[paola]

Major General, one way the screen can get the damage as for your device is e.g. if you ever happened to handle it from a single corner - the larger the device, the higher the risk that this can damage the substrate. This is a weakness of e-ink screens, which is why most companies don't cover that kind of damage (including Amazon, but they do have an excellent customer service and extensive bookshop, so they'd rather keep you as a customer than risk you switching to the competition: you won't be able to read amazon books on non-kindle e-ink devices legally in most countries). So I think you've been lucky that they accepted to replace your Aura HD in the first place.

Moving on then, I also agree that if they made a mistake and sent you the wrong item they should not expect you to return it at your expense (but did they say that?): on the bright side, you have a glo on loan for the week-end, so you are not without a device (did they tell you not to open it?), and who knows, you might end up keeping it in the end.

You will have realised that what must have irritated a lot of people is the violence of the title of your thread when after all, regardless of whether or not you realised it, the damage must have happened after you received it, and Kobo agreed to a replacement. At the risk of sounding patronising, if you search the forum you will find a lot of horror stories of devices just "left there" and then found with a broken screen. It is not gremlins, but unfortunately sometimes the damage takes a while (even days) to appear. There is a very instructive post on this by a guy who repairs e-ink devices, but unfortunately it is in Italian!