BooksOnBoard is not on board

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This past week­end I tried a new ven­dor of elec­tron­ic books: Book­sOn­Board. I found the store in the Stan­za app on my iPad, which so far I believe is the best eread­er soft­ware avail­able. Stan­za includes in-app links to sev­er­al sources of elec­tron­ic books, and Book­sOn­Board is the first choice listed.

My first impres­sion of Book­sOn­Board is not favorable.

Cre­at­ing an account was sim­ple and quick. Book­sOn­Board takes Pay­Pal, which was a require­ment this week­end since some of my mon­ey was tied up being trans­ferred from my Pay­Pal account to my bank. Accept­ing Pay­Pal was a crit­i­cal fac­tor in my deci­sion. Though usu­al­ly I use a cred­it card for this sort of pur­chase, I appre­ci­ate the choice.

How­ev­er, when I tried to down­load the book I paid for it fails every time. Inside Stan­za, an error not list­ed in Book­sOn­Board­’s help sec­tion appears: «Failed to down­load and import ‘Down­load’: unsup­port­ed URL.» I hoped that at least I could down­load the book in a desk­top brows­er, then install the book man­u­al­ly. But no. The «down­load» but­ton on my book­shelf on the down­loads an XML called «Download.acsm»—the file exten­sion I believe means Adobe Con­tent Serv­er Mes­sage but con­sid­er­ing the cir­cum­stances I notice that it is an ana­gram of the word scam.

An attempt to use Book­sOn­Board­’s cus­tomer sup­port sys­tem revealed that they lim­it their sup­port requests to 800 char­ac­ters. I appre­ci­ate brevi­ty as much as the next guy, but real­ly: if a cus­tomer is try­ing to explain what it is he or she is dis­sat­is­fied with, telling the cus­tomer to shut up in the mid­dle of typ­ing the griev­ance is stu­pid­ly customer-unfriendly.

The response that came from Book­sOn­Board indi­cates that although they used to dis­trib­ute books that worked with Stan­za, that instead they have con­vert­ed every­thing over to work only with the Blue­fire read­er. The only option for read­ing a book from Book­sOn­Board is sup­pos­ed­ly an iPhone/i­Pad/i­Touch-only soft­ware pack­age that was released less than two months ago.

It’s doubt­ful that is true, but it is Book­sOn­Board­’s offi­cial line. I don’t real­ly have any inter­est in installing Blue­fire; I did­n’t choose Book­sOn­Board just to get tied to a sin­gle read­er soft­ware. If I can’t read on any device I want, I may as well buy Kin­dle books.

Blue­fire Read­er’s own lit­er­a­ture toss­es around words like «open­ness» and «free­dom». It’s not fair to blame Blue­fire for Book­sOn­Board try­ing to force its cus­tomers into a sin­gle solu­tion. Blue­fire appears to be a read­er for ePub and PDF files with Adobe DRM. Their web­site says they sup­port those for­mats because peo­ple should be able to move their doc­u­ments from device to device. Clear­ly, fail­ure to sup­port desk­top sys­tems, Android devices and oth­er eRead­ers and smart­phones has lit­tle to do with Blue­fire and every­thing to do with Book­sOn­Board. I know there are read­ers for Adobe-DRM ePub and PDF files for Mac­in­tosh, PC and Android. That Book­sOn­Board won’t allow down­load­ing of a pur­chased book except to Blue­fire is rea­son enough to stay away from them.

Published by splicer

12 Replies to “BooksOnBoard is not on board”

  1. Book­sOn­Board is Awe­some
    I now have thou­sands of dol­lars worth of grad­u­ate school texts and otehr books that I can ref­er­ence on my iPhone and iPad.  I could not do that on any­one’s app or read­er until Book­sOn­Board made that pos­si­ble last week.  How awe­some is that!

    While I think I can under­stand the con­fu­sion, many of the state­ments in Splicer’s blog are sim­ply incor­rect. I’ve been a Book­sOn­Board cus­tomer since they were the first to make eBooks avail­able to buy on iPhones a few years ago. Last week, I switched to Blue­fire on my iPhone and iPad. And I remain a hap­py cus­tomer – hap­pi­er than ever because of the new Blue­fire option. 

