Monday, April 18, 2011

Why Google-Checkout sucks - at least for me

I just tried to buy the electronic version of David J. Anderson's Kanban book, because I'm traveling the world quite a bit right now, left the paper book at home and wanted to look up a few specifics for the design my own personal kanban system.

Two things delayed my decision to buy it - and actually will delay it for a couple of days to come. Which is unbelievable for a process that takes a mere minute on amazon and the pragmatic bookshelf.

1) I have to buy the eBook twice to read it in iBooks and on the Kindle [see below]
2) I have to become a Google-Checkout Customer (which is the dealbreaker)

The Problems with Google-Checkout

  • They (Google Checkout) added my credit card info to the currently logged in google account
    Really? The currently logged in account? That's just silly.
  • They (Google Checkout) stored the credit card information
Actually Amazon also stores the credit card data. But amazon is a store - Google is a search engine and an information broker. So I'm supposed to give my credit card information to an information broker, who adds new services to it's portfolio every day?
So, what I'll have to do now - to get the electronic version of a book I already own - is to get a prepaid credit card, put some money on it, connect that to google checkout, buy the book, disconnect the card from google-checkout.
[Aka: No, I don't want others to be able to control my credit card and identity management. That's where I really want a push system]
What a waste of time!

The Problem with buying the book twice


I use the Kindle for reading and the iPad for Browsing, and since the Kindle UI is only mediocre compared to iBooks I would love two have both formats available as it is possible with the pragmatic bookshelf. I admit that the Kindle UI is not as bad on the iPad as it is on the Kindle itself, but still it's a drawback compared to the iBook experience. So the current option for buying the book online isn't "quite" as pleasant as it would be to buy it from the pragmatic bookshelf - or perhaps I'm just spoiled by the latter's focus on customer value.

2 comments:

JLinden said...

Hi Michael,
We've been getting the feedback that a lot that people want to buy once for multiple e-book versions. We want to transition to that as soon as we can set up the infrastructure.

Thanks for the comments about Google Checkout. We have the option of also enabling Paypal and other pay systems and this helps us prioritize those decisions in our queue.

Janice Linden-Reed
Blue Hole Press

Michael Mahlberg said...

Hi Janice,

Thanks for your reply - I'm looking forward to the upcoming changes.

- Michael