all you say is correct, as usual. I recently goggled the amazon kindle books return policy, thinking you had somethig like 15 minutes to say whoops i did not mean to by that, but you have a mind boggling 7 days- enough to read war & peace if you get a move on
so there was once a petition started by some author to get that changed, but it did not succeed.
Its inconsistent because if you order an app or a movie then " all sales are final" - you might get your money back on a movie if they detect that you have not watched it, but it's not guaranteed, and if you watch if first & then ask, you have no chance.
As for habitual returners, if I were planning to rip off all the text books needed for a college education I'd cycle through a bunch of throw away amazon accounts- I was thinking more about other schemes which I have seen references to but do not have the details of, which are specifically for course book loans - probably PDF tomes.
I have read that amazon clamp down hard mostly on folks buying & returning expensive electronics e.g. buy a bunch of cameras, keep only the one you like best/ I get twitchy anytime I need to return anything, & usually buy even more stuff to keep my ratio in good shape