I’m afraid I feel that I have to add, without naming names, that a Faber source has privately admitted to me that the problems I detail above with the site are known to them, which I think justifies my other comments. I’m certainly not saying it’s easy.

http://postspectacular.com/process/20080711_faberfindslaunch

What is the reasoning behind resetting a text to be exactly the same as previous additions? Surely a large part of resetting is to make it fit the page better?

I’ve just been to the site again, and here’s what happened:

I added this book to my basket, and then clicked ‘Checkout’ in the sidebar. I was then told there was nothing in my basket.

Am I supposed to sign in before I order? There is no assistance so it’s hard to know. I then signed in, and the basket forgot my order, so had to re-enter it.

Oh no, it’s still in there on the book page, but not on the basket page.

I previously found that removing stuff from my basket actually resulted in a server error, but since I now can’t seem to even add anything to my basket, whether logged in or not, and tried lots of different books, I gave up.

Added to this the complete lack of styling on a number of pages, and the fact that faberfinds runs in an iframe, I’m sticking to calling it lazily-designed. Sorry, it’s not meant personally, but what do you expect when I can’t use it?

James@digitalist was right that the text has been re-set. Rather than reflowing the text, the plan was to stick to the same lines and line-endings as seen in the original texts.

Faber Finds is a very ambitious project – there should be at least 300 titles each year (it doubles Faber’s list). In an ideal world there’d be more people and more time to work on the books. There’s obviously room for improvement but if you believe it’s just another cynical fleecing exercise you should spend a few minutes in the company of the series editor …

And as for the ‘lazily designed’ Faber site, we didn’t feel lazy when we were slaving away at it. It’s not the finished article yet in terms of content and integrating bits of technology further down the line. Surely it boils down to the question ‘why would anyone visit a publisher’s website?’. There’s a number of different answers to that question and a few different audiences to cater for – not all of whom are Twitter-literate or on last.fm (now there’s a backlash …)

I was sad to find this was the case because I was pleased with the concept and thought the approach to covers was fun, and the list is certainly enticing. But having paid £16+ (after delivery charges) for a sub-par product, I’m unlikely to buy again.

I can only imagine that the folks at Faber are aware of these issues and for some (good or otherwise) reason had to make decisions that put Faber Finds where it is in terms of product quality. I’d be interested to discuss that decisions making process with them…

I’m impatient to know a little more, James !… Especially after this post who shows that POD does not yet appear to be technically mature.

I’m sorry you consider bkkeepr dross, but one of the many points of it was that publishers don’t have to spend huge resources on projects like this: it cost me nothing to build. The new market, as the three sites I pointed to show, has nothing to do with spending vast sums of money on expensive agencies.

Interesting post, but your last paragraph lets you down! When assessing other recent projects (and the new Canongate site is at least an improvement on the previous two incarnations), you might have mentioned that the new Granta site doesn’t exactly set pulses racing. If publishers start spending resources they don’t have on dross like Bkkeepr will they then be successfully understanding the workings of the new market?