Quick, what’s the difference between these 4 items (results of searching for at Amazon.com) ?
- NIV Audio Bible Dramatized CD (Audio CD - Jan 1, 2002) - Audiobook ($63)
- NIV Dramatized Audio Bible by Zondervan (Audio CD - Nov 1, 2004) - Unabridged ($49.99)
- NIV Audio Bible Voice Only CD by Zondervan (Audio CD - Feb 1, 2002) - Unabridged (50.39)
- NIV Audio Bible New Testament Dramatized CD by Zondervan (Audio CD - Sep 1, 2001) - Audiobook ($32.99)
Is the first one abridged? It doesn’t say it’s abridged, but the other ones say “Unabridged”
The second one is $13 less and it says that it’s unabridged too. It’s also newer by 2.5 years.
The third one is voice only, which I eventually figured out was the opposite of “Dramatized.”
The fourth one… oh wait, that’s just the New Testament.
The first one is not abridged. If you click through you would see its name changes to
The second one is also not abridged, but it’s not an audio CD. It’s MP3s on CD, which you might understand if you looked closely at which is what its name changes to when you click through.
Now if you look at it like that, you might see that it says “MP3 Audio” but what I saw was “Unabridged” and “Audio CD”
I found myself adrift in a sea of options, some sold by Amazon.com (and therefore free shipping!) and some not (and so shipping might be extra). Abridged or unabridged? (Unabridged, of course. As Stephen King says, I don’t get abridged books. Especially for the Bible. He didn’t say that last part, I did.) Just the New Testament or the whole thing? (Whole thing. See above about abridgment… leaving off 75% of the Bible doesn’t sound too smart to me!) Some were PC programs of the Bible, some were audio bibles, some where listed as “audio books” and some were listed as “audio CDs.”
Finally I found two versions of what I wanted. One was $50 and the other was $63. By this point I was pretty bleary eyed from all the different stuff I had looked at, so I thought “I’m going to order the $50 one, and if it’s less than $13, I’m going to get the 2 day shipping so I can have it by the weekend.”
2 day shipping was $12, so I placed the order and went to take an aspirin and a nap to sooth my achin’ head.
The package arrived today, as scheduled, but something looked wrong. At first I thought that they had just sent the New Testament, but it said “Complete NIV Bible” on the front. I went to the car, plugged in disc 1…
…and it chugged, and chugged, and chugged….
And then my CD player spit the disc out.
I took it out and checked for scratches. Nope.
I put it back in, thinking perhaps it was just being ornery. Chug chug chug spit.
Disc 2, same thing.
“Well that’s odd” I thought. And I went to put them back in the case.
That’s when I noticed a little circle (about the size of a quarter) on the front of the package which said:
![[mp3 CDs]](/files/mp3cds.png)
Oh you’re kidding me.
I think I remembered looking at the MP3 NIV at one point, but it was like looking at one piece of hay in a haystack. It didn’t really make an impression and I didn’t think much about it because I knew my car didn’t play MP3 CDs.
Well I could just load the MP3s onto my iPod, but then I can just imagine them getting into all my play lists, etc. I really wanted the real CDs. You can make MP3s from CDs, but you can’t make CDs from MP3s
Ok, now what?
I knew I could email Amazon.com but I really wanted to talk to someone. I vaguely remembered that there was an option to but I had never done it before.
I thought it was a process where I’d send them my phone number and someone would call me back when they got a chance. I’ve tried that before with limited success at other places. But Amazon.com doesn’t work like that. You put your number in and click the button and whammo your phone rings. Immediately. Pick it up and you hear it ringing on the other side.
“Joe M” answered the phone. Was his name really “Joe M?” I don’t know, but at least he spoke a language clearly discernible as English as opposed to someone with a thick Indian accent who says his name is “Biff.”
I explained to him the problem, and he was very understanding. He said that yes, MP3 CDs were not like regular CDs. I told him what I had done and how I had gotten confused by it. He did the same search that I did and agreed that it was confusing (the MP3 part was not always clear in the product description) and said he’d have it looked into.