    Blue­fire is NOT a lim­i­ta­tion, but an addi­tion­al choice Book­sOn­Board has made avail­able to help get around lim­its imposed by the pub­lish­ers and the book indus­try. Book­sOn­Board and Blue­fire are both part of the solu­tion, NOT the prob­lem. Book­sOn­Board ebooks still work on many oth­er readers.

    In a world where we are get­ting more and more shoved on us by mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar com­pa­nies with big mar­ket­ing machines, I can’t sit still and watch a small inde­pen­dent com­pa­ny that has been so good to me over the years get hurt by incor­rect infor­ma­tion. The world of mul­ti­ple eBook for­mats can get baf­fling and the path is some­times very wind­ing, but Book­sOn­Board has been a bea­con on that path, not an obsta­cle. They have had the courage to sup­port mul­ti­ple for­mats and read­ers at the risk of con­fu­sion among new­bies to meet the needs of thou­sands and thou­sands of cus­tomers like me.

    Book­sOn­Board may be the only ebook retail­er left that offers choice. They are offer­ing solu­tions to some of the pro­pri­etary games oth­er eBook stores play on us to force us to buy from their stores only. Book­sOn­Board is almost the only ebook store left that gives the cus­tomer choic­es. Every­one else forces you to use their apps or read­ers. BooksOnBoard’s books can be read on many dif­fer­ent read­ers, includ­ing both Stan­za and Blue­fire. Splicer appar­ent­ly pur­chased a secure Adobe for­mat book which Stan­za – owned by Ama­zon for the last 18 months – does not work with. Ama­zon has lim­it­ed Stan­za so that it doesn’t read the indus­try stan­dard secure Adobe ePUB, prob­a­bly to force peo­ple to go to Kin­dle. That dra­mat­i­cal­ly lim­its title selec­tion. Book­sOn­Board did not cre­ate that prob­lem. Ama­zon cre­at­ed it along with Barnes and Noble. Ama­zon pur­chased Stan­za to con­trol a ris­ing com­peti­tor to its Kin­dle plans and Barnes and Noble bought the eRead­er for­mat used on Stan­za at about the same time to con­trol and lim­it avail­abil­i­ty of the for­mat to facil­i­tate its own pro­pri­etary for­mat – which, with­out extreme tech­ni­cal manip­u­la­tion, works only on its own Read­er soft­ware and ebook read­ing device. Again, Book­sOn­Board did not cre­ate this prob­lem, but offered me ways to avoid this pro­pri­etary trap.

    Book­sOn­Board, in fact, did me and tens – or even hun­dreds — of thou­sands like me a HUGE favor in intro­duc­ing secure Adobe for­mat books on the iPhone and iPad for the first time a week or two ago. I can now read Book­sOn­Board ebooks on both Stan­za and Blue­fire. And there are appar­ent­ly sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand more eBooks I can buy for my iPhone and iPad than I could before Blue­fire. The lim­its here are not those of Book­sOn­Board, but of the pub­lish­ers and the for­mats available. 

    You can read Book­sOn­Board books in Adobe Dig­i­tal Edi­tions, Stan­za, Blue­Fire, Nook, and more on PCs, Macs, iPhones and iPads. And I do, as do many of my Face­book friends. The blog­ger here is just wrong in his state­ments that you can­not. Blue­fire is an option for iPhones and iPads that allows for a for­mat that you could not open on these devices before. I have hun­dreds of eBooks in secure Adobe for­mat that I used for grad­u­ate work that were not avail­able in the Stan­za eRead­er for­mat. I have been forced to read these on my desk­top because no one had a way for me to read them on either my iPhone or my new­er iPad. Now, I am able to read these texts in Blue­fire Read­er on both iPhone and iPad by sim­ply down­load­ing them from my Book­sOn­Board book­shelf. And I can still read them on my lap­top in Adobe Dig­i­tal Editions.

    I can­not read these books in Stan­za, how­ev­er, because they are sim­ply not avail­able in the out­dat­ed eRead­er for­mat. (If they were, I could read them in Stan­za .) While there is under­stand­able con­fu­sion dur­ing tran­si­tion for Stan­za users – I was among the first – the result is a bet­ter deal for all of us. Premised on my expe­ri­ence with them, Book­sOn­Board and its sup­port team – for years, the best in the ebook busi­ness – will clar­i­fy and fix any ongo­ing issues and con­fu­sion. Although they may, in fact, under­stand­ably have dif­fi­cul­ty work­ing their way through an 800+ word sup­port request which frankly sounds more like it was a man­i­festo than a sup­port question.

