I was reading a post over at The Digital Reader today which came down heavily on Barnes and Noble’s support response to a few of the writer’s issues with their products and services.
I personally have never dealt much with Barnes and Noble’s remote customer support. My experience with Barnes and Noble has been limited to the retail stores and the agents therein. As usual, the merit of each agent’s response to my requests has always been evaluated on the basis of the individual encounters and not on the overall experience of a Barnes and Noble retail store. As a result, I can’t really comment on the remote customer service quality in the detail that this particular writer has.
Conversely, I can comment on the customer service at Amazon, because I have been dealing with them for over 10 years and prior to the advent of eBooks and the eReader.
Some companies place a huge emphasis on customer support, and sometimes to the detriment of other aspects of the business. In Amazon’s case, they have spent a great deal of time and effort [ more ]
You may have noticed that there is a lot going on in the eBook industry lately.
For one, back in April, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a suit against Apple and five of the top U.S. publishing houses for what they term “colluding to set eBook prices and sales models”. This was in response to an agreement formed between Apple and those 5 publishers to set eBook prices as per what is known as “the agency model”. This enabled the publishers to set their prices at the level they wanted to set, and dictate to the eBook distributors what the price ought to be. The U.S. department of justice think this is behavior that violates the antitrust laws. Apple and the “big five” maintain that their decision to sign such an agreement was to prevent Amazon.com from building and strengthening a monopolistic hold on the eBook sales market.
While I agree that a retailer shouldn’t have the autonomous decision to set eBook prices, I have to maintain my objection to the trend that publishers have taken in pricing eBooks over and above the [ more ]