Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
All you have to do if you loose your kindle is deregister it. Reporting a "lost" kindle as stolen seems just wrong to me. Although I guess some don't think others should benefit from their misfortune.
BOb
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I have lost 2 EBRs. (yeah, I'm an absentminded professor type.) One was at the Chicago Symphony, and the other was on American Airlines. In both instances, I checked with the lost & found. In both instances, my name & address were pasted to the device in the form of a return mail label.
At the Symphony, I checked with the lost & found the next day, and they had no record but told me to check back. I checked back a couple of weeks later, at which time they had a record of it being turned in, but could not locate it. So obviously, someone turned it in, then someone else stole it.
On American, I checked the lost & found when I got to my hotel, & they didn't have it. Later, on the way home, I checked again, & the story was that my airplane hadn't been cleaned & to check in Chicago. In Chicago, they had a bunch of EBRs that had been turned in, but mine wasn't among them.
I have renamed my two Kindles "LOST/STOLEN REWARD: call <one of my phone numbers>" Oddly, I haven't lost a kindle since, so clearly, this works!
My hunch is that any thief will be unable to easily figure out how to change that name, and might decide to be an honest citizen since there's a reward involved.
(But it occurs to me that I should also upload a document entitled "Please Read If You Have Found This eBook Reader" with more detailed information, including the fact that as soon as I find I've lost the EBR, I'm having it deactivated and banned from Amazon, and reporting the loss to the police. Nicely, of course. Including the amount of the award. Carrot. Stick.)
It seems to me that bricking the EBR is the right answer, assuming that can be done, because it deprives the thief of being able to use the device, and does not leave them with a working model to sell. Anyone who buys an electronic device without checking to see if it works does not have any basis to complain about losing his money.
So your point about deregistering does not make much sense to me if the device can be bricked. But it is worth considering if the device can only be blacklisted or deregistered.
On the whole, I think you are right. The reason is that I doubt that very many thieves are taking the device to read on. I cynically believe that most thieves aren't interested in reading at all, much less on EBRs. They intend to pawn or sell the device.
And I don't think that most people who buy second hand devices believe that they are stolen, mainly because most aren't. If the device is merely blacklisted rather than bricked, most people won't be in a position to tell until it's too late.
So blacklisting it doesn't really matter, except possible to screw some trusting 3rd party.
On the question of keeping the found EBR, I think that the finder should demand her money back from her sister, and contact Amazon to return the device. And threaten to tell Mom if the sister doesn't comply.