Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
What law? Stores both physical and online in the US are not obligated to allow returns on used goods. You can see examples of this with dvd/blu-ray, CDs (assuming you can find a store selling them still), video games, clothing, etc. and online take a look at Etsy where some stores don’t accept returns.
Also try on a pair of shoes online. Let me know how that goes for you. What an utterly ridiculous claim “ As soon as you are allowed to do something in a shop, it must be possible to do it online” is, it’s never been the case and barring significant advances in technology will not be the case for the foreseeable future.
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Well, while I hate to encroach on this spat between you, you can return shoes online all the time. I know it because I have hard-to-fit feet; most shoe stores don't have a variety of suitable size widths for me to try, so...online stores, where I can order 3 sets of the same shoe and return (hopefully 2, but sometimes all 3).
Offered solely FWIW.
I do want to add...you know, people like me, who feel that we have the
right to return really godawfully bad books--the plot dies a terrible horrible death, the homophone errors pile up, the editing is truncated after chapter 2, etc.--we COULD just sit there and download eBooks that are free, in Kindle Select giveaways. Then, nobody would care if we read them or not, because the author would make precisely ZERO dollars. I wouldn't be taking any risk--because again, zero dollars.
My thinking on this keeps being cast as either a) I'm just taking advantage of authors, reading their books entirely and then returning them "because I can," or b) that I'm stealing their book. Seriously, I probably don't even return one out of a hundred, but when I return them, I mean it. There are serious flaws with a book that I return.
This false equivalency: "would you
ever return a book you bought in a bookstore," has two aspects--firstly, prior to the publishing revolution into self-publishing, 99% of the books you found in bookstores had been trade published. Even though that's no guarantee that the products thereof were all perfect, or great books or stories (I give you as exhibit A, 50SOG, after all....), at
least editing care and the like had been taken with them.
Somebody gave enough of a crap so that I didn't read a sentence, as I did recently, where one character thinks that he can tell what another is feeling "by his continence." That's the first thing. The second thing is, eBooks can be "returned" without making the product unsaleable as new. Print books cannot. If I buy a paperback or heavens forfend, a hardcover at a bookstore and 2 chapters into it, and I'm so appalled by the errors, that I'm going to return it, that book is forever used. It's not resellable as new. With an eBook, that consideration does not exist. (There are, of course, reasons that customers in bookstores do often read 1-2 chapters of a book, prior to purchasing, as someone mentioned upthread, to try to mitigate that risk.)
My point is: I
seriously doubt, if you asked 1,000 authors, whether they'd rather that a customer like me
only download KS freebie eBooks--where they'd earn
nothing, whether I liked the book or not--or have me buy and download their $0.99 or $1.99 or $2.99 eBook (or borrow it on KU from which they'd earn page-reads), and risk that I
might return it as one of my 1-out-of-100 reads, I strongly suspect that they would take a (paid) chance at being one of the 99 and not the one that gets returned.
(BTW, for those of you that
don't know this, because you're not in the trade, POD
paperbacks get returned all the damn time.)
I fail to see, given the options, how my actions don't benefit the author, rather than abuse them. I really don't.
I once returned a Perry Mason, which had--I kid thee not--not less than 2-3 scanning/homonym/??? errors per bloody screen, on a Paperwhite set at font size 6-7. That's an egregious number of errors. Should I have just grinned and borne it, for $7.99 or whatever it was? I checked the book's reviews, and
those errors had been noted FIVE YEARS earlier in reviews and the publisher had done sweet Eff-Ay about them. What, I should eat that? I don't think so. I returned it, I bitched to Amazon in no uncertain terms. Did the book get fixed? I don't know, but I would be
fascinated to know what someone's threshold for "you bought you, you eat it" is. I suspect 2-3 scanning errors/screen might exceed even Zod's. If I'd kept it and eaten it, the subsequent buyers had zero hope it might get fixed--but maybe, just maybe, enough returns and complaints MIGHT fix it.
Hitch