A Wrinkle in Tech

Student comments and feedback January 30, 2012

General comments & suggestions from students:
“The Nook was cool”
“More books for girls”
“I think we should get more of todays [sic] books.  And some a little more challenging”

The third one is my favorite…If only they realized how expensive “today’s books” are, compared to the free classics I downloaded.

Suggestions for ebooks (Each line is from a single student; prices added and spelling corrected by me):
“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series by Jeff Kinney (sadly not available on Nook)
“Series of Unfortunate Events” series by Lemony Snicket ($6.99 each x 13 books)
“Titanic” series by Gordon Korman ($4.91 each x 2 books I don’t have)
“Baseball [Card] Adventure” series by Dan Gutman ($5.99 each x 11 books)
“The Penderwicks” by Jeanne Birdsall ($6.99) or “Heidi” by Johanna Spyri ($5.99 for Sterling Publishers’ version)
“Scumble” by Ingrid Law ($7.99), Touch Blue by Cynthia Lord (not available on Nook), and “Finally” by Wendy Mass ($5.59)
Another request for “Finally” by Wendy Mass

By combining the remaining amount on 2 gift cards, I was able to purchase “Finally” since that got two votes, and I’m asked at least once a week if we have more copies.  The rest of the ebooks available might be possible if I can purchase a gift card with a P.O.  Barring another donation, the gift card balances are expired.

My takeaway - Students know what they like when they are introduced to it, and their friends are a big influence on their choices.  I have booktalked other books by Wendy Mass and Cynthia Lord, and there is higher demand for them as soon as one students reads it and tells his/her friends.  I’ve known this in theory, but it helps to see it played out.  Now I just have to harness that social influence and keep students excited about discovering new books.

Handy Nook fix! January 30, 2012

I spoke with a “Nook expert” though the 1-800-THE-BOOK number today, and found out about a handy trick for resetting a frozen Nook.  I wish they would share this fix with the store employees, because when I took it to the store to either fix or exchange, they didn’t know what to do with it, and only offered to exchange it for a pre-owned Nook.  Since this particular device was only a month-ish old, I declined and decided to work with the phone support, which I’ve always been pleased with.

For some background, this Nook device was completely frozen.  No amount of “soft resetting” (pressing and holding the power button for 20 seconds or more) or charging it had any effect whatsoever.  I had another device do the same thing a month ago, and then this one started acting up shortly after.  The brick-and-mortar store kindly and swiftly replaced the first one with a new one.  Since then, no issues in the slightest.

So when I spoke with this customer service rep, Keith, he asked confirmed what I’d tried so far (charging it, soft resetting, attempting to wake it up), and then he asked me to plug it into my computer.  To my surprise, the Nook was recognized when plugged in with a USB.  It didn’t show up right away as an external device.  Then he told me the most helpful thing…he asked me to hold down the power button and then the Nook button simultaneously for 5 seconds, then release it.  At first, nothing, then suddenly the screen came up that it was charging and the battery was too low to start up just then.  Incredible!!!  I was thrilled of course, and since then I’ve double-checked all the functions we’ve been using.  It all works!

My only question for B&N is this: why not train your brick-and-mortar store employees to be able to do some of these tricks for customers?  Often a helpful, courteous, real, live person is more valuable to customer support than a phone conversation.  In fact, one of the reasons that I chose Nooks over Kindles was the in-person support through the stores.  The irony is that my best support experiences have been on the phone, not online or in the store.

According to conversations with store employees, this isn’t a reflection on the management of the store, so much as B&N corporate keeping the stores in the dark.  The general gist of the comments I heard was that boxes just show up one day, and they find out there’s a new device coming out the following morning.  No training, no notice.  Honestly, given the number of blogs leaking technology gadget information, is all the secrecy really necessary?  And shouldn’t your employees that are directly meeting with customers have access to a device to learn how it works before they try to sell it?  It just makes no sense.

Larger issues aside, I’ve now had 3 great customer service experiences (1 in-store, 2 on the phone) and 1 disappointing one (in-store).  If I had to give a grade, I’d say B&N is at an A- right now.

The value of record-keeping January 11, 2012

After today, I am totally convinced that all the extra “paper” record-keeping I did was absolutely worth it!

As I stated yesterday, one of the Nooks has been acting up and generally behaving like the one that bit the dust already.  I thought it was strange that it was part of the same “set” as the Nook that died, so I checked my BN.com account and sure enough there were 7 Nooks registered to that account!  The dead one I had returned wasn’t “de-registered.”

I immediately called customer service and they were really amazing, especially as customer service goes.  Kudos, BN!  As soon as I got to talk to a real person (which only took about 1 minute), I found out that yes, that would be a problem to have too many devices on one account.  And yes, they could easily remove the returned Nook…all I needed was the dead Nook’s serial number.  Unfortunately, the Nook was not in my custody…not even close.

Now with 7 devices listed on the account, it would be time-consuming to look up each Nook’s serial number and then use process-of-elimination to figure out with serial number listed online was the dead one.  Using electronic methods only, I would only narrow it down to 2: the dead one and the misbehaving one that I can’t get to access the settings menu.

Since I had written the serial numbers and my assigned Nook numbers on the boxes, though, I had the correct number right away.  The very nice customer service rep. said it would take a while to get it to sync with the online system, but he thought that might help clear up the issues with that set of Nooks.  Time will tell on that matter.

And so, despite living in a more electronic and paperless world, sometimes the best way to keep track of or fix something, is plain ol’ pen and paper.  Ironic, isn’t it?