We looked through and found that the $63 version was, in fact, what I had wanted (I should have just assumed the cheaper one was wrong, Murphy’s law and all that). He said there would be no problem returning the other ones for a full refund — including my 2 day shipping costs!!!
No one, I mean no one, refunds shipping costs, do they? Well, Amazon.com did. Why? Because it’s good customer service. Yeah I made a mistake, but he could understand and agree that it was an easy mistake to make, so hey, here’s your refund.
Not long ago, I paid $300 for a TV and then another $80 for an extended service warranty from Best Buy and spent months trying to get decent customer service. Here’s Joe, giving me more attention, consideration, and compassion over a $60 purchase than I got from Best Buy for $380 including paying for extra service.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll order the other ones. If I do the free shipping it won’t cost any more than what I already paid. I won’t have it here by the weekend [since it was already Thursday], but that’s OK…”
“Hold on,” said Joe, “let me see what I can do.”
He put me on hold for a few minutes, came back on and said “Ok, I went ahead and put a credit on your account for the cost of overnight shipping, so you can go ahead, place the new order and go for the overnight shipping and that way you can have it by the weekend.”
I was dumbstruck. Who goes out of their way to help people like this? I didn’t ask him (and never expected) but he saw that I had tried to order something, made a mistake, and he wanted to make it right.
He suggested that I go ahead and place the order while I had him on the phone (again, what?!? Don’t they train tech support people to get you off the phone as possible? Apparently Amazon.com hasn’t gotten that memo, because he wasn’t rushing me at all). I asked if I could have it sent to my home address instead of my billing address, he said no problem. I went through, verified the shipping credit had been applied and —
“Oh crap,” I said into the phone.
“Did you place the order before changing the shipping address?” he asked, without any tone of mockery in his voice, despite the fact that I had clearly earned it. (I hate that he knows me so well 5 minutes into our relationship.)
He went in and changed the shipping address for me so I don’t have to wait at the church on my day off for the UPS guy to come.
Let’s review that last part again:
- he agreed to refund my shipping costs for my initial order because of my mistake/confusion
- he gave me a credit towards overnight shipping so it would be there by the weekend (even though I had only paid for 2 day shipping, but 2 days on Tuesday got it here Thursday. 2 days on Thursday would be Monday at the earliest)
- he stayed on the phone with me to make sure the shipping credit was applied
- by staying on the phone with me, he fixed the shipping address that I got wrong which saved me from wasting part of my day off or having to wait until Monday to get the package, which would have ruined most of what we had been working to avoid in the first place.
Let’s assume they’re paying Joe $30/hour to do customer support (I have no idea if that’s a reasonable guess or not. If anyone has a better estimate, please let me know). The conversation with me was probably about 10 minutes on the phone, so that cost Amazon.com $5. Refunding my shipping will cost $12, and the shipping credit was about $18. So there’s $35. The item I bought was only $63.
Someone with an accounting degree might look at that and say it was a terrible financial decision. After all, it was my dumb mistake in the first place. Heck, they might end up losing money on this transaction!
Hopefully someone with some business savvy would pipe in and say, “But what did that $35 gain us?”
But how likely am I to place an order with Amazon.com again? Very.
Compare that to Buy.com, where I ordered an item ($200) and then returned it when we decided we didn’t want it, and it took over two months to get a credit back on my credit card. Then, this week, I ordered something from Buy.com and they sent the wrong item. I ordered an Ultra ATA laptop drive and they sent an SATA drive, so it won’t fit. The receipt shows I ordered an Ultra ATA drive, but the packing list shows an SATA drive was sent, and that the SKU didn’t match.
How likely am I to order from Buy.com again? Wait, before you answer, it gets better.
I called up to order a replacement, and the tech support guy at Buy.com (who was a native English speaker but mumbled so badly I could hardly understand him, and whose apathy oozed through the phone) told me that the price had gone up since I placed my initial order (I had sent the incorrect one back and was trying to order a new one).
“Actually” I said “the price has gone down, but the shipping was free when I ordered the other day.”
His response was something like “Well, promotions change.”
“You sent me the wrong drive!!” I replied. “Now you want me to pay more to get the correct one?!?”
He transferred me to someone else. So I had to start all over again.
