I dropped my membership to the Book of the Month Club because their failure to supply ebooks, but I’ve always kept my membership to the Science Fiction Book Club. I don’t hardly buy anything from them, but it always been a good way to keep abreast of what’s new.
The latest email I got from them said “Ebooks Available”, so I took a look. All they did was to provide a link to eBooks.com. That’s it. As a matter of fact the email even says:
Any orders placed from eBooks.com will be processed by and subject to the eBooks.com website terms and conditions. eBooks.com accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Diner’s Club International. eBooks.com purchases do not apply to your book club membership.
They don’t get it. I guess I’ll finally drop them as well.
That is just crazy on their part. ESPECIALLY with genre fiction that has a dedicated fan base publishers/book clubs should be catering to the e-book market. I’m no romance novel fan, but Harlequin has really led the way in catering to its readers with ebooks to great postiive financial results.
Insane.
Makes sense to me. Since the 1950’s fan zines this enclave of futurists intends to possess the future. The least desired relation is cloud readership. Book Clubs also rely on a retail commerce of physical commodities. I doubt there are e-book clubs.
The reason for this is that they make their money on their “Shipping and HANDLING” fees. With eBooks there would be no justification for this and they would not make as much money.
re: shipping and handling fees… A truer word was never spoken. Traditional paper publishing companies just don’t seem to realize that their cash cow is not responding to CPR. A swift digital transplant would save it, whilst retaining a piece of the paper realm… but it would be in immediate danger again if publisher eBook prices continue to skyrocket.
Yes, I was looking for science fiction for our Kindle and this company has always had such great books. However, I am also dropping them as a source because electronic books are the thing that is great – no killing of trees and paper paper paper, etc. It is much quicker to get to read the book as well since no shipping. Why don’t they get with the program? They must not want to stay in business against such giants like Amazon. Oh well, their loss.
I’m preparing to drop my account after nearly 30 years.
SFBC retrograded their previously functional website to some kludgy template that can’t process simple search requests nor allow one to easily edit payment information.
Nor can their customer service handle straightforward problem resolution such as, “I have money. You have books I want. Why can’t you understand your stupid Payment Options form has stuck my middle initial in the Surname field and would permit me to change it!”
It’s crazy. The site operated smoothly last year. Why pay someone to **break** your customer interface?
JJB