    To go back to my open­ing comment:

    I now have thou­sands of dol­lars worth of grad­u­ate school texts and otehr books that I can ref­er­ence on my iPhone and iPad. I could not do that on any­one’s app or read­er until Book­sOn­Board made that pos­si­ble last week. How awe­some is that! Thanks, BooksOnBoard.

    1. My first and last book from BooksOnBoard

      I can­not share your enthousiasm.

      I searched in Stan­za (iPhone) for a book and I found it at Book­sOn­Board. I bought it and thought I just had to click the down­load but­ton. Not at all! That’s not the way it works at BooksOnBoard.

      I searched in the Book­sOn­Board FAQ and, accord­ing to ques­tion 11, there was sup­posed to be a sec­ond link if the down­load but­ton did not work, but there was no oth­er link. I start­ed search­ing with the help of Google and dis­cov­ered I was not the only one who thought he would get a book read­able with Stan­za when he orders from Stan­za, but that was not the case. I had to down­load the Blue­fire Read­er and then cre­ate an Adobe account to final­ly get access to the book I ordered.

      It was a 10$ book, not a big deal, but it was quite frus­trat­ing. Book­sOn­Board should warn cus­tomers com­ing from the Stan­za app that some of their books are not com­pat­i­ble before the order is entered. And I don’t even under­stand why Stan­za accepts to pro­mote libraries, edi­tors and books that force peo­ple to use anoth­er book reader.

      1. Yep Me too

        I am not buy­ing any­more books from BoB, sor­ry if it takes me 30 min­utes and help from cus­tomer ser­vice just to down­load the book to my Kobo, I will buy elsewhere.

  2. Please show me I’m wrong

    Anne, I’m glad you’ve had a good expe­ri­ence with Book­sOn­Board and Blue­fire. As I wrote, I don’t have a prob­lem with Blue­fire so much as being forced to use it. And after four emails from Book­sOn­Board, I still have no instruc­tions for sim­ply down­load­ing the file I want. Even if Adobe Read­er for­mat is supe­ri­or to oth­er for­mats, Book­sOn­Board switched their sys­tem over with­out chang­ing any of their doc­u­men­ta­tion. The doc­u­men­ta­tion pro­vid­ed is for soft­ware they don’t use.

    Per­haps if they were clear about what they were sell­ing from the start, I would have been hap­py to try out new read­er soft­ware. But when their direc­tions say to use Stan­za while Blue­fire is their only option, they have a seri­ous cus­tomer rela­tions problem.

    As far as their sup­port request lim­it, Anne, your above com­ment is 877 words—does that sound like a man­i­festo to you? More to the point, Book­sOn­Board­’s sup­port request lim­it is not 800 words—it is 800 char­ac­ters. That would have got­ten you less than the first two para­graphs you wrote here.

    If my blog com­ment soft­ware had stopped you from typ­ing in the mid­dle of your sec­ond para­graph, would you have been hap­py about that?

    The fact is, that lim­it­ing the length of a sup­port request forces sup­port requests to be vague when any­one doing actu­al cus­tomer sup­port needs more spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion. It’s not so much that their are sti­fling my abil­i­ty to express myself—they are mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult for them to help me as a customer.

    You fur­ther sug­gest that Blue­fire reads ebook for­mats that Stan­za can­not. That is sim­ply not true. Stan­za reads the same ebook for­mats as Blue­fire and more; the dif­fer­ence is that Blue­fire has the Adobe DRM scheme built in. Yes, Stan­za reads eRead­er for­mat books and yes, that for­mat is quite out of date. It also reads PDFs and ePub doc­u­ments. Blue­fire only reads those same for­mats. Because the only dif­fer­ence is the DRM scheme, you’re prais­ing Book­sOn­Board essen­tial­ly for what Apple did with iTunes before they elim­i­nat­ed their DRM—selling books you can’t read with com­peti­tors’ software.

    The bat­tle over DRM is not one I want to get into now, but please be clear: Book­sOn­Board­’s switch to Blue­fire did not change the file for­mats; it only changed the locks on the doors that keep you from using the books you’ve purchased.

