mobipocket.com - good or evil?

[Kevin]

How many people have used this and how many writers have been abused by this company?

I'll reserve my experiences until after someone else posts, I want to see if my experiences are the norm or if the exception.

[Dorie]

I use it quite a bit on my PDA but only to read RSS feeds. I don't really download books -- I know they're available but it is difficult to read on the device I have.

[GracieKat]

Kevin wrote: "How many people have used this and how many writers have been abused by this company?

I'll reserve my experiences until after someone else posts, I want to see if my experiences are the norm or ..."

I've never heard of it but what's wrong with it?

[Dorie]

Katie, where do you get this is spam? And we do discuss reading formats here, so I wouldn't believe a similar discussion would be inappropriate.

Kevin, perhaps it would help if you told us your problem with Mobipocket.

[Kevin]

Dorie:
MobiPocket.com advertises services to authors and publishers to provide world wide ebook distribution. This is supposedly an open to the independent publishing market.

However, I've had several problems and have viewed others having problems and was wondering if I should just abandon mobi now or hope they'll fix their screw ups. My problems include:

* First informing me I did not need to provide tax information, then getting what appeared to be a spam email asking me to fax tax information to a number. It took me 3 weeks to clear them as an authoritative email and fax number.
* Their agreement assurse me that living in the US I am capable of requesting to be paid by check. But the payment options to not select check. I had an argument with a support person over what is in the agreement - the agreement still offers check.
* Sales figures "vanishing". Granted I only had 1 sale, but it disappeared.


I've since seen a few other posts on mobipocket.com's help area where people are having the same issues.


I'm just trying to find out if anyone else has had any similar issues with mobipocket.com or amazon.com, if so I will have to rethink how I plan on publishing my ebooks. Basically I need to find out how widespread their failures really are.

[Mel]

Don't know anything about this from a publishing perspective but I am a regular purchaser of mobi format books as I have a Cybook ereader. Don't buy from the mobipocket site though since I get a better customer loyalty program through Fictionwise.