How to get Amazon to stop accepting returned Kindle ebooks

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

As soon as Amazon start behaving as responsible corporate citizens, certainly. Until then I'll go right on pointing out their behaviour at every turn. Believe me, I don't spare other companies when they behave in this manner either.

It's bluntness - if I see a brick, I call it a brick, and Amazon's absolutely terrible record in corperate governance counts massively against them. If you want rude, ask me my opinion of Ebay. (Or for that matter Wikipedia, the OLPC project or Google)

So what is your opinion on Google and the OLPC project?

[DawnFalcon]

Let me illustrate my opinion on them with a picture:

[HarryT]

What ever is wrong with Wikipedia? It's a wonderful resource, IMHO.

[DawnFalcon]

It's more to do with the way Wikipedia is run (which is a farce), Harry, than it's value as a resource (which is considerable, given a pinch of salt)

[kindlekitten]

mmmmmm hostility is strong in this one Master

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

mmmmmm hostility is strong in this one Master

[scveteran]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

A friend of mine just sent me an email he got from Amazon. He wanted to remain anonymous, so I can't tell you who. But I will vouch for him. He isn't sure how many ebooks he's returned, but he estimated the total to be around 30. I hope that's not true; in absolute terms that's a pretty low number. A fair number of people are going to be getting this email at some point.

Here is the text of the email:

I have a hard time feeling sorry for anyone who buys 30 books, refunds them, and then gets told he can't screw with a business anymore. There are costs to Amazon to provide the book and then refund his money every time he wants to do this. If I had a customer who brought back 30 items for a refund in 2 years or less, I wouldn't give them a refund anymore either.

I also find it incredible that you think that returning 30 books to be a pretty low number. Yet you think that more than one book refund a month is a low number?

At this point, it seems you are saying that people geting refunds on basically every book they purchase. After all if 30 is a pretty low number then they are likely getting at least two refunds a month. I know the members here do read more than the average person, but I don't know that many people who buy more than two books every single month.

Of course this is assuming that they purchased starting in Nov. 2007 when the Kindle first came out. Most people did not get one in the first month or even the first 6 monthes. So the number per month refunded would be far higher.

[scveteran]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

I'd think samples will be sufficient to indicate whether the book is tolerably formatted or not.

I generally concur though that if you returned 30 books to a store over a period of time, any store would start to get suspicious -- even if you buy a ton of books. And at least they haven't booted his account, which they have done in the past.

Not only should the sample tell you whether the formatting is ok or not. It should also give you a really good indication of whether the book is one you want or not.

[scveteran]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Well, it would depend on the ratio of purchases/returns.

If the friend bought 31 ebooks and returned 30, then it may well be fair for Amazon to ban him from returning (for some finite time.)

If the friend is a shopaholic and purchased 3000 ebooks, then returned 30 for reasons such as DRM (Topaz,) or bad quality, then Amazon is wrong.

You are really stretching here. 3,000 books would be more than 4 books a day if he started buying them in Nov. 2007. If later, it would be at least 5 or more books a day.

I know you were just trying to come up with a big number. But the truth is that any number that you make up to show that it would be reasonable, is just to high for a person to have had actual problems to justify returning the ebook.

After all, they can check a lot of information about the book before buying. You can check the formatting, see if you like it, read reviews from Amazon and other customers, see certain information like if text to speech is enabled. That should tell you really if you want to buy the book or not. So I really can't see returning 30 or more of the ebooks.

[scveteran]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

There are not always samples. (Amazon has them, but not every ebook seller does--and the samples may be in non-DRM'd formats when the actual book is Topaz.) There are not reviews of the *formatting* of ebooks, not in any coherent location.

Books received as gifts are not checked at the store. For that matter, when I go to the store to buy a book, I don't expect to need to flip through the pages to find out if the font is readable or the contents don't match the description--if it was mis-shelved in nonfic and was instead a novel, the bookstore erred in placement. Books advertised as Young Adult may contain content parents don't want their kids to have, which they don't discover until they read through them. A lot of stores object to people standing in the aisles and reading entire chapters at a time.

All that aside--books are no different from any other product. "It turns out I don't need this/already have one/don't have room for it" is all the explanation most stores need for returns; if it's in good condition, that's fine.

Ebooks should allow returns for
--bad formatting (missing punctuation, extra-wide margins, bad font/text size, OCR errors, lacks pictures included in paper version, Topaz, wrong metadata)
--file not usable with purchaser's software arrangement
--selected wrong filetype (for those that require 1 purchase per filetype)
--corrupt file

If the seller doesn't have previews, they should also allow returns for "started reading it and didn't like it." And "got this [coupon] as a gift; don't want it; exchange for different book please."

In a sane world, they'd allow "already have this in a different version/different publisher." Eventually, I think we'll see that--when enough ebook stores have open competition that customer goodwill becomes more important than the $3 profit from a single ebook.

Since Amazon is the company being discussed, other companies not providing a sample doesn't seem relevant to this discussion IMO. I will agree that they should tell you up front which format the ebook is in. However, since the Kindle can read it regardless of the format and you are purchasing it to use on the Kindle I don't see a problem with it. I realize that I am in the minority here, but I have no problem DRM.

While your listed reasons for being able to return ebooks may seem reasonable to some people here, I don't think that that they are.

