Tuesday, February 12, 2013

A warning about Bookish.com

Just a quick warning. If you're thinking about signing up for the new social media site, Bookish.com, I'd advise against it. Once you've signed up, there is no way for you to delete your account. There is also no way for you to unsubscribe from their newsletter.

I'm emphasizing the word "YOU" because the power to change your involvement in this site does not lie in your hands. In order to do these things, you must petition their customer service department, which I have already done to no avail. How time consuming can it be to delete one person's account? Or better still, give their customer service department a break and put the power of account deletion into our hands where it belongs?

When I tried to point out these things in a message uisng the Bookish "feedback" email address, I got a failure-to-deliver message from Gmail that reads, "Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain bookish.com [...] The error that the other server returned was: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist."

In addition, the site lacks the flexibility and interactiveness of Goodreads.com in that you cannot easily add a book to their book database. If you're an author, you are supposed to contact your publisher and ask them to submit your book for you to Bookish. I'm sure authors and publishers alike would rather not have to jump through those hoops just to get that done. I'm also unclear on who Bookish would even recognize as a "legitimate" publisher.

Anyway, if I'd known that I'd have no power to cut loose from this site once my personal information was ensnared by them, I never would have got involved with Bookish. I hope I can save some other people the trouble. (Edited to add that the customer service department did delete my account about a week after I asked them to.)

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2 comments:

  1. D'oh! I'll include this in linkity this week. I almost included something about them last week - guess I should've. :/

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  2. Hi, Chris! Yes, isn't this weird? It's pretty much de rigueur for social media sites to let users control their own accounts. DEFINITELY include it in linkity, if you'd like. The more people who can avoid my mistake, the better. And maybe Bookish will just wither on the vine as everyone continues to ignore them and go to Goodreads.

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