Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
While in general I agree with you, in this particular case I'm not at all sure that what was going on was necessarily bad. It depends on what he was doing. (Note that the characterization of the purchases as "accidental" is Amazon's, & I'll bet there's a list of acceptable reasons for return, & the selection of "accidental" by Nate's friend might have been just the closest approximation to what the real reason was.)
For example, if you are buying a technical book at a bricks store, you get to browse the entire contents of the book including the contents page and the index, in making your buying decision. This is critical to the selection process.
But there is no comparable process for ebooks. A sample, which in my experience just consists of the first chapter of a book, is not useful for purposes of acquiring a technical book. The only way to decide on what to buy is to acquire all the books, browse them, & make your selection.
But if you do this, eventually you are going to get caught up in Amazon's return policy net.
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HOWEVER, you only get to browse what the bricks and mortar store HAS in STOCK. You don't get to order 5 into the store and then pick and choose. Since Amazon has a much larger stock than most brick stores, you can't really apply a comparison. If this person had access to all those books at a brick store, he could have done what you suggested. Instead, he took advantage of Amazon's larger inventory--and browsed and returned. Not exactly apples to apples.