What's the worst non-canon decision in the history of Trek?

[Steve Roby]

I've been buying Star Trek books since the early 1970s, and since the late 1990s I've had easy and helpful ways to not only let me know that new Star Trek books are coming, but to help me actually get them. My local independent bookstores have traditionally been much more oriented towards local interest, nonfiction, and literary fiction, so I've never relied on them for things like Star Trek books. The chain stores would rather sell blankets and tea and other reading lifestyle accessories these days than books in their brick and mortar stores, or so it seems. So Amazon still feels like a reasonable alternative. Even if you only use it to identify what new books are coming out and ask a local store to order them for you, it's useful.

 

[The Wormhole]

And even if you want to leave using the computer out of it for whatever reason, you can go to Coles or Chapters or whatever and make a request with their staff for a particular book they may not have in the store, and they will order it specifically and notify you when it comes in and hold it so you can go in and pick it up. That's been an option for decades, throughout the 90s and early 2000s it's how my uncle kept up with the latest Doctor Who novel releases.

But yes, Amazon is probably the most reliable way to keep up with book releases these days, as they can ship it to you within two business days in a manner which does not rely on Canada Post.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I've been trying to avoid shopping on Amazon wherever possibly lately, for, um, reasons (casts gaze southward), so for now that means for books that I have to order online (instead of in-store), Chapters/Indigo is the go-to. One of the benefits I've seen with them is that they always seem to ship in a box, whereas Amazon was just as likely to throw the book in an envelope, where it could get considerably banged up during the shipping process. The box is definitely an advantage if you're picky about the condition your books arrive in.

One of the downsides, though, is that Amazon usually seems to be cheaper, so that hurts a bit.

Of course, I live in a city in Ontario where Chapters/Indigo uses an alternate courier instead of Canada Post, so they will still ship to me during this labour uncertainty, and I still get it within a day or two of the shipment leaving the warehouse. I know that won't be the same for everyone.

 

[The Wormhole]

Ordering from Chapters/Indigo just started becoming extremely unreliable for me. In the span of fall 2018 to the end of 2019 I had:
-The wrong book shipped to me. When I went to the store to sort the matter out, they promised to send the correct book to me free of charge along with bonus plum points. I was sent another wrong book,
-They rarely could get new releases to me by the release date, which actually was one of their strengths in previous years. Hell, for a while in around 2014-2016 I could get new releases two weeks prior to their release date. Even taking account that was incredibly good fortune, I don't see why it suddenly became normal to wait a week or two after release date for the books to arrive, especially when those books were usually available in brick and mortar stores on release day. It especially got bad, one book I had to wait a month after release date, even though it was available in stores.
-The line with me was the time they sent me an empty box.

All my books have almost exclusively come from Amazon since 2020 and have been buying other products from them for nearly a decade now and have not experienced issues like these. Indeed, the only issues that have cropped up from ordering on Amazon are when I'm getting something which actually ships from one of their third party vendors. So better reliability, combined with lower price and free shipping on everything since I have Prime has pretty much solidified my loyalty to Amazon.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Ordering from Chapters/Indigo just started becoming extremely unreliable for me. In the span of fall 2018 to the end of 2019 I had:
-The wrong book shipped to me. When I went to the store to sort the matter out, they promised to send the correct book to me free of charge along with bonus plum points. I was sent another wrong book,
-They rarely could get new releases to me by the release date, which actually was one of their strengths in previous years. Hell, for a while in around 2014-2016 I could get new releases two weeks prior to their release date. Even taking account that was incredibly good fortune, I don't see why it suddenly became normal to wait a week or two after release date for the books to arrive, especially when those books were usually available in brick and mortar stores on release day. It especially got bad, one book I had to wait a month after release date, even though it was available in stores.
-The line with me was the time they sent me an empty box.

Yikes. Completely understandable that you wouldn't want to deal with them further after all that.

 

[Steve Roby]

I understand not wanting to use Amazon for a number of reasons, but I still do it because it’s reliable. A couple weeks ago I received a hardcover book with a badly damaged spine. I filed a return request on the Amazon site, identified my nearest post office, got a QR code, went to the post office with the book in the box, the employee scanned the code, done. I was a bit busy that week and actually got the replacement copy before I shipped the defective one back.

 

[David cgc]

I've found Bookshop.org to be pretty reliable and good about returns, even if they don't have the seamless return infrastructure of Amazon. I've shifted my online book-buying to them, and Amazon has become just for miscellaneous goods and blu-rays.

 

[Emissary of the Prophets]

I have read a massive amount of Star Trek novels over the last 35 years along with a lot of Star Wars and other novels. I am struggling to think of anything which really annoyed me. Oh, apart from the destruction of Pluto in Before Dishonor, but I was annoyed it was reclassified in real life.

 

[Christopher]

Oh, apart from the destruction of Pluto in Before Dishonor, but I was annoyed it was reclassified in real life.

You shouldn't be -- it was an improvement. Laypeople might not have known it, but astronomers were never comfortable with calling Pluto a planet, because they knew it was a poor fit. But they didn't know what else to call it, since it was the only known example of its category. Even before 2006, there were astronomers that refused to call it a planet (like this entry from 2000), though there was no consensus about what it should be called.

But now we know of multiple dwarf planets, so Pluto is no longer just an embarrassing footnote among the planets, but the first and biggest known member of its own category, a category that probably outnumbers planets by a huge amount and that's made astronomy more exciting because there are so many new ones yet to find and learn about. It's like a fighter who was mistakenly assigned to too heavy a weight class and was always overshadowed, but then got reassigned to the correct weight class and became a standout. Few would consider that a demotion.

When Ceres and the other asteroids were first discovered in the early 1800s, they were considered planets for decades. But then we learned more about them and realized they should have their own separate category, and now nobody remembers or cares that they used to be called planets. So I found it unbelievable that Before Dishonor claimed that Pluto's status was still a controversy 400 years from now. That's like writing a book where people living on Mars in the future are still debating whether it has canals.