fred_mouse (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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ebooks2012-04-10 09:25 am
fred_mouse) wrote in ebooks2012-04-10 09:25 am
survey fail
quick background: I bought a kobo touch ereader for my youngest child's 8th birthday, with the intention of putting lots of the ebooks from the Gutenberg project on it. While getting this working is still ongoing, due to tech fail on my part (not working out which parts of the process were going to require internet access, and then going away for the weekend), zie is pretty excited by the idea.
On to the reason for this post: Today, I checked my email, and found a 'recommendations' set, which includes the option to take a survey about my thoughts on the recommendations. Given that I don't like the recommendations that we are getting, and I'd like to work out how to stop them on the kobo, so that zie doesn't read the free previews of things that zie really shouldn't be reading, I took the opportunity to make comment.
Unfortunately, some of my responses are going to be irrelevant, because I had to fake the age - the choices start at 18, and go up. Plus, for the 'how do you like to get recommendations', none of the options were relevant, so I filled in 'none' in the 'other' box, which it insisted that I had in fact not answered the question.
On the plus side, I've found that I might have the opportunity to modify what is recommended. Now all I have to do is log in to the site, and see how I go with poking the buttons.
Has anyone had any luck with changing those preferences?
(mostly posted to grumble about stupid publishing industry who assume that the only people who use their stuff are the ones that they want to market to)
On to the reason for this post: Today, I checked my email, and found a 'recommendations' set, which includes the option to take a survey about my thoughts on the recommendations. Given that I don't like the recommendations that we are getting, and I'd like to work out how to stop them on the kobo, so that zie doesn't read the free previews of things that zie really shouldn't be reading, I took the opportunity to make comment.
Unfortunately, some of my responses are going to be irrelevant, because I had to fake the age - the choices start at 18, and go up. Plus, for the 'how do you like to get recommendations', none of the options were relevant, so I filled in 'none' in the 'other' box, which it insisted that I had in fact not answered the question.
On the plus side, I've found that I might have the opportunity to modify what is recommended. Now all I have to do is log in to the site, and see how I go with poking the buttons.
Has anyone had any luck with changing those preferences?
(mostly posted to grumble about stupid publishing industry who assume that the only people who use their stuff are the ones that they want to market to)
no subject
It's one of my longstanding rants that ebooks are never going to be seriously mainstream as long as they're inaccessible to kids, which means "as long as you need a credit card to buy them." (I always giggle maniacally when publishers wring their hands about the low sales of YA titles in ebooks. Because, duh.)
Also worth checking: the Patricia Clark Memorial Library at Mobileread has public domain & a handful of other books-with-permission; usually, those are better-formatted than the Gutenberg editions. Many are hand-proofed against original print copies (many early Gutenberg books are sloppily proofed) and formatted more carefully.
There are also a number of free & low-cost children's and YA books posted at Smashwords, but I don't recommend you send an 8-year-old there to poke around; there's also a lot of questionable content. (Including erotica, which most 8-year-olds I've met have no interest in, and books with violence, which parents might want to steer them away from, and books with atrocious grammar and bad spelling, which parents might be even more concerned about.)
When my young teen got an e-reader, she discovered Fanfiction.net and I can barely pry her away from it now. Both of my daughters' writing skills improved noticeably after they started reading at ff.net... it's like they suddenly realized that words can be fun and had a reason to want to get better at them.
(Kindle specific)
Re: (Kindle specific)
(while youngest has a kobo, once I run out of things to read on the ipad, I'll have a loot there for things to read using the kindle ipad ap)
no subject
Thank you for the reference to the library - I will go and look at that when next in need of books. I have seen some of the issues with the Gutenberg books - the ones easily available through the Kobo store are frequently proper covers - but as a start, we have picked up about 50 books, and will worry about getting more when youngest has finished those. And I might go and have a poke around at Smashwords - mostly I'll be doing the looking, with guidance from youngest as to what zie is after, because the ereader has been registered on my laptop, rather than the family machine (compatibility issues with the ereader software).