Before I left for a recent vacation, I wanted to top up my ebook library on my iPhone so I’d have some fresh reading material and didn’t have to carry a bunch of books in my luggage.
Stanza is a joy to use as an ebook reader on iPhone, but acquiring new titles is not such a fun experience. Tap on Stanza’s Online Catalog and instead of seeing one smooth interface with a searchable catalog of titles, you are presented with thirteen (!!) different vendors, each with their own list of books and separate buying processes. Publishers and vendors include O’Reilly Ebooks, Feedbooks, Random House Free Library, BooksonBoard eBook Shop, Fictionwise and others.
From a customer experience perspective, this is just idiotic. It would be like walking into a bricks and mortar bookstore, seeing all the books shelved according to publisher instead of genre/content and then having to go to a separate checkout counter for each different brand.
I had a look in the various catalogs, picked up some favourite classics for free from Feedbooks and Munseys, but then I tapped over to Fictionwise to see what they had on offer. Abhorsen, the third book in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy was available for US$7.99. A little steep on the price for an ebook edition of a title that’s been out for a couple of years, but Garth’s a great writer and I hadn’t read it yet so what the hell.
I tapped the “Buy now for $7.99″ button. Great. Got taken to a Safari page where the Fictionwise store is located. Okay. Entered my customer login details. So far so good. Arrived at shopping cart. EPIC FAIL.
I received a message that looked something like this:
ERROR: Due to the geographic location of your payment information, the eBook(s) marked below cannot be purchased because of geographic rights restrictions by the publisher. Please go back and remove then from your cart.
Do I really have to articulate the levels of stupid here? Firstly, trying to impose geographic rights boundaries on digital products is just inviting customer disenchantment. Sort out your rights and licences before you make your titles available to online retailers, don’t expect your customers to understand or care about why they can’t have the book they want to pay you perfectly good money to own. Secondly, if you really absolutely must prevent customers in different territories from purchasing a book, at least pay them the courtesy of providing that information up front instead of forcing them to walk through to the final stage of the purchase sequence before yanking the book out of their shopping cart.
I am sorry for Garth Nix, Garth’s publisher and Fictionwise who all miss out on income here. But mostly I’m sorry for myself as I will not be reading Abhorsen, at least for a little while yet.
One of the interesting things to look out for in Amazon’s recent purchase of Lexcycle, the company that developed Stanza, is whether Amazon can bring some of their substantial online retailing expertise to bear on all this confusion.
Kate Eltham is a writer and creative industries professional based in Brisbane, Australia. She is Chief Executive Officer of 
kate.eltham {at} gmail.com
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Had a similar experience after trying to play DVDs I bought while living in the UK on the new Xbox. Legitimately purchased DVDs, that I can’t play on my Xbox because of region coding. So we’ve had to plug the old DVD player back in!
I also had this nonsense with fictionwise. I had this, sorry we can’t sell you that nonsense trying to buy the third installment of a series I was reading. I bought the first two volumes from Fictionwise. I’m convinced they only started it after they were bought out by Barnes and Noble. By my reckoning, it took Barnes & Noble less than a month to ruin my favourite ebook seller. I will not be spending any more of my money jumping through fictionwise’s hoops.