Muses of Murari

I love reading books. You would have seen my views on some of the books I read in this blog. I made a habit to buy one or two books every month. The unread books keep piling in my shelf and this pushes me to complete reading them asap. This way, I force myself to read regularly. Last week, I got two mails, one from India Today Book Club and other from Flipkart, regarding some offers on their books. I saw lot of promotional mails, booklets from India Today Book Club. But, somehow I am not impressed with their offerings though they give good discounts. I visited flipkart.com and after seeing things well organized, I was tempted to buy and I bought the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.

Flipkart promised three day delivery and they did kept their word. I received the book today through Blue Dart. I was elated about the fact that at ease we can buy books. Next time, you don’t need to hover over hundreds of books in traditional book stores to find one which you are looking for. Just click of a button, you can order what you want and it gets delivered at your doorsteps.

India Today Book club has poorly designed website. Many things can be done, only when you become a member. The search results are pathetic. When you search well known and popular book like “Outliers” you get no results. And the worst part is promised delivery time is around 15 days! The only good thing is India Today offers very good discounts. Better than Flipkart. But fails miserably in customer experience, in my view.

Flipkart kept informing about the status like the book dispatch status, the courier reference number and expected date of delivery. All these, now-a-days have become minimal services to hook customers on to your side. Flipkart does the job neatly. There is also flip side with online stores. In traditional stores, you look for any damages on the book, you spend some time reading few pages before making buy decision. In online models, online reviews, recommendations from friends & blogs make that influence.  But regarding the physical damage, I really don’t know how online books stores (especially the Indian stores) deal with. Will the services to replace books or refund money, work as smooth & ease as with their delivery models?

Forget all these flip-flop stories, when e-book readers enter into our lives! Everything changes. Game changing device. If e-book readers entrench in our lives like ipods do, it is not difficult to speculate that the traditional book stores would face the same fate as Newspaper Industries all over the world facing today!

What you think?

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