“Don’t like your tone, boy!”

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Buondì.

I detested school, from the very first day when – aged five – I was prodded unknowing into the maw of Warberry Primary School, until that sunny, June afternoon eleven years later when –  aged 16 and clutching a bag of leaflets detailing what were then known as venereal diseases – I was paroled from Hele’s Comprehensive.

The uniforms were ugly and uncomfortable, the lessons were tedious, and we were expected to play rugby in the driving rain. Or, if the ground was frozen, run ‘cross-country’, which meant jogging (before ‘jogging’ was a thing) through the grounds of the neighbouring lunatic asylum, over a stream, up a muddy hill, and back to school via country lanes and the path next to the dual carriageway, soaking wet and panting in the chilled air.

For classmates it was a good chance for a smoke, but I’m sure I’d have learnt much more had I been left at the steps of the local library each day, instead.

Apart from the waste of my formative years, what I particularly hated about school was the permanent sense of threat, not to mention the regular outbreaks of actual violence.

The latter I learnt to deal with, first by putting up with the pain and humiliation, eventually by fighting back. It was a jungle, so you sort-of had to, in the end. The teachers, supposed guardians of law and order, would generally look the other way.

One particular fellow, a music teacher, having sniffed the air of a morning and sensed trouble brewing amongst his pupils, would absent himself from the classroom on the excuse of having to run some errand, so leaving aggressor and victim to sort things out, to the enthustiastic baying of the other thirty or so teenagers.

Complaints of any type were not to be tolerated.

Bullying? Grow a pair, go sort it out for yourself. It’ll be a valuable life lesson!

Bored? Try a little harder, won’t you? Or, if you prefer, we can discuss this with the head teacher…

Rather a surprise then, that I ended up as a teacher myself. Though of adults mostly, and in the private sector where customers are valued rather than victimised.

Still, at sixteen I put the ‘happiest days of my life’ (my father’s take on my school career) behind me, and got on with ‘college’, then adult life, in both of which norms of civilised behaviour, and actual laws, meant not having to live each new day intimidated and fearful.

E così. Times have changed, apparently, and adults no longer get to intimidate, terrify, and mismanage children in return for easy hours, long holidays, and a comfortable salary.

Imagine my surprise, then, when one of my primary school teachers crawled out of the woodwork, via an ebook store customer service email!

OK, so I’m not sure it was actually her. I would have been about six, now I’m fifty-seven, so if it was, she’d be about eighty, and still as scary and unpleasant as ever.

But it certainly sounded like her. Here’s the exchange, more or less verbatim:

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Q: I can’t download it as an error message comes up saying I have exceeded my download limit.
As this is the first purchase and download I have attempted I don’t think this is right. Not a very good start.

A: That’s usually an ipad or iphone problem. The user needs to specify which app should open a link before using it, or it will fail. Your ebook is attached to this email. SCROLL DOWN TO FIND IT.

Q: Thanks. I didn’t see an instruction to specify which app, where is it? I just clicked the link provided. It didn’t work on iPad, phone or MacbookAir. Usually the provider’s problem rather than the device but hey ho.

A: In the FAQ https://easyreaders.org/faq/

Problems with ebook download links
As mentioned above, our ebooks are delivered via a download link which is sent automatically by our shop software as soon as your payment has cleared, usually immediately.
The download link is set to expire after 7 days (we really want you to read your ebook, not just buy it…) so please use the download link when you receive it. You get 3 download attempts, which should be more than enough.
However, perhaps you’ve never done this before, and clicked more than three times without understanding where the downloaded ebook has gone? Or maybe you were on holiday, so put off doing the download until you got home, by which point the link had expired? You will then see an error message, something unhelpful about a system error, which it wasn’t.
DON’T WORRY! We can fix this. Just write to us and we can either renew the download link for a further period, add more download attempts, or – if all else fails – email the ebook or ebooks to you manually, as attachments. That always works!
N.b. People using iPhones and iPads often have problems with download links, as Apple would prefer you to buy ebooks and so on directly from them, so make things harder than they would be on a computer or an Android device. With this in mind, why not just click the download link once and see what happens? (Or better still, use a device that isn’t produced by Apple to download your ebook.) Then, having clicked once, if it’s not obvious what you should do to view/save your ebook, you’ll still have two further attempts, so you can figure out what you’re doing wrong (it is an Apple / Apple-user issue, not a problem with our system, we promise…) But if you can’t manage the download, just email us for help.

Q: Probably be easier not to order from you than change all my devices!

A: Easier for me, too. Fortunately you’re the only customer this year who’s had this issue and didn’t appreciate the immediate solution I offered.

Q: It’s your tone Daniel, right from the start, that’s the problem for me.

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When I was five, I didn’t understand what ‘tone’ was, but I knew enough to recognise the criticism and implied threat.

Details of the ebook offer are below, if anyone’s interested. Since Monday I’ve had a dozen or so customer service emails, all pleasant except the one above, all resolved in one brief email exchange.

Customer service, though…

I hate doing it because of exchanges like the above (while I’m trying to cook Bug’s dinner or prepare his bottles), and because of the rather more frequent problems caused by iPad and iPhone users who didn’t take the trouble to learn how to use their devices before landing on my metaphorical doorstep.

So why bother? After all, I indirectly own the company. Should I really have to dirty my hands with this sort of grunt work? And isn’t there someone more suited to being nice to rude people (like my wife, who runs our Italian school) who could do it for me?

I DETEST companies that use ‘do not reply’ emails.

I DETEST it when I’m paying good money for a service (sometimes thousands of dollars a year) and I have to fill in an online form to get help, to which there’s often no timely reply.

