I had a bunch of articles build up in my RSS feeds while I was away at Fiddle Tunes, but I’ve been working on getting caught up–and today on Dear Author, I see this post that reports, among other things, that B&N is pulling out of trying to sell ebooks in international markets. They’ll be pulling back to US and UK only.
The Digital Reader reports that B&N had expanded into international markets through Windows 8, and that now they’re pulling back on that. Sales will continue only in the US and UK markets.
Except that apparently B&N launched an updated Nook site that is significantly broken. The Digital Reader reported on this on the 2nd, detailing several very worrisome ways that the new Nook site is very badly broken.
And now, as of tonight when I tried to get at my Nook account data, I couldn’t even log in in Safari. When I tried to click on the “Sign In” link in the upper left hand corner of the revamped site, the page grayed out. What I THINK tried to happen here is that they probably tried to load a sign-in overlay, and that overlay is not loading. I’m about to check this out on other browsers to see where else it might repro. Given their track record of stupid problems on their website, though, I’ll lay you even money that it’ll work on Windows browsers and not on Mac ones. LET’S FIND OUT, said the web page tester.
If you’re a Nook customer, what this tells me is that if you haven’t already, you’d damn well better try to make backup copies of all your purchases with them as soon as you can. If you’re a Mac user, the Nook desktop Mac app still works in Yosemite–I haven’t gotten rid of my copy yet, though I’m only using it for purposes of downloading purchases, since, annoyingly, they’d already also removed the ability to download your purchases from the website.
And if you’re an indie author, be keeping a sharp eye on this and what it may mean for your sales on the Nook platform.
I gotta say, at this point I wouldn’t object very hard if B&N sold its customer base to Kobo. Sony apparently already did that when they pulled out of the ebook market. And I wouldn’t mind condensing the two biggest parts of my fractured ebook library.
But dammit, B&N, why’d you have to go and screw this up so badly? I so wanted you to hang in there.
ETA: I have just now confirmed that I cannot log into my B&N account on any browser except Internet Explorer on Windows. This is pathetic. I’m offended not only as a Nook customer, but also as a QA professional who tests web pages for a living. I mean honestly, who okays “inability to log into customer accounts on most of the major current web browsers” as an acceptable bug to push out to your production site?! Furthermore, the Digital Reader’s report on the site launch was a week ago. If this bug has been in production on the site for a full week, somebody on their engineering team needs to be fired.
FWIW, at least, Dara’s mucking around a bit and has discovered that if you are on Safari on the Mac and you have the Developer menu turned on, you can set your User Agent to pretend to be IE 8 or IE 9 and get it to work. I have confirmed this on my own laptop. So there’s a workaround for Mac users, at least.
ETA #2: I’m getting told by a few friends across the Net tonight that they can confirm ability to log in on non-IE browsers on Windows. But on the other hand, one fellow NIWA author reported that while she was able to log in via Chrome on Windows, she is reproducing the behavior I’m seeing on her laptop. I also note that at least twice when trying to hit the B&N index, I have triggered an error message in general rather than actually reaching the page. So just trying to hit the site at all appears to be chancy. And you may or may not be able to log in from the Sign In link.
Additionally, once I was actually able to log in on IE and get to my Nook library, I was able to confirm what the Digital Reader reported. You can do fuck all with any of the books in your library except archive or delete them. You can’t read them. You can’t download them. GoodEreader.com reports that B&N has been getting swarms of angry customer feedback about how you can’t even get at your past purchases, but I hadn’t realized there was an inability to get at samples either. Which, yeah. I can add a sample to my library via the website, but since I can’t actually read it on the site, that’s kinda useless, at least if I don’t actually happen to have my device with me.
I specifically have to jump over to my actual physical Nook to read the thing. I can at least confirm that a sample added to my library is downloadable and readable on the actual device, so that’s something.
ETA #3: Checking this morning, I’m finding I am able to log in via Safari on the B&N site. For now.
angelahighland.info 
Like, but really, dislike; the Nook hardware is good but yeah, this is a fail level which is hard to comprehend, and goddammit, Amazon needs epub competition.
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At this point I’m pretty much going to hope that Kobo will buy B&N’s customer base. This is _stupid_.
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I’m enjoying this post as I’m reading it on a Nook HD.
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Hell, I own _multiple Nooks_. I’ve got a Nook HD AND a Samsung Nook, and those are the 3rd and 4th Nooks I’ve bought. I _want_ B&N to succeed. But it bothers me both as a Nook customer _and_ as a QA professional that I can’t even freggin’ log into my customer account on their new site. o.O
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I mean honestly, do they have ANY QA PEOPLE AT ALL?
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Oh and this is fun: if I load their site up in Firefox on Linux, _I don’t even see a Sign In link_.
