Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
You misapprehend my point, namely, that Amazon and the author make more money in the long run by promoting such laziness. They want to encourage people to buy without a lot of due diligence and forethought. Some will renege, but most will live with it. You’re ignoring other buyers: “I bought it because it was easy and I could return it since it stinks, but I can’t be bothered.” And: “I bought it only because I could return it if I didn’t like it, and I liked it.” (This one’s Hitch.) There are more, all resulting in increased sales. Good authors should embrace easy returns and even bad ones will do better than without it.*
Allowing returns of ebooks costs Amazon and the author nothing at all at the individual sale level and results in a lot more sales in the aggregate. And while sometimes Amazon gets things very wrong, mostly it doesn’t. I can’t help thinking it knows exactly what’s going on with this policy.
I honestly don’t know why you’re making a moral crusade out of something that’s strictly business.
*The risk for a bad author, of course, is that once burnt a customer will never try them again. But even here, easy returns mean someone might chance them again.
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@Zodwallop, et al: I want to be clear that Amazon's EZ-return policy on eBooks has, in fact, encouraged me
to try Indy authors that I never would have tried, otherwise. And become a devoted reader of their various and sundry series/books/etc.
I have very limited time--as do most of you, in today's world--and I like to use as much of that time as I can, reading things that have
value to me, whether fictive or non-fic. (It's not even the damned money so much, as it is not wasting my time. It is vexatious to invest half a book, only to find out that the book itself is so depressed about the plotline that it wants to throw itself off a cliff...)
And I've been
happy finding those new-to-me Indy authors. I probably would not have been as willing to try them, were the books not returnable in some relatively sane fashion.
And as far as reading OPR--Other People's Reviews--oh, spare me. Today's reviews are like...firstly, 80% of them are plot regurgitations and worthless reading. The next 10% are "I liked it," or some other eloquent description of their reading enjoyment.
That leaves,
perhaps, 10% that might be worth reading. Of that 10%, unless I'm already familiar with the reviewer, who's to know if their review is worth reading or simply insipid trash? I mean, ever read all the
RAVE reviews for the crash-and-burn that describes Laurell K. Hamilton's descent into Trashocracy for the ABVH series? Yet still, apparently, hundreds of thousands of (largely female) customers bought those things, moving them into hardcover and still
raved about them. That boggles me. And, OMG, 50SOG? Twifright? Yuck.
Nay, nay, I say, Zod--if I could be certain that the group of reviewers I was reading had more than two braincells to rub together, hey, that would be great. But alas, I'm not sure and thus, those reviews aren't that helpful. Sure, if you see 10,000 ratings for a book and they are largely 4+ star, great. You can probably rely upon those to some extent. But...the, the...trying to think of the word--the the junkyard that is Amazon book reviews
might yield some gems, but it more likely yields that for which it is named--
junk.
So, yes--returns and preferably, EZ Returns. (FYI, in KU, Kindle Unlimited, when I stop reading a book that is effectively a return. The author only is paid for the pages I read--not those that I do not read and when the file is returned, they're never paid for those. Unfortunately, yes, they're paid for the pages that I did read--can't be helped--but at least the author likely knows that the book went unfinished. When they get enough unfinished borrows like that, perhaps it will drive home a point.)
On the "try again" front--for me, that's
possibly true--but I will say that once an author burns me with a cliffhanger at the end of a novel, that's
it for me. Never again. That's just rude and greedy, IMHO. (And yup, Melanie Rawn, to this day, is responsible for my feelings about that one!
Ruins of Ambrai my ass!)
Hitch