If you want to read something new this weekend and you’re interested in okay with willing to endure Google Ebooks, then the small literary publisher Unbridled Books has a great deal for you: 25 titles for only 25 cents each through Saturday, June 11th.
I found out about the offer through literary agent Janet Reid’s blog. Reid made her purchases from a local bookstore and reported back that the process is unnecessarily complicated, with each store bringing a different level of online competence to the transaction. I foolishly tried it out myself after reading her post, and I think she’s being too polite; I was stunned at how awful the purchasing experience was. I think Google is more to blame than any of the booksellers, though, because of how clumsily it integrates its Google Books service with each store.
But before I show you how it went down, let’s look at the good news here. These are the lowest prices you’ll find for these books. I chose three titles at random from Unbridled’s list and looked up their prices on the Kindle, Nook and Kobo stores, and here’s what they’re currently going for:
So it’s clear that 25 cents is a pretty good deal.
Unfortunately, while the price is terrific, the actual process of purchasing the books is almost comically painful, especially when compared to how seamlessly you can buy music, apps, ebooks, subscriptions, and basically anything else online these days from other vendors.
Here. I took screenshots of every screen that I had to go through to buy two ebooks from one of the participating booksellers:
At this point, you can either log in to this new account you suddenly have with this particular bookseller, or you can say to hell with this, as I did, and just go over to the ebooks section of Google Books and find your purchases there. Either way, you’ll then be able to read your new ebooks online or download EPUB versions that are locked with Adobe Digital Editions, which should work on both Nook and Sony Reader—right after you’ve authorized it through ADE on your desktop, sigh.
If you choose to read it in your web browser, at least Google has made sure that the experience is fairly pleasant:
So that’s what you have to do to get these discount ebooks. If you want to give it a shot yourself, then the easiest way to proceed is to look at this list of available titles at Unbridled Books, then jump directly to Google Books, bypassing any indie bookseller, and buy the ebooks from Google. Of course, that shuts your local bookstore out of yet another transaction, so if you don’t mind the extra hoop jumping you can do this instead:
- Choose a local indie bookstore from this list of stores that sell Google Ebooks. (You don’t have to choose a local store, but it’s probably a nice thing if you do.)
- Visit the store’s website. If you’re lucky, the store you picked was thoughtful enough to promote the 25-cent sale on its home page. (See WORD and Greenlight for good examples.) If you chose badly, you won’t see any mention of the sale and will have to search for the titles yourself—or just hit your back button and try another store on the list until you find one that’s easier to shop from.
- Take a deep breath and get ready to run the checkout gauntlet as shown above. Be brave!
Either way, good luck. Imagine how much more you’ll enjoy reading something that you had to hunt down and kill yourself, the way people had to do it back before all this one-click-purchase nonsense made us all fat and lazy.
Note: The downloadable versions won’t work on the Kindle.
[via Janet Reid, Literary Agent]
(Barbed wire: Eusebius@Commons)
