Book People Archive

Re: World eBook Fair: 12 million downloads. Anyone notice?

Jon Noring wrote:

> Both Catherine and I are perplexed by the lack of public discussion
> about the WeBF on the various ebook-related forums such as this one.
> What are your thoughts?

   Censored.

   ...

   Visiting that web site is a bit like visiting a library, and finding
it locked, with their annual report attached to the door. The door mat
with the text 'welcome' is on the inside, behind the locked door. Perhaps.

   Main eye-catcher on the web page is full text search?  Am I interested? No.
(But let's try anyway. I search for 'Scott'. Blank page. I search
for 'chess'. Blank page. I search for ... no, why bother.)

   'Advanced Search' and 'Browse collection'? They're in so
small type that they can't be where the newcomer should go.
Visiting sponsors is not really what I want to do either.
But reading through all that text is not any better. (Here
is where I stopped the first time I visited this site -- I
remember I deleted the bookmark as well.)

   Once I've wade through the text of first page and reach the
recommendation to use 'Browse collection' at the very end, I'm not
a very willing visitor anymore (THAT LINK SHOULD HAVE BEEN AT THE TOP! -- in
fact, the target page should probably have been the first page by itself).
And when I finally 'browse collections' I feel like a library patron who hopes
to find a small, fat, yellow book on greek archaeology, but who discovers
himself deserted somewhere in the closed stacks of a library with only
a list of the library collections to guide him, and noone to ask.

   There are better places to be.

   I count 70 collections, but ... 'eBooks'? Government Accountability
Integrity Reliability Office Collection and it's 6620 PDF eBooks and
eDocuments? Export and Trade Publications (9372)?

   This is not an eBook fair. This is a eDocument dump site, and someone is
trying to make it look better than it is. I have no trust in the site left,
and simply give up. Nothing interesting here. If there is, it's been archived
away by professionals. Let them dig it up again.

  ...

   A site like this produce 12 million downloads? Unlikely. Doubtful.
I suspect it's that msnbot.msn.com that likes to download an entire web site
every other day along with the various *.googlebot.com that produce those
statistics. Not real people.

   ...

   I can't say that this is the general reaction ... but it is mine. It's the
third time I visit, and it's the third time I turn away. I don't see
the use.

   The On-line Books Pages aren't particularly glitzy, but I feel in
control from the very beginning: I can see what is available, and I don't
have to read through sales talk to find out what I can do and where I
can go. And searches work like (snap) that! That's a site I trust.

   And there are e-book-store webs that give me an equally pleasant experience:
it's almost fun browsing the pages, occasionally stumbling over unknown but
interesting titles. Those are also sites I trust.

   And then there's this.

   Treat it like broken porcelain: weep over it and bury it. There seems to be
little point in public discussion, except perhaps among web page pathologists.

   Next time consider the recommendations and many bad examples given in
'Homepage Usability' by Nielsen and Tahir.

-- 
Anders Thulin     ath*algonet.se     http://www.algonet.se/~ath