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Ah okay there’s a link finally. But same behavior as on Mac. I can’t even log into my account on Linux, either.
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I guess we know how many QA people are left over there.
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…… and yeah, I can’t even log in on Firefox on Windows, either. It apparently has to be Internet Explorer. Because fuck you if you’re running ANY OTHER BROWSER.
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Wow okay. So we’re looking at a website that works on approximately 12% of browsers. Nice.
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I can log on through Firefox on Windows. But I noticed you still can’t read any comic books online or on your Nook. It’s been like this for a long time. I’m surprised comic book publishers aren’t up in arms about this.
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They’ll let you buy a comic book. But reading what you purchased? That’s asking too much.
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And when you visit your Nook library on the website, they still display purchase buttons. It’s like they didn’t do any QA at all. The program managers must be in the basement, drinking.
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One of the other authors on the NIWA group is reporting she can get to her account via Chrome on Windows. So the connectivity issues I’m seeing right now MIGHT be just us. I’ll have to try this from work tomorrow and see if I can log in from there.
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But yeah, the Digital Reader links I’ve linked to report that they’ve broken ability to read your ebook purchases online, too. I can confirm this. Once I managed to log in on IE, and got to my ebook library, I saw what the Digital Reader site was talking about.
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It’s very iffy. I was able to read some of my ebook purchases online but not others. And of course, you can’t download epub files anymore from the site. So if the site goes down, you’re totally screwed.
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Yeah, they actually yanked ability to download your purchases some time ago, which did in fact piss me off at the time. >:|
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My most recent purchases I’ve been making a point of downloading via the desktop Mac app, which still works more or less, at least enough to let me pull purchases down to my computer and then slurp them into Calibre.
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It almost feels like B&N is actively trying to get me to switch to Amazon but I don’t want to for the same reasons as you.
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There’s no Windows app to pull down epubs?
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There’s a Windows B&N desktop app, yeah, but my primary personal computer is a Mac. (I also have Windows 7 on my older Macbook, but haven’t had to bother to use it as a means to get at my Nook library.)
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I’ve got downloaded copies of all my B&N purchases at this point, thankfully. Though at this point I am not anticipating I’ll be making any further purchases through them, either. o.O
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Interesting. I haven’t been able to find a B&N Windows app that will let me download my purchases anymore.
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Hrmm. I THOUGHT there was a Nook desktop app for Windows. I’m not seeing it linked to on the site anymore, though. They’ve probably backed off on it the same way they did the Mac desktop app. My surprise in this is SMALL.
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(That said I THINK I still have a Windows version of the desktop app hanging out on my Windows 7 install. I seem to recall I did actually install the desktop app there too.)
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Oh wow. I found it still on my PC. But when I try to download a purchase I haven’t already downloaded I get “We are experiencing technical difficulties at this time – please try again later. (Download: 2082)”. Lovely.
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Interesting. The downloads work for books, but not purchased comic books. Weird.
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So, basically, if you didn’t already download your ebooks you are completely hosed? Way to encourage piracy.
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Quite. Or hell, even “way to encourage people to go out and buy Kindles”. Amazon has a lot of strikes against them, but I’ll say this for them: they have this whole “selling you content and letting you get at it in a whole bunch of different platforms” thing down to a science.
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They don’t listen to their own staff reporting up on what customers say they want, or don’t want, or wish they had been told earlier (like member discounts not applying to Nook books) so why should they listen to mere customers? Corporate knows best in all things!
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Do you work for B&N? ‘Cause as someone who works in tech, I can imagine all too vividly how the site engineers must have been gritting their teeth with that website launch.
And yeah, it still disgruntles me that I can’t get a member discount on ebook purchases–that’s disgruntled me right out of the gate.
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At various times, yes. Not at present, but the last time was recent, and things were so different to how they had been run fifteen years ago that it was as if they were different companies sharing the same logo.
A huge change is that the managers are not being promoted up from the ranks but hired from outside — meaning they’re not “book people” any more, but tech and retail people. Another huge change is pushing “pushiness” over competence at anything — upsell, upsell, upsell, but customer service and data accuracy can go hang. The third is replacing books/music/films with gifts and toys that have a larger markup, even though people specifically come to B&N for physical copies of books, music, and films. “Go to the website” was what we were supposed to tell disappointed customers, and I thought this was a disaster — if they’re going to go online, why should they go to B&N, which was poorly organized, instead of to Amazon, with its far better search function and informative reviews?
But that brings me to the biggest change — what customers and employees say is overtly disdained, in favour of what Corporate pushes from HQ. They have experts! They know what works! Ignore what you read in the trade press, the suits in distant offices have the secret of making money! Ignore what the customers are telling you, as they walk out of the store empty-handed and angry! Trust authority and upsell more memberships!
