I was interested in the book "We Are Smarter than Me", and from the primary hardcover book page, followed the link to the Kindle title. The Kindle title has a very similar name; however, having completed the purchase and downloaded it, the purchase totals only a few pages of reading content, with a notice "if you liked this Element, you might like the book". Yes, I would like the opportunity to read the book, which is why I purchased the Kindle title -- only, it turns out that I have *not* purchased the book. In fact, what I have purchased appears to be a brief excerpt of the book.
Whether it is a mistake or not, there is NOT a link from the hardcover page to a full title on Kindle. There is a link labeled "Kindle edition", priced at $1.59, that leads to a page of a product titled "We Are Smarter than Me" (with a different cover image than the book). And that item is NOT the book, but is an excerpt.
Ultimately, this is fantastically annoying, and verging on false advertising. It is not an objection to the amount spent (the Kindle title is priced at under $2 -- perhaps this should have tipped me off, but I thought only that the authors might be making use of an opportunity to gain lots of readers and accumulate good reviews). And the small amount that I was able to read -- shorter, by the way, than many of the free previews that are available without charge for Kindle books, to help buyers determine if they want to read the full book or not -- was not terrible. It had a small amount of momentum in the argument, enough that I would have continued to read, IF IN FACT I HAD COMPLETED MY INTENDED PURCHASE AND THE BOOK WAS AVAILABLE ON MY KINDLE.
Thus my one-star rating is not entirely an indictment of the book content -- I cannot, in fact, know the book content. And I am so irritated by the experience that I will probably not buy the book in any other form. Partly the fault lies with Amazon, for allowing a link to a misrepresented set of content, and partly there is some fundamental misunderstanding about customers on the part of the publisher, if they think that people really want to buy a preview (when it is incorrectly linked as an "edition" from the primary product page and is not phenomenally, painfully, obviously, explicitly and glaringly clear, during the resulting transaction, identified and labeled as such).
However, within this experience there is a strong argument that the content of the book must not be very well informed. It is ironic to me that a product page for book about crowdsourcing, which implies an ultimate understanding of the behavior and nature of crowds -- and thus I would assume some sense of care about what customers experience, and therefore how they will react and behave -- could commit such a glaring error. I do not believe that I am the only person that will be led into this same dark alley, nor that I will be unique in my frustration at the experience.
It is because of this fundamental disconnect between the product (and the domain in which it claims to reveal expertise) that I can no longer believe in the content of the book itself. So, although after further research I did discover (*not* linked from the hardcover page) that there may in fact be a full Kindle edition of the entire title, I am no longer interested in purchase. I would doubt any insights and recommendations contained within the book, based on my experience at the other end of this transaction. Crowd behavior is strongly correlated to User Experience Design, and this experience was a FAIL.
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Top reviews from other countries
Cliente Amazon
Buen libro sobre crowdsourcing
Reviewed in Spain on October 23, 2016
Chuck X1a
WELL SOMEONE'S BEING SMART! JUST NOT THE BUYER.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 30, 2012
