Since yesterday (6/30/2015) the Ellora’s Cave site as been “under construction.” According to a post on their Facebook page, there’s a new site coming.
One has to wonder why they didn’t sandbox the new site and just swap it out with the old one once it’s done? That would, after all, be a best practice. You never nuke your entire site without having the new one ready to go and tested. A couple of hours, okay.
Going on a whole day? Hmmm.
EDIT: As of 1:30pm eastern time 7/1/2015, the generic “under construction” page has been replaced by a customized “under construction” page. Don’t know if that’s progress or stalling. It also appears that the domain is forwarding to an account on a dedicated WordPress hosting service, http://wpengine.com/
EDIT 2 (3:30pm EST, 7/1/2015) Deirdre Saoirse Moen reports on her site that EC has sent out e-mails regarding new Kindle contract terms and an e-mail dated today that reports a site changeover. (Note: I call shenanigans, because EC’s excuse about changing stuff is bullshit. There are apps/programs that allow for wholesale database find/replace functions to make the pricing changes like they’re talking about super-easy.) http://deirdre.net/elloras-cave-new-kindle-contract-and-forthcoming-website/
EDIT 3 (5:00pm EST, 7/1/2015) Apparently the EC site is now back up. I hope customers will somehow be able to access their previous purchases in some manner.
In regards to the new site recognizing EC’s old customers…in my case, not so much. It doesn’t recognize my userid or password but strangely when I try to register as a new customer it tells me that my userid is already in use. Hmmm ? Where have I heard a similar story? Oh, yeah. Now I remember. The same thing happened during the last major site modification. I lost 100’s and 100’s of books that just mysteriously failed to link to my account. My account (with my financial info) was still recognized but not the history of what I purchased so I was told sorry, should have backed things up, even though I was repeatedly warned that cracking the DRM was a violation of copyright & a major no-no. Silly me, just obeying the law when a freight train (complete w/ clown car) comes barreling down on me.
This time I only had 34 books on my bookshelf. Lessons learned and all that. For all their handwringing that going to Amazon first undercuts their profits at least I know that Amazon has a handle on data backup & recovery practices and an excellent Customer Service department that can and will make things right if there is a problem. EC does t even want to speak to their customers. In their after the fact announcement that they were jacking their (outdated & cumbersome) website they slipped into the language that customer complaints, issues & the like should be sent to an generic email account. Certainly gives the impression that they really don’t want to have to talk to anyone or address their problems. I suspect, if past history is any indicator, that emails are a heck of a lot easier to just ignore and “hey, extra benefit” you don’t have to pay anyone to deal with those inconvenient whiners.