You start off with bad formatting and include things that basically would allow every single book to be returned after reading. There is no way that a company can survive doing that. I challenge you to find a decent length book that doesn't have some sort of missing punctuation at some point. Then you can decide that you don't like the font???

I would agree that if the file is corrupt you should at the company's discretion either receive a refund or a new copy. Of course that assumes that the file was always corrupt. If it gets corrupted at a later point, then it is the same as if you had misplaced a regular pbook.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by scveteran

Since Amazon is the company being discussed, other companies not providing a sample doesn't seem relevant to this discussion IMO. I will agree that they should tell you up front which format the ebook is in. However, since the Kindle can read it regardless of the format and you are purchasing it to use on the Kindle I don't see a problem with it. I realize that I am in the minority here, but I have no problem DRM.

While your listed reasons for being able to return ebooks may seem reasonable to some people here, I don't think that that they are.

You start off with bad formatting and include things that basically would allow every single book to be returned after reading. There is no way that a company can survive doing that. I challenge you to find a decent length book that doesn't have some sort of missing punctuation at some point. Then you can decide that you don't like the font???

I would agree that if the file is corrupt you should at the company's discretion either receive a refund or a new copy. Of course that assumes that the file was always corrupt. If it gets corrupted at a later point, then it is the same as if you had misplaced a regular pbook.

Although I entirely agree with your points, it's perhaps worth pointing out that when Elfwreck refers to "missing punctuation", he was perhaps referring back to the case I mentioned earlier in the thread - a Vince Flynn novel I bought for my Kindle which was missing all of its quotation marks and dashes; clearly a production fault. It would be reasonable to return a book for that, although I chose not to do so, since it was a jolly good story, and the missing punctuation didn't make it unreadable.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by scveteran

While your listed reasons for being able to return ebooks may seem reasonable to some people here, I don't think that that they are.

Of course not, if you're completely willing to accept the limitations of print books. I, for one, think your view is limited and that ebooks need not accept the same limitations as the older medium. (Not to mention that for one, returns are cheaper. Much, much cheaper.)

[catsittingstill]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

mmmmmm hostility is strong in this one Master

:rotfl: :Thumbsup:

I've bought I dunno, 30? 50? Kindle books and returned 3. One was supposed to be an encyclopedia and it was not possible to pick out a single coherent entry--not a single coherent *paragraph* even. It was cheap and old and I wasn't expecting perfection, but seriously--this read like a 2 column book that had been OCRed as one column or something. The second was Topaz and had actual pieces of the letters missing. The third was "optimized for DX" which I thought might work on K2, but which didn't. I apologized, returned it, and bought the paper version, which cost more, but has illustrations I can actually read. It was a pity because I really wanted that book Right Away and I had to wait Days for it--it was like being back in the 20th century (whimper).

Obviously I don't agree that there should be no returns--I have returned paper books for having chunks of content missing and the like, and I expect to be able to do the same with e-books. On the other hand, Amazon is a bookstore, not a library--if you want to decide which of four technical books is your favorite, you ask for them, by interlibrary loan if necessary, read them, *then* buy the one you like best. I'm not surprised Amazon put the brakes on in this case.

And regarding Amazon having one-click turned on for Kindles to deliberately cause customers to accidentally buy the wrong book--I have a hard time squaring this with the page that immediately pops up when you buy a book on the Kindle that gives you the option of canceling the order.

If they wanted to make you pay for books you accidentally bought, I'd think they wouldn't say "are you sure you bought the right book? You can cancel this order right now if you like" every time you purchase.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by scveteran

You start off with bad formatting and include things that basically would allow every single book to be returned after reading. There is no way that a company can survive doing that. I challenge you to find a decent length book that doesn't have some sort of missing punctuation at some point. Then you can decide that you don't like the font???

As HarryT mentioned, I don't mean "missing a period at the end of the chapter" (which sometimes happens with some OCR programs), but "all commas have been replaced with periods" or "no quotation marks at all" or "has question marks instead of curly quotes." Or some other major punctuation problem that makes the book unreadable for most readers.

Anything formatting problems that'd get a failing grade on a 10-year-old's schoolwork should be considered returnable.

Fonts--most ebooks are made with readable fonts; I've not seen any ebooks with ISBNs that had troublesome fonts. (Have seen homemade ones that were atrocious.) However, ebooks are growing, and I expect publishers to try all sorts of ways to make themselves stand out.

Some print books are made with hard-to-read (for me) fonts; either tiny and cramped, or too scripty, or thin and spidery. Most formats of ebook don't have enough font variety to have these problems, but with Topaz and some PDFs, it's possible to get an ebook with fonts that aren't readable. PDFs can be fixed (painfully, by file conversion, which isn't always possible without DRM removal), but Topaz can't.

[scveteran]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Although I entirely agree with your points, it's perhaps worth pointing out that when Elfwreck refers to "missing punctuation", he was perhaps referring back to the case I mentioned earlier in the thread - a Vince Flynn novel I bought for my Kindle which was missing all of its quotation marks and dashes; clearly a production fault. It would be reasonable to return a book for that, although I chose not to do so, since it was a jolly good story, and the missing punctuation didn't make it unreadable.

You are right that a book that is clearly substandard is a different case. The problem is that people like to abuse things. Just as there is no valid reason to return more than 30 books in less than two years, there are going to be people who will want a refund for missing one or two periods if you make that an automatic reason for getting a refund.