For that last week, yes one week, I’ve been trying to buy a book from Kobo. This has been the antithesis of simple procedure that it is supposed to be. My mistake was downloading a preview of a book before buying it. If you read no further in this post remember this, do not download a preview before buying a book from Kobo.
So why has it taken me a week to buy a book from Kobo? Here’s the short version. I bought a book last Friday but couldn’t get past the preview. I contacted support and the technician added the book to my library. That didn’t fix the problem. Rather than fighting with that problem I asked for a credit so I could buy a different book. The credit was issued but I couldn’t see it. That’s when things got worse.
I called on Monday to ask about the credit and was told it would appear in my account at some point. I had to be patient as they were experiencing heavy call volumes. I called back on Tuesday and asked about the credit. I was told that the credit was applied to my account. I said that’s great but I can’t see it when I log in to my account. The support technician assured me that the credit was there. Well how do I get it? I took a screen shot and sent that too her but that didn’t make a difference. I was told the problem would be escalated to tier two support. Level one support is delivered from St. Lucia. I don’t know where tier two is located but I couldn’t call them directly. By this point I was VERY frustrated.
I am not a patient person. Anyone who knows me will attest to this. I wanted to call someone at Kobo directly but I couldn’t as they don’t make their phone number available on their website. Kobo is a joint venture between Indigo and Borders. Indigo being a Canadian company I thought I’d reach out to them and see if that helped and it did.
I spoke to a VP at Indigo and he was very helpful. He was the only bright spot in this entire, ongoing, saga. The contact at Indigo has clearly spent most of his career in customer service, his Linked In profile backs this up. I am very grateful for his help even though he doesn’t even work for Kobo. I wish he was running Kobo’s support team!
My contact from Indigo followed up with me the next day and told me that he’d received word that the credit was in my account. I told him that I’ve been told that before but I still can’t access it. To prove my point I gave him my credentials and had him log in as me. Once he did that he confirmed that I indeed he could not access my credit. He was so helpful he forwarded another email to Kobo describing his experience and asking them to fix it. Keep in mind this guy doesn’t even work for Kobo, that’s someone that understands customer service.
Later that night I tried to access my account again. This time I received a 500, Internal Server Error message when I tried to view my account balance. I guess the folks at Kobo were trying to fix something.
The next day I received a call, not from Kobo, but from my contact at Indigo. Kobo had my phone number but chose to let someone else be the intermediary. I was informed that Kobo has accepted that there is a problem and are now trying to resolve it. Can you believe that it took a VP from an outside company to get Kobo to acknowledge they have an issue? I find it hard to imagine that nobody else has ever had this problem before.
By this time it’s Wednesday and I still don’t have my book. I guess I’ll just have to be patient. I was now in contact via email directly with Kobo support and was told they’d call me Thursday morning but they didn’t. I emailed on Friday morning and asked if they were going to call me and was told they would call within the hour and they did. I was away from my phone but was able to call them back.
It’s crunch time! I’ve got the support tech on the phone. At the time I was in a parking lot talking on my Blackberry and accessing the web via my Playbook. Darrell, the support technician that I was talking to told me the credit was in my account. Ha! I wasn’t falling for that again. I had Darrell log in to my account and verify that he could see the credit and he could. I had him proceed to buy the book while he was in my account and I was on the phone. Problem solved, not!
After running my errand I got home and opened up my Kobo reader. Guess what, I couldn’t get passed the introduction. The very same problem I had last Friday that initiated this adventure in the first place. Oh no, here we go again.
I quickly emailed the technician at Kobo and told him of the problem. I received a response from Lee this time. Lee’s response was “Being able to read only the first few pages of a title implies a “preview only” copy has been downloaded and/or the title is locked.” I assumed that Lee didn’t know that it was Darrell that bought the full edition of the book. Lee told me I’d hear back in 30 minutes and that was an hour ago.
When I emailed Lee back I told him I didn’t care what the problem was I just wanted a refund so I could buy the book elsewhere. That’s what I said but really I just want to read the book in my Kobo reader. I thought that maybe there is some kind of DRM issue with the Kobo app on my Playbook so I downloaded the Kobo desktop application. I opened the desktop app and accessed my account. I opened the book I’ve been trying to get all week and was able to get to the entire book. Well now we know the problem isn’t with the book it’s with the app on the Playbook. I’m not liking where this is headed. It may be that reading Kobo books on my Playbook is not an option.
For more than a year I’ve been using my Sony Reader to read my electronic books. Maybe this book will open on my Sony device. That didn’t work either. Unlike all other books that I’ve downloaded this one is sent as a zip file which seems to be unreadable by the Sony device. I have successfully added other Kobo books to my Sony device. The fact that I could do that is one of the reasons I shopped at Kobo.
The fact that the Kobo application is available for the Playbook was a good thing for Kobo. It has created some lock-in. In most cases after a day of consumer frustration I would have switched companies. I would have been buying from Amazon were it not for the fact that there is no Kindle app for my Playbook. This could turn out to be bad news for RIM. I have a Playbook for the applications not for the hardware. If the apps aren’t available on the device then I’ll have to consider alternate hardware (that isn’t likely to happen though as we have three Playbooks in the house). I don’t want to be carrying my Playbook and my Sony Reader.
You know, I never had these kinds of issues with a paper based book. Maybe I should go back to that.
[note: The events listed in this post took place from Friday, December 16 to Friday, December 23. ]
