For years I have hoped that Barnes & Noble would, through its Nook service, serve as a competent ebook competitor to Amazon’s Kindle service. My recent experience with Nook is a complete disappointment, as it is clear that Barnes & Noble cheats its Nook customers. If you purchase a book from Barnes & Noble that has maps in it, and if you purchase the book on paper, the maps will be legible. If you purchase that same book from Barnes & Noble as an ebook (through its Nook service), the maps will be illegible. See an example of this at right.
It is clear that Barnes & Noble’s process for converting a physical book to its Nook (ebook) format is defective. Barnes & Noble says that it offers over 4.5 million ebooks. I suspect that most of not all of its ebooks with maps inside are defective. What needs to happen is that Barnes & Noble needs to redo the conversions of those books so that the maps are legible in the ebook format. Only then will customers be receiving what they paid for, namely legible maps.
What got me started on this is that I have seen this category of service failure in several Barnes & Noble ebooks:
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- The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag (Flavia de Luce Series #2), by Alan Bradley (illegible map on page 9)
- The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932, by William Manchester (illegible maps on pages 313, 341, 360, 534, 565, 585, 615, 654, 685, 709, 719, 739, 763, 786, 826, 937 and 979)
- The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Volume 3: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, by William Manchester, Paul Reid (illegible maps on pages 210, 314, 696 and 1040)
I have tried to get Barnes & Noble to pay attention to this category of service failure. In the case of The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, it took six days of argument, spread out over half a dozen email interactions with Barnes & Noble customer care, to get them to admit that there was a problem. At my insistence, eventually Barnes & Noble did carry out a second conversion of that book from paper to ebook, and preserved the legibility of the map on page 9. Now if someone purchases that ebook, they will get a legible map.
In the case of The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932, Barnes & Noble customer care denied that there was any problem, and eventually unilaterally ducked the problem by refunding the $3.99 that I had paid for the book (which disabled the book on my ereader). When I reiterated my request that they fix the illegible maps, they challenged me to provide a page number for an illegible map. I said I was unable to do that because they had disabled the book on my ereader. They said I would have to purchase the ebook all over again if I wished to provide a page number to them.
I then repurchased the book. (By now the price had jumped to $16.99.) Having paid the $16.99, I am able to cite page numbers for the illegible maps in the ebook, for example, the illegible map on page 979. It is the map quoted above. There are a total of eighteen illegible maps in that book and you can see here the page numbers for those illegible maps.
I guess they save their money for legal fees so they can oppose every USPTO application that has the word NOOK in it, thinking that their NOOK brand is so famous and well-regarded.
It’s Kafkaesque for B&N to remove your access to the e-book and then demand that you identify the defective pages. Watch B&N now claim that by repurchasing the e-book, knowing of its defects, you are S-O-L on some theory of waiver or assumption of risk. A customer-focused enterprise would have thanked you for calling the problems to their attention, promptly investigated, fixed the maps, and given you a credit as a token for your inconvenience and good-faith efforts. But it is 2026, so the customer is never right.