Now tell me, how likely do you think it is that I’ll order from Buy.com anytime soon?
Best Buy treated me like a disease when I need help on a $300 TV with an $80 extended warranty.
Buy.com treated me like a problem when they sent me the wrong $130 hard drive.
Amazon.com went out of their way to help me to correct a mistake that I made when ordering a $50 item.
If anyone at Amazon.com reads this, Joe M. deserves a raise. Seriously. Or at least a bonus. You can’t pay someone to care (as clearly evident by the other experiences I’ve had with other companies) but you can reward them for caring. What I estimated as $35 that this cost your multi-gabillion dollar business has bought a truckload of goodwill.
The same people I told about our horrendous experiences with Best Buy will also hear what great service I got from Amazon.com.
Thank you, Joe M, wherever you are.
Coda
In MP3 format, the Bible comes on 6 CDs. On regular audio CD the Bible is on sixty-four (yes 64) CDs. Yikes! That’s almost one CD per book! Then again, at $63 that’s less than $1 per CD!
I wonder if they could get all of the MP3s onto one DVD? Assuming 650MB per CD times 6 = 3,900MB. They could be 700MB CDs which would be 4,200MB. I doubt they are all filled to the limit, though. I’d bet that they could all fit on one regular DVD. That would make it a bit simpler. However I do know that some CD players can play MP3 CDs, so that might not be ideal.
The best solution would be to change the listing in the search results.
This:
NIV Dramatized Audio Bible by Zondervan (Audio CD - Nov 1, 2004) - Unabridged
Should look more like this:
NIV Dramatized Audio Bible by Zondervan (MP3 CD - Nov 1, 2004) - Unabridged
Why? The word “Audio” is already in the title. Calling it an “Audio CD” is redundant and potentially confusing. Wait, not “potentially” confusing, it confused me, and I’m not, generally speaking, stupid.
This:
NIV Dramatized Audio Bible [UNABRIDGED] [MP3 AUDIO] (Audio CD)
2 brackets and a parenthetical? That’s crazy. Yet almost all of the results in this category have them.
Should look more like this:
NIV Audio Bible, Dramatized and Unabridged (MP3 CD)
There’s also a need for standardization in nomenclature:
- NIV Audio Bible Dramatized CD (Audio CD - Jan 1, 2002) - Audiobook
- NIV Dramatized Audio Bible by Zondervan (Audio CD - Nov 1, 2004) - Unabridged
- NIV Audio Bible Voice Only CD by Zondervan (Audio CD - Feb 1, 2002) - Unabridged
- NIV Audio Bible New Testament Dramatized CD by Zondervan (Audio CD - Sep 1, 2001) - Audiobook
- NIV New Testament Audio On CD by Zondervan (Audio CD - Jun 1, 2004) - Audiobook
- NIV Audio Bible: New International Version Holy Bible on Compact Disc by Stephen Johnston (Audio CD - April 1995) - Audiobook
- The NIV Study Bible: New International Version, Study Bible, Version 6.0, Study Level 1 (Audio CD)
First of all, the first 5 are all by Zondervan. I’m not sure why putting Zondervan in the title matters, but if it does, it ought to be in the first one also.
The first two “NIV Audio Bible Dramatized” vs “NIV Dramatized Audio Bible” need to be identical. One says it’s an “Audiobook” and the other says it is “Unabridged.” Both are audiobooks and unabridged.
The difference is that one is regular audio CDs and the other is MP3s on CDs, but that isn’t clear from either of these summary titles.
“NIV Audio Bible New Testament Dramatized CD” and “NIV New Testament Audio On CD” seem like the same thing, except that one of them has “Bible New Testament” in the title, which seems almost redundant or at least confusing.
“NIV Audio Bible: New International Version Holy Bible ” and “The NIV Study Bible: New International Version” are completely redundant. “NIV” stands for “New International Version” so why say NIV Study Bible NIV Study Bible?
Also, the last one appears to be not an audio CD at all, but rather a computer CD with a software program containing the NIV. The ‘Version 6.0’ might be a clue, also the “Windows XP” in the .
If it is the Bible on audio CD, it must be the best deal of the bunch, since it is selling for $15.59.