Good ol BrandoSando has screwed the community again. First, he announces the secret project and promises us new stories. Then, he “boycotts” amazon with JUST THESE COMMUNITY FUNDED STORIES. Now, he’s making money on books we bought without letting us utilize the accessibility features we’ve come to expect from his other work unless we pay him again.
Tl;Dr Brandon Sanderson is an exploitative greed monster that swallowed 43 million dollars and is hungry for more. Do not buy Brandon Sanderson products until this betrayal is addressed.
The secret project books were purposefully withheld from kindle and audible as a “boycott” by Brandon. The problem is that the community already paid for these books to be written and should not be charged more simply to access these books in the format we prefer. Specifically, some readers have accessibility needs that were simply not met on the kickstarter release for these titles. These accessibility features are available on kindle and audible, as with virtually every other Brandon sanderson release. Taking the kickstarter money and then charging people who already paid for the books more just to access these features is a gross money grab move.
Kindle is definitely not withheld, i have it as part of my backerkit reward with no additional purchase
EDIT: also why do you keep putting boycott in quotation marks? he explicitly stated the problems that he had with audibles platform, they backed down on them specifically because of his boycott, and he didn’t put the books on audible until after they made the change. that’s not a fake boycott that’s an effective one
Idk if you’re being deliberately misleading, but the ebooks were specifically withheld from the Kindle platform during the backer kit release. It was possible to import the .epub file into Kindle, but doing so restricted certain accessibility features due to the file being imported rather than natively available in the store. This was the entire issue for some readers.
Further, Brandon actually folded his boycott without achieving any of his stated goals except to get audible at the table at all. That’s not a victory, that’s taking the first plea deal they put on the table. It’s pathetic and it shows the publisher that shit talks when money walks. A tiny improvement is insignificant in the face of true change. Brandon didn’t change anything. He just screwed everyone who backed him on the project.
not deliberately misleading just not sure i understand what the big deal is between imported and native. i remember there being some formatting issues at launch and so they fixed those and made an epub specifically for Kindle to handle those issues. what accessibility features are missing with imported files?
I also use a kindle and try to buy most books away from Amazon so I imported the epubs from backerkit and read all the way through those without issue. Didn’t hear about anyone having issues
For what it’s worth, people don’t generally gift Amazon copies of books when they can send out epubs. A previous Kickstarter campaign for Dragonsteel also fulfilled in this way, I suspect they all have. Have you seen it working differently elsewhere? Why did you think it would work like that here?
The previous kickstarter campaigns aren’t really comparable here. First off, for the leather-bound books, those are already released titles being reprinted in higher quality binding. They’re commemorative or collectible editions of media already on the market. As for the new stormlight archive releases, they’re almost always bundled with audible products where desired. This is the first publishing campaign where Brandon had full control, and he used it to scam the community with an inferior, incomplete product when compared to his other releases. We were promised “full functionality” except we never recieved it. Now, that functionality is available for an additional cost. When you buy a video game, do you expect to pay more over time for patches and qol improvements? Ofc not. Why should the community continue to pay for products we’ve already purchased?
I personally think he did an adequate job explaining his position.
Change is often incremental. Sanderson didn’t get everything he wanted, but he moved the needle. That’s meaningful. Allowing perfection to be the enemy of progress is an immature position, in my view.
As for not working with Kindle, using Send to Kindle with the Kindle EPUBs (specifically labeled as “EPUB for Kindle” and formatted to work properly on the Kindle) from the Secret Projects uploaded them just fine to my Kindle and the Kindle app. Progress, highlights, and notes sync just fine between devices. Fonts can be changed and resized. Justification options are all there.
Obviously we don’t get syncing between the ebook and the audiobook, but as far as I know that use of Whispersync is the only thing we miss out on without official Audible and Kindle purchased versions, but that’s a minor annoyance and not something worth being angry about if you ask me.
Maybe there are other accessibility features I don’t use that are missing, I don’t know.