Ignore the fact that customers are complaining about being armwrestled into buying a membership every time the walk in the door — oh, and don’t call them “customers” any more, that’s disrespectful! They’re “guests” now…but still try to sell them another membership, or a gift card if they already are members! And your performance will be docked points if you don’t sell more memberships than the previous day, even if every customer you had was already a member because saturation has been achieved.
It isn’t owned by the original founders, and it’s very obvious, and all the warning signs that Borders had are there, except Corporate doesn’t want to see it.
They’re far more obsessed with the idea that employees could be stealing books, than the fact that customers aren’t finding the books they want, even though their own numbers show that employees stealing non-book gift items like Sonic Screwdrivers is the tiniest bit of loss, proportionately, to anything else.
This is another huge change — but since the managers aren’t book people any more, who love books and want to share books and are there for the community and employee discounts, they don’t understand how the obsessive paranoia and lack of concern for data entry competence versus “steak knife” Glengarry Glen Ross sales goals is demoralizing — and also bad for profit.
If the customer can’t find their books because shelving isn’t getting done, and the clerks aren’t allowed to help them find it because “that’s not your job,” any more, if they’re told to order it online, if their memberships aren’t processed correctly so their discount card doesn’t work, if they find out after they’ve spent a lot to get it that the discount doesn’t work on the Nook that they were pressured into buying, then they’re not going to come back so that the clerks can pressure them into buying a gift certificate on top of everything else!
(Borders employees during the last days said they were being pressured to upsell their own annual member discount cards, even when the company was about to fold. None of this fills me with anything but sadness and frustration, because it used to be good, and it could have been better, but they turned to chasing the short-term penny and lost the long-term pound.)
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Argh, that should say “employees stealing books and non-book gift items is proportionately the tiniest loss to anything else, including customers stealing small but expensive gift items, like Sonic Screwdrivers, and the fact that the order entry system itself is outdated and confusing and makes it easy to get the wrong price on things unless you’re going slowly and carefully, but the understaffing means you have to rush because the lines are jamming up the store, and that’s another part of Corporate policy.”
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Oh god. Well, this all just sounds horrible and I am very sorry you’ve had to deal with that kind of a work environment. 😦 Many sympathies both for the engineering team who’s had to work on the website and for the staffers in the stores.
As a B&N customer (and I just go ‘wut?’ at this whole idea of calling a customer a customer being insulting), I have certainly noticed the uptick in non-book items in stores. And I’ve noticed the uptick on non-book stuff on marketing emails sent out, too.
But the B&N membership upsell rush is worrisome. So is the notion of clerks not being allowed to help customers find books anymore. I haven’t run into that in the B&N’s I usually go to–but I dunno, maybe this is because Seattle is a very book-heavy town? And if people here bail on going to B&N, we have quite a few other local options.
And it’s particularly worrisome that the incoming new managers aren’t book lovers. 😦
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Yeah, it isn’t ALL the stores that are packing in the Lego and large-scale comic figures at the cost of the AV sections and more books — but this is a city with a large toystore in the same plaza and a couple of stores that sell comic collectibles, including a dedicated comic book store, so the logic of it escapes me. “Make yourself distinct from your competition!” is Marketing 101, I thought. But there is no other new bookstore within a significant number of miles, and even more significant badly-jammed freeway driving (except for a Christian Bookstore with all that that entails), so that creates a vacuum when it comes to competition. (Except for Amazon.)
I’d be inclined to say, well, it’s just this one store with dysfunctional culture — but they’re a regional training centre, so this is clearly what Corporate has in mind for the foreseeable future. And “guest” is just the tip of the buzzword iceberg — they’ve got a whole non-intuitive private language of buzzwords that has replaced ordinary terms like “restock the shelves” which only create more stress among employees. And “push people into buying Nook readers” but also “don’t train anyone how to properly upload e-books” is just unreal, to me. (But it isn’t any less sensible than “push e-readers but don’t bother to have a decent website or e-reader interface,” either.)
It used to be a place where all the entry-level employees were former customers who were on a waiting list for openings and everyone loved working there, although there was a little bit of corporate BS even then, but nothing like now. It should be a warning to them that they can’t get people to stay, but I guess that Corporate has a policy of ignoring their Glassdoor reviews now, too.
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Yeah, what you describe sounds entirely like “strategy to make people order books from Amazon” rather than “strategy to distinguish yourself from your competition.”
No one tries to upsell me anything when I come into the B&N store in downtown Seattle–but as mentioned, we’re already a book-heavy culture here, and we’re also a geek-heavy culture. When I got my Samsung Nook, I had to only open my mouth long enough to make it clear that “yes, I DO actually understand the device, leave me alone and let me fiddle with it” to get the staffer to do exactly that.
But I know of at least one sizable B&N store that did close up here. And of the ones that remain, more and more floor space IS getting taken over by the toys.
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