Authors are protesting Amazon's 'read and return' e-book policy

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

To resolve the debate between two users. Why else?

I mean why do we need to decide on a single percentage for everyone as opposed to allowing each of us to decide for ourselves what is right?

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I mean why do we need to decide on a single percentage for everyone as opposed to allowing each of us to decide for ourselves what is right?

Because we’re having a discussion. Should you not want to think about this specific aspect no one is holding a gun to your head.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Because we’re having a discussion. Should you not want to think about this specific aspect no one is holding a gun to your head.

Certainly. I will leave the discussion of what the number should be to those who believe there needs to be one.


I don't think it will matter anyway. Someone who is going to steal a book will figure out pretty quickly that the way to do it is purchase, download a copy, and then return it before starting to read. Only honest people will be inconvenienced.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by issybird

Ah. And yet Amazon explicitly disallows this. (Xenophon: format and device shifting, that is)

(Xenophon: snippet from Amazon licensing terms)
Use of Kindle Content. Upon your download or access of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times (for Subscription Content, only as long as you remain an active member of the underlying membership or subscription program), solely through a Kindle Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Kindle Content. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict. Some Kindle Content, such as interactive or highly formatted content, may not be available to you on all Kindle Applications.

Limitations. Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Kindle Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove or modify any proprietary notices or labels on the Kindle Content. In addition, you may not attempt to bypass, modify, defeat, or otherwise circumvent any digital rights management system or other content protection or features used as part of the Service.
(Xenophon: end of Amazon licensing terms snippet)

(Xenophon snipped the remainder of the message)

Issy:

Amazon does indeed have licensing terms that forbid format and or device shifting. That said, it's entirely unclear under US law whether or not that restriction is enforceable. No court rulings on point, that I'm aware of, and plenty of high-powered legal-theory types who argue fairly persuasively on both sides of the issue.

For my part, I have in my possession written advice-of-counsel from an extremely high-powered lawyer who specializes in US copyright law. I even paid for it. That advice tells me that both DRM removal and format shifting of legitimately acquired content for personal (and immediate family/household) use only falls squarely within Fair Use, and that license restrictions claiming otherwise are unenforceable.

In the absence of court rulings to the contrary, the only thing this written advice is good for is to establish that I've at least attempted to discover my legal rights and responsibilities and to stay within them. Should it ever become a legal issue and I were to lose in court, that would likely — but not certainly! — keep me out of the "3x damages for egregious offenders" penalties. Maybe.

The overall point here is that what you can and cannot do with eBooks is both simpler and more complicated than it appears. And that even large companies with lots of lawyers have terms of use and other legal boilerplate that is (or is arguably) inconsistent with the actual law, and may well turn out to be unenforceable. And finally, that we don't really know what the answers are until & unless the Supremes take a relevant case and rule on it.

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Give me your work for free.

No one commissioned it - it was made at your own risk.
If you like it, you buy it - if you don't, then don't.
The Amazon right of return corresponds to that of a purchase option in a shop.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

No one commissioned it - it was made at your own risk.
If you like it, you buy it - if you don't, then don't.
The Amazon right of return corresponds to that of a purchase option in a shop.

Yes and I’m saying it shouldn’t you’re saying it should. Specifically you’re saying it should because you can read a whole book in a store. So again give me your work for free.

You bought it, you read it, you don’t get your money back, is how Amazon should handle ebook returns.

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Yes and I’m saying it shouldn’t you’re saying it should. Specifically you’re saying it should because you can read a whole book in a store. So again give me your work for free.

You bought it, you read it, you don’t get your money back, is how Amazon should handle ebook returns.

Bla Bla Bla.
As soon as you are allowed to do something in a shop, it must be possible to do it online - that's what the law requires.
An imagined loss of earnings is of little interest.
Amazon is selling more books through its lawful approach.
Bad luck for those authors who don't want to be bought

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

Bla Bla Bla.
As soon as you are allowed to do something in a shop, it must be possible to do it online - that's what the law requires.
An imagined loss of earnings is of little interest.
Amazon is selling more books through its lawful approach.
Bad luck for those authors who don't want to be bought

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.

[ottischwenk]

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.

I don't really care about US laws.
In the EU there is a 14-day right of return for online purchases.
Precisely because it is impossible to try out when buying this way.

[Deskisamess]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

A book is a finished product - music and video need a performance and that makes the difference

A book not read/consumed is just a mass of words. It needs to be consumed in the same way as music you listen to or video you watch.

If your comment is correct about music/video, it also applies to books.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

I don't really care about US laws.
In the EU there is a 14-day right of return for online purchases.
Precisely because it is impossible to try out when buying this way.

I don’t really care about EU laws, especially ones which are written with such a poor understanding of how media differs from other products. A simple provision that media (books, music, tv shows, movies, etc.) once consumed a single time are exempt from returns for the simple fact that you’ve gotten the value of the good and thus it’s not legally fair for you to reclaim the money exchanged would have indicated at least a basic awareness of those who drafted the law.

[Hitch]

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.

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

[Quoth]

You aren't the problem, Hitch.

I see the situation is more complicated than I thought. However there is a problem with some people (allegedly growing rapidly) misusing the returns system. I don't know what the answers are. There are some things Amazon could do, but they probably won't bother.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Quoth

You aren't the problem, Hitch.

I see the situation is more complicated than I thought. However there is a problem with some people (allegedly growing rapidly) misusing the returns system. I don't know what the answers are. There are some things Amazon could do, but they probably won't bother.

Well, thanks. I don't think I'm the problem, either but apparently, some folks do think that. (That's one of the reasons I mentioned the "freebies versus the odd return" equation--I mean, really, let's not blow smoke up our own asses, in which scenario are authors better off?????)

Now, the question, I suspect, is largely one of numbers. What takes Amazon longer? Processing the returns or arguing about them? I suspect the latter. There are what, 8M books on Amazon now, or even more? (More if you count the godawful Low/No-Content things....).

I am 99% sure that they have algorithms in place to keep an eye on serial returners. And I also suspect that TikTok or not, the number of criminally-minded returners is pretty low. IF it becomes a bigger problem (we, cough, more-mature folks tend not to credit TikTok with much, but it seems to have quite an influence on people with as-yet-not-fully-formed brains...), they'll take steps to do something about it.

I suspect, sadly, that we'll all find out.

That reminds me, what are the return policies for the others? Kobo? iBooks? Smashwords (god help us all)?

Hitch

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

If your comment is correct about music/video, it also applies to books.

I have never heard/seen a book interpret the text it contains