Friday, November 2, 2012

11/2/2012 MY LOCAL BOOKSTORE DIDN’T KICK DOWN MY DOOR AND TAKE MY BOOKS AWAY



     Just read an article about someone having their Kindle wiped and their account canceled randomly by Amazon and not being able to talk to Amazon about the issue because they don’t discuss these things besides a vague statement of why they did what they did. The crazy thing is this goes on all the time and is just one example of what you have to accept in being an ereader user with one of the bigger companies.
     These types of situations are holding back digital publishing as a whole. And this is one of the reasons I only read ebooks on my computer or on Mar’s nook. I’m not buying one until the ereader manufactures back off this stance were we don’t really own the things we buy and they can delete at well. I know there are lesser known ereaders that are better in this regard but again, you are buying a lesser known piece of technology and that can always be a risky choice to make.
     But why do we accept this sort of thing? Part of it is because we care more about the status of owning a name brand device more than the quality and user friendliness of said device. That type of thing is good enough for people who are ready to toss around good money for bad tech, but for the rest of us it just puts you in a bad position, leaves you buying something you know is flawed and purposely so or you can choose something that maybe total crap with not much course for troubleshooting when issues come up.
     These examples as well as with a lot of others are what comes into the conversation whenever I talk to people about buying and reading more ebooks. As a publisher of ebook projects it’s really frustrating to see this stuff day in and day out. In a lot of ways this type of thing frustrates me more than piracy. The main things that get up my ass about piracy are that most people just won’t admit that it’s stealing.
      What companies like Amazon are doing I think hurts the epublishing industry just as much a what pirates do because it shines negative lights on the platform overall. It pushes away people who might be thinking about making ereaders part of their reading experiences.
     Whenever I release a new project people always ask me what format, what devices can they read the materials on; which is the main reason, besides ease of publishing, that I moved from LuLu to Smashwords. Smashwords allows me and my readers so many more ways to find and read my work. They can read it on a computer or an ereader. I also enjoy the fact that when someone downloads something from Smashwords to their device they don’t have to worry about it being deleted later for some reason.
     It might be really stupid, Hell it is really stupid but I don’t give a shit if my work is ever sold in any Nook or Kindle or Apple store until they start treating their customers with a little respect. As a publisher and a writer that disrespect of the reader is also a disrespect of me and doing so is saying fuck you to the reader and my message back is fuck you Amazon.
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