BooksOnBoard is not on board

This past weekend I tried a new vendor of electronic books: BooksOnBoard. I found the store in the Stanza app on my iPad, which so far I believe is the best ereader software available. Stanza includes in-app links to several sources of electronic books, and BooksOnBoard is the first choice listed.

My first impression of BooksOnBoard is not favorable.

Creating an account was simple and quick. BooksOnBoard takes PayPal, which was a requirement this weekend since some of my money was tied up being transferred from my PayPal account to my bank. Accepting PayPal was a critical factor in my decision. Though usually I use a credit card for this sort of purchase, I appreciate the choice.

However, when I tried to download the book I paid for it fails every time. Inside Stanza, an error not listed in BooksOnBoard’s help section appears: «Failed to download and import ‘Download’: unsupported URL.» I hoped that at least I could download the book in a desktop browser, then install the book manually. But no. The «download» button on my bookshelf on the downloads an XML called «Download.acsm»—the file extension I believe means Adobe Content Server Message but considering the circumstances I notice that it is an anagram of the word scam.

An attempt to use BooksOnBoard’s customer support system revealed that they limit their support requests to 800 characters. I appreciate brevity as much as the next guy, but really: if a customer is trying to explain what it is he or she is dissatisfied with, telling the customer to shut up in the middle of typing the grievance is stupidly customer-unfriendly.

The response that came from BooksOnBoard indicates that although they used to distribute books that worked with Stanza, that instead they have converted everything over to work only with the Bluefire reader. The only option for reading a book from BooksOnBoard is supposedly an iPhone/iPad/iTouch-only software package that was released less than two months ago.

It’s doubtful that is true, but it is BooksOnBoard’s official line. I don’t really have any interest in installing Bluefire; I didn’t choose BooksOnBoard just to get tied to a single reader software. If I can’t read on any device I want, I may as well buy Kindle books.

Bluefire Reader’s own literature tosses around words like «openness» and «freedom». It’s not fair to blame Bluefire for BooksOnBoard trying to force its customers into a single solution. Bluefire appears to be a reader for ePub and PDF files with Adobe DRM. Their website says they support those formats because people should be able to move their documents from device to device. Clearly, failure to support desktop systems, Android devices and other eReaders and smartphones has little to do with Bluefire and everything to do with BooksOnBoard. I know there are readers for Adobe-DRM ePub and PDF files for Macintosh, PC and Android. That BooksOnBoard won’t allow downloading of a purchased book except to Bluefire is reason enough to stay away from them.