Alert! In a recent blog post, the Mail & Guardian’s resident film critic, Shaun de Waal, laments the difficulties of dealing with Exclusive Books and its online shop at ExclusiveBooks.com.
De Waal recounts his frustrations in some detail, and even goes so far as to recommend an EB rival, loot.co.za, for sourcing books.
Word on the street for some time now is that the rather antiquated EB.com is in for a revamp, but the deadlines for the new-look site keep getting pushed back.
The comments below de Waal’s post are worth a glance - and we would be remiss without mentioning that our own BOOK Finder might prove useful to the critic, on occasion. Search three online shops at once, Shaun!
In search of Chéri (and its sequel, The Last of Chéri, with which it is nowadays packaged) I went on to the internet and logged in to the Exclusive Books site, www.exclusivebooks.com. As the biggest book chain in South Africa, I thought Exclusive would be most likely to be able to tell me if and how I could get a copy of Chéri relatively fast. I also thought that since a lot of Colette had been recently republished in Vintage, an imprint of one of the giant publishers (I got Colette’s The Cat not so long ago), I thought it would be easy to find what is probably her most famous work after Gigi. How wrong I was.
The title could not be located on the site, with or without its acute accent. Look up “Chéri” and you get Cherished Tales of the Countryside as first hit, and How to Love Yourself: Cherishing the Incredible Miracle That You Are as the second. Look up Colette as author and you get something by someone called Colette Brooks and another by one Colette Caddle, but no Colette as such. Searching around the site and trying different options, I did stumble upon The Collected Stories of Colette, its price mysteriously given as R0.00 and its availability “unknown”. But when I looked for it again it had disappeared and could not be found again — “No results match your request”. Computer says no.
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