Well, not too long after this great experience with Amazon, I bought a NuvoMedia RocketBook. This is one of the first generation of “electronic books” that lets one carry a paperback book-sized device that holds the content of several books. They all are extremely simple devices with a RFM interface. I really like the RocketBook, and I’m sure I’ll rant about it at length soon.
NuvoMedia has made an exclusive deal with Barnes and Noble, and the only place you can purchase RocketBook content is on the Barnes and Noble website. Happily, at the time I purchased the RocketBook they also offered a dozen or so ‘classic’ texts (ones with expired copyrights, you know) which you can download for free to get you started.
First you register your RocketBook at NuvoMedia’s website, and receive a user ID and a public key with which your books will be encrypted (so nobody else can read the books you buy). Then you go to the Barnes and Noble site and register there as a customer to buy books. Curiously, at Barnes and Noble, you don’t need to enter your RocketBook user ID.
Once you buy an electronic RocketBook book on Barnes and Noble, some sort of EDI (electronic data interchange) takes place behind the scenes, between Barnes and Noble and NuvoMedia, and you get to download your book, encrypted just for you.
I tried to order several of the “free” books, just to test out the process, and got an error from Barnes and Noble. The error said that I hadn’t registered my RocketBook (which I had), or I had registered with a different name than I did at Barnes and Noble (which I did not). In effect, they were saying that the EDI step failed mysteriously.
Encouraged by my success at Amazon, I fired off an email to support@barnesandnoble.com and support@nuvomedia.com. Once again, within an hour, I got an automated response from both of them.
I waited four weeks, and neither company communicated again. This is not smart, since I can’t buy until they fix the problem. Meanwhile the previously free books at Barnes and Noble now cost $4 each. What both companies are telling me is that they don’t really care enough about me as a customer to even make sure I can conduct business with them.
So, four weeks later, I tried to conduct another purchase, and failed again. This time I fired off email to every email address I could glean from the website for both NuvoMedia and Barnes and Noble. This time the outside PR firm (Switzer Communications) for NuvoMedia contacted an executive at NuvoMedia who assigned an individual to look into my problem. While it’s still not fixed, after a dozen messages, and while I still can’t buy, at least I have the email address of a real person.
Barnes and Noble still has not responded to either request for support.
It’s hardly fair to compare this with my Amazon.com experience.