    As to your claim that you can read Book­sOn­Board books on that wide vari­ety of read­er soft­ware, that may be true for your old books from Book­sOn­Board, but new books that Book­sOn­Board sells can be read in only two ways: Adobe Dig­i­tal Edi­tions soft­ware and Blue­fire. That’s the word direct­ly from Book­sOn­Board­’s tech­ni­cal sup­port team. If I’d been able to read my book in Stan­za, I nev­er would have got­ten as far as try­ing to con­tact Book­sOn­Board­’s tech­ni­cal support.

    So please. Rather than telling me I’m wrong, show me I’m wrong. Asser­tions that I am lying to you are worthless.

    1. 800 charater limit

      Steve,

      Our sup­port form does have an 800 charater lim­it.  It is designed to pro­vide cus­tomer with a chance to quick­ly enter the infor­ma­tion our sup­port team requires to diag­nose their issue. How­ev­er, cus­tomers with a lot to say also have the option to con­tact us via our sup­port email with no lim­it to the length of their mes­sage.  When select­ing the sup­port form in our help sec­tion, the email and option to for­go the sup­port form dis­plays so that cus­tomer may choose if they wish to con­tact us direct­ly at our sup­port email.  I see that you have used the email option twice at least, with no lim­it to the length of your mes­sage.  I also see that our sup­port team pro­vid­ed you with instruc­tions and links for the install of the required ADE 1.7 and down­load of the file you pur­chased to your Mac.  If you require fur­ther assis­tance we are avail­able to help. 

       

      The Blue­fire Read­er App does allow users to read the Secure (DRM) Adobe for­mats, while Stan­za does not allow this.  This is a huge ben­e­fit to iDe­vice users who have until Blue­fire Read­er been pre­vent­ed from access­ing the exten­sive amount of titles avail­able in the Secure Adobe for­mats.  The use of DRM by pub­lish­ers is by their choice.  Blue­fire Read­er and Book­sOn­board now pro­vide users the choice to access these files via their iDe­vices, while at the same time con­tin­u­ing to offer the eRead­er for­mat for our Stan­za cus­tomers.  I have both Apps cur­rent­ly installed on my own iPhone, as do many of our Book­sOn­Board cus­tomers who are hap­pi­ly on board with Book­sOn­Board and the choic­es we con­tin­ue to pro­vide them.

      1. Book­sOn­Board needs to pro­vide more info…
        Sim­ply-put, Steve… When I am sent to Book­sOn­Board from Stan­za on my IPhone, and I choose a book to pur­chase from a list they pro­vide based on my search from Stan­za, and they allow me to buy that book,…it should either be read­able from Stan­za, or there should be a gigan­tic warn­ing in the Book­sOn­Board inter­face telling me that what I’m about to pur­chase WON’T work on Stan­za, and will require me to down­load a dif­fer­ent e‑reader entire­ly (one that I may not want to use, based on a great deal of the hon­est-look­ing feed­back and reviews,…as opposed to the large num­ber of reviews that were obvi­ous­ly placed there by panderers…)…

        That’s the issue here Steve… It’s about hon­esty and integri­ty, and about cater­ing to the cus­tomer’s expec­ta­tions… If I buy a book through Stan­za that links to any ven­dor, that ven­dor needs to make sure the file works on Stan­za, or warns the buy­er that it won’t IN ADVANCE.…

        Addi­tion­al­ly, even though I tried to give Blue­fire Read­er a chance, it fails to down­load from the App Store on the IPhone, and when I attempt­ed to do some research to find out why, I begin to see the enor­mous num­ber of folks hav­ing prob­lems with it, describ­ing how it con­stant­ly crash­es their device, and how its inter­face is ter­ri­ble com­pared to Stan­za­’s qual­i­ty and ease of use… This already feels like an app I should stay away from…

        I want my mon­ey back from the pur­chase of a book I can­not even access… Book­sOn­Board owes me either that, or a down­load that oper­ates from the app I used to get to your com­pa­ny to pur­chase it in the first place…

        It’s that simple…

        1. Allow me to edit this a bit…

          For­give me,…but the above mes­sage should have been addressed to Kurt John­son (who seems to be affil­i­at­ed with Book­sOn­Board) and not to Steve (who Kurt was talk­ing to)…  Please insert “Kurt” any­where I say “Steve” above…  The rest of the mes­sage still applies…

  3. Blue­fire Read­er Stan­za BooksOnBoard

    Steve, thank you for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to address some of the mis­con­cep­tions about Book­sOn­Board found in your blog post.

