[gmw]

So you walk into a bookshop, browse for a while and then walk to the counter and hand your selections over to the clerk. The clerk turns to the bench behind them, so you can't see what they're doing, and after a few minutes turns back with your books in a bag ready for you. You pay for them and head for home. When you get home you discover that the clerk appears to have torn the covers off some of the books, and replaced them with plain cardboard covers listing the title and author. What do you do?

Aside there being no travelling involved, this happens to me regularly when I shop at Kobo. Something like 10-15% of the books I buy from Kobo have a different cover in the epub I download to what I clicked on "in the shop".

I don't mind so much if it's just that the epub has the old pre-movie-tie-in cover or something like that, but most of these are plain backgrounds with an ugly font listing the title and author. (It's almost as if they've gone out of their way to make them as ugly as possible.)

I guess they expect me to accept that the cover doesn't matter. After all, it's done its job - got the sucker to part with his money - but what if I liked the cover? My understanding is that any licence granted to read the text of the book also included the right to look at the cover - so where's my damn cover?

Now I'm sitting here looking at my latest couple of coverless mongrels trying to work out whether I should try to return them as a means of complaining and saying it's not acceptable. Certainly I would do that if the first paragraph was literally true, but since I can fix these for myself I probably will do that rather than give them back. But I still think it's damn rude!


(Just another reader-rant thread. Isn't that what social media is for?)