TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘BooksOnBoard’ Category

By Jane Litte

I want e-books to succeed, and I think that a successful e-book market needs to include competitors to Amazon. So I was glad that BooksOnBoard was partnering with Stanza to bring "for purchase content" to the iPhone.

When I had a free moment, I took the opportunity to visit BooksOnBoard to experience the purchase process. The first time was a bit, well, off-putting. It took fourteen steps and over 10 minutes on the Edge connection. I e-mailed BooksOnBoard with my frustrations, and the company was very prompt and responsive. It asked me to try again; and on my second time, about three steps were eliminated. If you choose the reward dollars method, you’ll save at least four steps. Paypal, while the easiest method for me because I don’t have to dig for my credit card, adds about four steps. The credit card payment option is less than that.

1. BooksOnBoard site
2. Choose book.
3. Book page. Click Buy link.
4. Add to cart (I wish that this step didn’t exist. By choosing the "Buy" link, I am already committing to buying the book.
5. Login screen
6. Shopping cart. Click the Secure Checkout button (which is very small and hard to see)
7. Payment page. I choose the rewards, entered the amount and was taken straight to the download page.
8. Click on download link and Stanza will open.

Interestingly enough, after I purchased the book and hit the BooksOnBoard logo to back to the front page, it went to http://booksonboard.com/index.html instead of the iPhone designated page. I had to delete the index.html and reload in order to get the iPhone-designated site again.

Site not optimized for iPhone viewing

The site is not optimized for iPhone viewing and if you are browsing, instead of planning on purchasing a specific book, you’ll have better results in landscape mode than portrait.  In fact, in portrait some of the buttons during the purchasing process were very difficult to see.  Amazon, despite having the Kindle for e-book sales, has an iPhone optimized Web site for ordering print books.

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By David Rothman

Check out a post from Neelan Choksi at Lexycle, who discusses the Stanza-BooksOnBoard interface. Along the way he shares an interesting stat:

"We believe over 3 million ePub books have been downloaded to Stanza."

Meanwhile Lori James at All Romance eBooks, another retailer offering ePub via Stanza, tells us of an interface improvement to help address Jane Litte’s concerns expressed in our comment area.

For newcomers: Stanza is an e-reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows direct downloads of e-books—not quite as easily as the Kindle, but I suspect it’ll reach that point in the near future. ePub is the e-book standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, the leading e-book trade group.

Related: Lexcycle’s Marc Prud’hommeaux on the issue of backups of Stanza-BoB downloads—plus Stanza tips for bookstores and writers and Stanza-BooksOnBoard-Samhain: Direct downloads already working.