The other day I decided to purchase a book I had been holding out on for my Kindle. While I do plan on reading the book eventually, what got me to buy it was that I knew it would be helpful for an assignment I was working on. I wanted to search through it quickly and and find snippets I could use.
The book is
Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and I didn't check to see if the file size was listed. I only purchase ebooks with DRM if the DRM can be stripped. This is my personal rule. Some of you might not agree with it but it's the only logical course of action from my standpoint. After purchasing and downloading the book I realized it wasn't mobipocket format. I went to the page and saw that the file size wasn't listed. "Damn it!" I thought to myself.
An ebook I can't open on my computer is almost useless to me. Reading on the Kindle is great but I only buy ebooks to get full functionality out of them. If I wanted the same limitations as a paper book, I'd buy the paper book!
I never got a topaz book from Amazon before. It didn't make sense to me. Usually when I see topaz referenced on these boards the format is being used for graphic intensive books. This book is just text, mostly. I looked up another book I had been looking at, The Reasons of Love by Harry G. Frankfurt. This ebook had no file size listed either. I own a paper copy of this book (purchased from Amazon a few years ago, actually) and know that the book is all text. I don't recall any different fonts so I don't know that there was any need for embedded fonts. I promptly looked up several other ebooks and they all had file sizes listed. It's odd that the first two books I looked up happened to be topaz. It still makes me curious, though: is Amazon increasing its topaz titles to combat the stripping of DRM?
After realizing I purchased something that was virtually useless to me, I looked into Amazon's return policy. I knew I had heard something about it. I didn't know at the time they had a 7 day return policy on all ebooks. I was excited to find out about it. About ten minutes after buying and downloading the book, I sent Amazon's customer service a message saying that I wanted to return it. When I woke up the next morning I had an email message saying the $9.99 had been returned to my card and that the book was removed from my library. It's the only thing I've ever returned to Amazon and I'm very happy that it went smoothly.
I don't want people to end up like the guy on here currently talking about getting his account banned (this mostly seems to happen with big ticket items, though) but I think if you unwittingly buy a topaz book and you can do without it or find it somewhere else, return it to Amazon. Amazon knows mobipocket DRM can be removed. If they get an increase in returns of topaz books or notice sales of those books declining, they might be able to make an intelligent assumption about people preferring not to have restrictions on their ebooks. They might see DRM as bad for business. Who can tell, though? Hopefully Amazon never removes the file size thing. I don't want my file format to be a surprise when I buy a Kindle book. If Amazon is, in fact, stepping up their topaz quantity, they can expect fewer sales to me. I don't mind DRM when I can remove it but I do not buy books I can't strip. It's something I will never compromise on. Amazon should hope topaz is cracked.