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.
No, I didn’t. If you read my post, I said I bought the books on Kindle.
I backed one of the previous leatherbounds, and, understanding from that that there was no Amazon gift code for the e-books, didn’t get that through this campaign - instead opting to buy it when it went up on Amazon.
I don’t think he actually delayed the release of the e-books, just Audible - though I may be wrong. Looking at Amazon, I see that Tress~ was available from 10th January 2023 - which is, admittedly, 9 days later than the release to backers - but that’s really not significant or “withheld” or “boycotting” at all IMO. Wikipedia backs this up.
So, are you just annoyed about Audible not being available at the time? I see that’s apparently out as of April '24, so yeah, more of a delay, and you would have to re-buy access via Audible - but I’d assume you’d already listened to/read the book by now, if you were that into it / backed it.
Out of interest, what specific accessibility benefits are you looking for here? Genuinely a touch curious, having been trying to fill out a VPAT survey this week.
Whispersync and infinite scroll on kindle are pretty important for my nephew, who I backed this project for. I used to be a fan myself but have withdrawn from the community over the treatment we have recieved when asking for accommodation. He has a moderate visual processing disability that makes it extremely difficult for him to read print. The infinite scroll available on most native kindle titles let’s him sort of fix his eyes on one line instead of trying to refocus repeatedly down the page, and he says that helps him. We had issues with the .epub importing into kindle disabling the infinite scroll feature. We reached out repeatedly to dragon steel and were told that we’d have to repurchase the titles on Amazon when they were released there. That on its own was shitty, but trying to explain to him why the book might never be on Audible was devastating. I showed him that he could get the books to play on a different program, but all he understood was that audible was broken and he must’ve done something wrong. Needless to say it’s soured our entire household on anything Brandon Sanderson where it used to bridge so many chasms.
I’m sorry to hear about all that, that sounds like a really frustrating experience