manage Account <\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
    Order Status <\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
    My NOOK <\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
    Wishlists <\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
    Address Book <\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
    Payments <\/span><\/a><\/li>\n
    Sign Out<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>", "cartQuantity": "0", "email": "xxxxxxxxxxx" }

bernie

[fjtorres]

I dunno.
I don't look at the store code just how it performs compared to other sites.
Was your experience faster or crashier?

[gbm]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

I dunno.
I don't look at the store code just how it performs compared to other sites.
Was your experience faster or crashier?

That is what was displayed after logging in.

So I would say that was a crash.

bernie

[BearMountainBooks]

I tend to buy at Kobo or google play. I agree with others that kobo is an easier place to shop than google play for the most part. You might also try author's websites. Some have their own stores. And you already know about Smashwords.

[Difflugia]

I buy indies from Kobo and Agency books from eBooks.com.

Google makes (used to make? I guess I haven't checked lately) changes to the underlying epub code that occasionally break the formatting, so they're sort of a last resort for me.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Difflugia

I buy indies from Kobo and Agency books from eBooks.com.

Google makes (used to make? I guess I haven't checked lately) changes to the underlying epub code that occasionally break the formatting, so they're sort of a last resort for me.

From the few I've de-DRMed and checked (this is a couple of years ago), they put in markup that appears to have something to do with syncing reading position between 'Flowing Text' ('ePub') and 'Original Pages' ('PDF') modes (at least when book offers this option). There may be other things they put in for the Maps lookup feature, or other things. I have not had issues converting ePub to mobi despite this. It might mess things up for ePub applications, but I haven't checked that. With the right tooling it is probably pretty easy to identify and remove the 'extra' markup.