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Kindle gripe: Expiring book samples in some cases
November 8, 2008 | 11:57 am
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By Joe Wikert
Every time I see an interesting book I think I might like to read, I immediately check to see if a Kindle edition exists. If so, I always download the sample even if I if I can’t get to it for a bit. This is a good way to build a list of books I might like to read later. I never bothered to check whether these samples have an expiration date. After all, time-bombing samples would be silly, right?
Wrong. I recently discovered that some Kindle samples do indeed time-out. I downloaded the sample content for Pro LINQ a month or so ago and blogged earlier about the interesting zoom feature it includes. Imagine my surprise when I went to show this zoom feature to a colleague and was greeted by the following message:
End of this sample Kindle book. Enjoy the sample? Buy now or see details for this book in the Kindle Store.
At first I assumed it was a nag screen and I figured that’s fair. I don’t mind a gentle nudge in sample content, but it wasn’t just a nag screen. I can no longer access the book’s sample content. Worse, despite a couple of attempts now I can’t even re-download the sample material. Stupid feature, very stupid.
Amazon, I have two questions for you. First, do you really think providing unlimited access to sample content will hurt Kindle edition sales? Second, do you also honestly believe you’ll sell more Kindle content by time-bombing samples like this? (The answer to both questions is "no," by the way.)
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Comments:
This probably doesn’t have much to do with Amazon at all but more likely with the publisher of the book.
No. It’s Amazon. Part of the agreement for digital is that they can pull as much content as they want for sampling. There is no option for the publisher to say it can remain sampled for X days/hours/minutes.
Too, I bought 2 albums, assumed they’d be just fine where they were until I was ready to load them into my player, and voila. No. Three hours max and then they were unavailable for downloading. I complained. They gave me another three hours. I tried, no go. I’m still miffed.
That is odd. I too use samples as sort of a reminder of books I may eventually want to read. I still have samples that I snagged from last November when I got my Kindle so I don’t know if this is something for more recent books or just some books.
Either way it does seem like a silly thing to do.
I’m probably the most dedicated Amazon user I know — I have Prime, I’m an Amazon Associate, and a fairly large percentage of my sizable book collection came from Amazon. But the Kindle’s terms of service, which basically say that Amazon can mess around with the content on your device whenever they want to, convinced me to buy a Sony Reader instead.
Amazon is positively schizophrenic when it comes to digital content and DRM. They have the most consumer-friendly digital music sales anywhere, but for movies, TV shows and books, they employ lock-in that would make Microsoft proud. (Arguably this is at the behest of the publishers, but the RIAA is also notoriously pro-DRM. Amazon has enough clout to bring about change in this area if it wanted to.)
I get samples from the mobipocket store sometimes and as far as I know they don’t time out. I’ve never had one that did. Unless I’m just not keeping them long enough to find out.
Of all the idiotic things going on in ebook sales, having samples that time out has to be close to the top of the list.
Dollars to donuts, I’d say that this is the greedy publisher’s doings. It was the record companies who wanted to charge Amazon for royalties just for offering samples of music to the consumer public. Trouble is, it appears that Amazon doesn’t track my samples, so I cannot even recall half of them. Thus, I am hardly likely to get them. So who is hurting? Besides, I need to be reading more of the King James Bible, and it is in public domain.