    Book­sOn­Board, found­ed 2006 is not a new ven­dor of eBooks.  Book­sOn­Board has long been the cham­pi­on of cus­tomers choice, being both device and for­mat agnostic

    Stan­za is a won­der­ful App, how­ev­er many Book­sOn­Board cus­tomers who use our mobile site report that they are dis­sat­is­fied with the lim­it­ed title selec­tion in the eRead­er for­mat, and many are not com­fort­able with the cred­it card unlock required by the eRead­er format. 

    In addi­tion to offer­ing our cus­tomers the choice of pay­ment using Pay­pal and credit/debit cards, Book­sOn­Board also offers choice of Google check­out.  Addi­tion­al­ly Book­sOn­Board gift cer­tifi­cates allow a mobile user the choice to cre­ate a bal­ance in their account so they may skip quick­ly to end of check­out and begin read­ing quickly.

    Our Mobile site accessed via iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch does now fea­ture the Secure Adobe for­mats instead of the eRead­er and non-DRM epub pre­vi­ous­ly found there

    All of our for­mats, how­ev­er, includ­ing eReader/Stanza, MSRead­er, Adobe epub and pdf, and Mobipock­et remain avail­able to our Stan­za users to pur­chase from our desk­top site, and eRead­er for­mat files will still down­load from a users Book­sOn­Board book­shelf to the iPhone, iPad and Ipod Touch using the Stan­za App. 

    Like­wise, our Adobe for­mats work not only with Blue­fire App on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, but may also be loaded to the users’ Mac, PC, and numer­ous ebook read­er devices such as Sony, Bookeen, Astak, Nook, BeBook, and all oth­ers that sup­port the Secure Adobe formats.

    I have reviewed your sup­port emails of yes­ter­day and today.

    You iden­ti­fied that the file you pur­chased via our mobile site would not down­load into the Stan­za App.  Our sup­port tech respond­ed that the file was a Secure (DRM) Adobe for­mat and not sup­port­ed by the Stan­za App, they rec­om­mend­ed installing the Blue­fire App on your device.

    You then asked if you would be lim­it­ed to read­ing the file using soft­ware that exists only on one plat­form and whether the file could be accessed from PC/Mac and oth­er devices list­ed on our Help pages.  Our sup­port respond­ed that you could in fact access the file on Mac or PC and oth­er devices.  And that we do con­tin­ue to offer addi­tion­al for­mats.  Which we do con­tin­ue to offer, pro­vid­ing a for­mat choice for almost any device our cus­tomer choos­es to read on. 

    You then asked for instruc­tions for access­ing the file on your Mac.  Instruc­tions were then pro­vid­ed by our sup­port team for installing the Adobe Dig­i­tal Edi­tions on your Mac.  If you still are unable to access you file on your Mac, or on your iPhone.  Please con­tact our sup­port and they are hap­py to con­tin­ue to assist.

    Regards,

    Kurt John­son

    Book­sOn­Board

  4. Notwith­stand­ing…

    While I agree that Books on Board were gra­cious in their response — I have to agree with the orig­i­nal post. I have hap­pi­ly used Stan­za on my iPhone for years, and had no idea when I bought a Book­sOn­Board book a few min­utes ago that it would be unread­able on Stan­za. The Book­sOn­Board web­site does not make this clear, at this point. Their help doc­u­men­ta­tion still ref­er­ences Stan­za, and nowhere on the pur­chase pages did it seem to indi­cate “you will not be able to read this book using Stan­za; you will have to down­load a new app and pro­vide per­son­al con­tact infor­ma­tion to Adobe in order to read this book”. Insuf­fi­cient warn­ing, in my opin­ion — because while Book­sOn­Board may be a small com­pa­ny, Adobe is not. And I have no wish to give Adobe a great deal of per­son­al infor­ma­tion, just so I can access a book I have already paid for. I will not be using Blue­fire on my iPhone, nor will I be pur­chas­ing fur­ther books from Book­sOn­Board. I’m incensed and frus­trat­ed at los­ing the 6.99 and tax…but I con­sid­er it a small price to pay to keep this par­tic­u­lar shred of my dwin­dling pri­va­cy for just that lit­tle bit longer. 

  5. I hate Blue­fire. Brand new
    I hate Blue­fire. Brand new iPod, just down­loaded it and it crash­es when­ev­er I open it. What’s the point of it?

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