Your opinions please

[Simonm]

Hi,

Given that you are all experts in the ebook arena it would be great to hear what you think of our new ebook website. www.ebookShoppe.com
Please be honest and not too offensive . Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Simon

[Mike L]

Simon,

It's always good to see another source for ebooks. Thanks for telling us about it.

My first impression is that your site is nice and clean -- clearly laid out, not cluttered, not bogged down with annoying animations or other distractions.

However, I would make a number of criticisms in matters of detail (nothing drastic, I hope).

1. There doesn't seem to be any way to filter your browing by format. This is a key point. I like to browse by category, but I am not interested in seeing titles that are only offered in formats that my reading device doesn't support.

2. On a quick browse, I couldn't find any information about DRM. Another important point.

3. The subject list (down the left-hand side) has some minor inconsistencies. For example, if you select Crime & Thriller, you don't see any crime novels or thrillers; your only option is to go to True Crime. To get to Crime & Mystery, or Thriller / Suspense, you have to drill down into Fiction. Similarly, Food & Drink doesn't take you to books on food or drink in general, but to one of nine more specialised categories.

No doubt other points will emerge. I hope you accept these as constructive criticisms, and continue to develop what I'm sure will be a useful site.

[Elfwreck]

My workplace filters block the site as "sex." That's odd; they don't block Samhain Press or Torquere. So something in your metadata is probably very odd.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Simonm

Hi,

Given that you are all experts in the ebook arena it would be great to hear what you think of our new ebook website. www.ebookShoppe.com
Please be honest and not too offensive . Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Simon

Thanks for offering this site. However I had some major problems
- I searched for books by Jimmy Carter, and got nothing by him though the list included a book by Julian Barnes
- I tried to buy a book and entered my correct address and card number etc, but got a message saying that the entries had been rejected by the vendor database - but no information at all as to what it didn't like. So you lost a sale.

In case I decide to try again please tell me whether your books have DRM, (and if so what format for ePub), and whether you have geographical restrictions.

Regards, Alex

[ttf]

Also, you do not show the author in the list of books.
I have to open a books description to have the author shown.

[m-reader]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

My workplace filters block the site as "sex." That's odd; they don't block Samhain Press or Torquere. So something in your metadata is probably very odd.

I think your company is using the same WebSense filter database as mine. This is what I got:

Reason: The Websense category "Sex" is filtered.
URL: http://www.ebookshoppe.com/

[MikeB1972]

The search is a bit flaky - searching for "pratchett" doesn't bring up the terry pratchett book that is currently on your home page.
Also being able to click on the authors name in the book details to show other books by the author would be good.
Showing the format of the book in the search is essential, as is the authors name (Publisher / published date would be handy as well)

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by m-reader

I think your company is using the same WebSense filter database as mine. This is what I got:

Yep, that's the one. Weird.
Means I won't be shopping there, because at home, I have dialup internet; very few ebook stores are tolerable on dialup.

[m-reader]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Yep, that's the one. Weird.
Means I won't be shopping there, because at home, I have dialup internet; very few ebook stores are tolerable on dialup.

Don't they turn WebSense off at all? Man, and I thought Saudi Arabia was bad (that's where I'm working at the moment). Ours is switched off at 3.30 pm ...
Plus I have 4MB ADSL at home, so no complaints there.

[m-reader]

Hi Simonm, now that I have access to your web page, here's my comments:

1. WebSense block (see my previous post, same issue encountered by Elfwreck) - I checked your meta, there's noting suspect there. I think you should write into WebSense people to re-categorise your web site.
2. Registration page - Shipping address is a bit redundant for e-books.
3. Search results - in addition to book title and thumbnail, it would be nice to see the name of author as well. This is especially important for spelling challenged people like me who lots of times need to guess spelling of a name (or only know the surname) of an author.

Other than that, it's a pretty spiffy web site. Good luck with your (e-)business!

Cheers

m-reader

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by m-reader

Don't they turn WebSense off at all? Man, and I thought Saudi Arabia was bad (that's where I'm working at the moment). Ours is switched off at 3.30 pm ...
Plus I have 4MB ADSL at home, so no complaints there.

It's theoretically a 24/7 business. It's definitely a 7am-9pm business; after that is erratic.

Websense blocks: sex, games, social networking, software, and filesharing sites. Which means any blogs hosted on blog sites (that they've identified; new startup blogsites are visible until they get noticed), and free software downloads, and googledocs.

Can get to google wave, though. I try not to think about it.

We've had some occasional problems where clients send us links & we can't get to the content. I figure we have about six months before we start hitting major hassles with that, and our security people have to reconfigure the websense details or adding a whitelist.

[alecE]

Glad to see another site available, and I will definitely spend more time browsing here.

I find the site clear and uncluttered and thankfully lacking pop-ups and animated distractions.

I spent a while browsing through the European History topic:
- the absence of the author's name on the basic listing does not help. For example, is "Course of German History" a basic text book or is it A J P Taylor's work? (It is the latter)
- I found one instance where the wrong description has been applied - Jan Morris, "Europe, an intimate journey" has acquired this description "Using a detailed analysis of the writings of Nietzsche, Elbe seeks to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe, which would enhance the legitimacy of the European Union and provide the basis for a European identity."
- A lot of the titles are heavy-duty academic texts; nonetheless, the prices utterly gast my flabber, for example, "Identity and agency in England, 1500-1800" presumably a snip at £50.40 for a pdf vs. £56.05 for the hardback on Amazon;
- the absence of good descriptions is a hindrance, for example, "How the war was won" - which war??;
- Some titles have received unhelpful abbreviation, for example "Romantic Nat Tale Question Ireland" is really "The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland". I had to scrutinise the enlarged cover image to discover this;
- Searching does work, but could work better. for example, a search on "a j p taylor" produced a multi-page listing, when there is only one title by this author. Similarly, a search for "Identity and agency in England" produced a listing at the top of the page which definitely showed this title; possibly because of user error I was unable to select this specific title and ended up with a 13+ page listing for every item with the word "identity" in the title. Again, I got there in the end, but would have liked to get there more quickly;
- My preferred ebook format is epub. I saw very few examples of this format.

I think much of what I've itemised above could be resolved fairly easily, and I'll certainly be back to this site again. Please accept my apologies if my post seems overly negative - I'm really glad to see another ebook site and I hope you're successful with this.

[fugazied]

Looks quite nice imo.

One thing that might need improvement is your search. When a user searches for "Stephen King" you would expect to see Stephen King books. Maybe I am missing something obvious but I couldn't see an author filter.

People come to the site with a lot of different kinds of meta data, from publisher (don't know the name of the book, but penguin published it last month), author, partial titles, ISBN etc. Add a drop down to the search on the top right so they can search by anything quickly and easily. Users don't want to have to learn about search filters, they would prefer to use a drop down to narrow their search quickly (in my experience).

[FlorenceArt]

I'm having difficulties finding books, I must be doing something wrong. I tend to search by categories rather than look for a specific book. On your site I tried a few categories but the results are puzzling:

British literature brings up a list of two books, priced £85.50 each.
Crime and Thrillers gives no result, but only one subcategory: True crime.
Sub-category Painting and paintings contains, in order of appearance: a book on AutoCAD, a book on Irish writers, a book called "charmed knits", followed by "Crochet Patterns For Dummies"...

I agree that the author's name should be shown in search results.

Also, your prices are in GBP, are you considering adding an option for prices in EUR? And will you sell outside of the UK?

[Mike L]

One more point to add to my earlier comments:

I don't see any mention of geographic restrictions anywhere. Are there no such restrictions? Or are we only told about them at the time of paying?