I DETEST it when – having offered a detailed and informed description of my customer service issue – the response, when it eventually comes, is a copy/paste from a ‘help’ page that I’d already read.

So I try to do better, that’s why.

And I don’t delegate because, frankly, there are so many ways that people can mess up that it would be hard to train someone to know what the problem is each time and so deal with it effectively (which is, of course, why so many companies don’t bother.)

Two lessons here:

1.) If ‘real’ customer service is available to you, appreciate it. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, keep your sarcasm in check, and “don’t argue back”, as parents and primary school teachers used to say to bolshie kids.

2.) And take a little responsibility, maybe? There are dozens of popular devices on which ebooks can be read, and thousands of apps for them, so dozens of thousands of combinations. If free samples are available (which they totally are in our ebooks store) why not play with them a little until you know how to download them, open them, save them, open them again from the saved location, etc. on your preferred device and app? Then, if you still need help, you could ask how to proceed BEFORE buying something.

N.b. There are FREE EBOOKS IN OUR STORE (here and here for Italian), so you can try out the whole process – purchase, download, open, save, read, listen – BEFORE you spend your hard-earned cash on the offer below.

Coda: ever heard that bookstores don’t make any money? Perhaps your local book seller closed their shutters in disgust and the place is now a Starbucks?

It’s true. And it happens to ebook stores, too! EasyReaders.org is basically a hobby business. It generates little in the way of income, but more than its fair share of complaining emails (Thanks Apple!)

In the face of brutally anti-competitive practices from device manufacturers (i.e. making it hard for their users to do simple things like download .pdfs), not to mention overwhelming competition from online retail and search giants, my suggestion would be that if you find a human-sized business, offering original products, and with an owner who answers emails themselves…

Value it while it lasts.

Alla prossima settimana!

Select your own ‘Half-price Ebook of the Week’ and save £5!

Here at EasyReaders.org we regularly do ‘Half-price Ebook of the Week’ offers.

Usually though, it’s us that decide which title we want to promote. We’ll pick out an ebook title that we liked ourselves but which didn’t make much of an impact when we promoted it previously.

That’s almost always an Italian language text, as we have fewer people interested in French, Spanish, German and other languages.

The problem, of course, is that we do have ebooks for different languages, and they’re written for learners at a variety of different levels.

Something suitable for advanced learners won’t be appropriate for beginners, and vice versa. We use six levels and six half-levels to give an indication of the ease or difficulty of our texts, so that’s quite a range!

And obviously a text in Italian will be no use for people learning German, French or Spanish.

The solution?

This week we’re letting people select their own ‘Half-price Ebook of the Week’!

The idea is to offer a coupon code that’s equivalent to a 50% reduction in price on any ‘easy reader’ ebook, then let learners pick one out for themselves.

How will this work?

To offer everyone the chance of a half-price ‘easy reader’ at their preferred level, without having to do masses of work at this end, we’ve created a COUPON CODE worth £5:

Save £5!

How do you use Save £5! to get your Half Price ebook?

Browse our online Catalog, downloading sample chapters for anything that interests you, until you find one or more titles that will liven up your studies and provide valuable extra reading/listening practice.

Add them to your Cart, in the usual way.

Then copy and paste coupon code Save £5! into your cart (before proceeding with the payment, obviously…) and that’ll reduce the total of whatever’s in there by the promised £5.

Just buy one title, normal price £9.99 and (assuming you remember to use coupon code Save £5! ) the amount charged will be just £4.99.

Just £4.99 for an ebook that normally sells for £9.99 is excellent value, especially as you can ask for additional versions for use on Kindles and other ebook readers, at no extra charge.

Don’t see the reduction??? It’s not the item price that’s reduced by £5, but the CART TOTAL. In your cart scroll down to see that the cart total has been reduced by £5.

N.b. This offer ends during the night of October 13th 2024.

This offer is for one discount of £5, not one discount on each product. Coupon code Save £5! is one use per customer, which means if you mess up your order (say you choose the wrong payment option), then try again with a new order, the coupon won’t work the second time.

In which case, just email. I’ll fix it for you by deleting the messed-up order, and you’re good to try again.

Ready to pick out your own, personalised -50% ‘eBook of the Week’ from our Catalog page?

Don’t forget to take a look at the free sample chapters before you decide what to spend your £4 discount on!

Don’t know where to start? Then try exploring these categories:

Easy readers | History/historical | Literature | Cinema | Opera | Italian-English parallel texts

Find more ebooks, organised by level, then type: A1 | A1/A2 | A2 | A2/B1 | B1 | B1/B2 | B2 | B2/C1 | C1 | C1/C2 | C2

But also:

French | Spanish | German | Portuguese | Turkish | Swedish

How do I access my ebook?

When your order is ‘completed’ (normally immediately after your payment), a download link will be automatically emailed to you. It’s valid for 7 days and 3 download attempts so please save a copy of the .pdf ebook in a safe place. Other versions of the ebook, where available, cannot be downloaded but will be emailed to people who request them. There’s a space to do that on the order form – where it says Additional information, Order notes (optional). If you forget, or if you have problems downloading the .pdf, don’t worry! Email us at the address on the website and we’ll help. Also, why not check out our FAQ?

P.S.

And of course, don’t forget to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news, a fantastic, FREE way to consolidate the grammar and vocabulary you’ve studied, as well as to improve your Italian reading and listening comprehension skills!

Visit their website to get started immediately!

Better still, subscribe (also FREE) and so get all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news emailed to you each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be emailed to you.
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