An open letter to Audible.com
Submitted to Audible.com’s “ask a question” page (I’d link it, but I can’t, really – read on). The reason for the admittedly snarky tone, and for my posting this on my blog, is that I’ve tried to ask these same questions, nicely, via all available tech-support and customer-feedback routes. Once or twice a year for several years now. I’ve been a subscriber all that time, so it’s not like I haven’t been patient…
The responses have been about 90% deafening silence, with 10% being a canned response telling me I should use a modern browser. Must be triggered by the word “javascript” in the emails.
Anyway, just for fun, let’s see when/if they reply.
Subject: Javascript and bookmarking fun Please, please answer me this time -- historically I get a not-terribly-relevant canned response. What's with all the Javascript links? I can't open a book in a new window or browser tab, the back button doesn't always work right -- the rest of the web figured out 5 or 6 years ago that these were bad things. And I'm sorry you guys used Broadvision, but it's not my fault -- please don't punish me by making it impossible to reliably do crazy things like bookmark a page. Either I leave out the BV session/engine info (giving me an immediate "Timeout" error, instead of establishing a new session and redirecting, like sane people) or I leave it in and the link soon goes stale, giving that same timeout error. Seriously, I love the service, but the site navigation seems designed to thwart users. I won't even try to suggest latest-additions RSS feeds...