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

[John F]

As far as authors prefering returns or bad reviews, if it was me, and I returned a book for a refund because it was "bad", I would take the refund AND write a review.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by John F

As far as authors prefering returns or bad reviews, if it was me, and I returned a book for a refund because it was "bad", I would take the refund AND write a review.

Oooh, you're a tough customer! :-)

Unless a book is...beyond-redemption-type-bad, I won't refund it and write a review. It has to reach a level of horribleness that is nearly unseen in the annals of my devices, because I would rule those out BEFORE I clicked buy or borrow or whatever.

Hitch

[John F]

Originally Posted by John F

As far as authors prefering returns or bad reviews, if it was me, and I returned a book for a refund because it was "bad", I would take the refund AND write a review.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Oooh, you're a tough customer! :-)

Unless a book is...beyond-redemption-type-bad, I won't refund it and write a review. It has to reach a level of horribleness that is nearly unseen in the annals of my devices, because I would rule those out BEFORE I clicked buy or borrow or whatever.

Hitch

Well, I did say" if". I've never returned a book.

[MGlitch]

I’d be curious to see what those authors would say if asked if they’d rather refund and get a negative review vs just one or the other since refunding is no guarantee they don’t review, nor is a retailer not refunding a guarantee of a review. It’s also somewhat presumptuous to assume all the negative reviews would be well written vs “This is trash!”. Judging from the Amazon reviews I’ve read that are 3 stars or less I think those authors are greatly overestimating the well written negative review counts.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

It’s also somewhat presumptuous to assume all the negative reviews would be well written vs “This is trash!”. Judging from the Amazon reviews I’ve read that are 3 stars or less I think those authors are greatly overestimating the well written negative review counts.

Star count is star count. Even for those (I'd bet comparatively few) people who read the reviews, "This is trash" may signal "This book was such a waste of my time, I'm not wasting more of my time writing more than three words" vs the (admittedly disgracefully high number of) one-star reviews that say stuff like "I couldn't get it to download."

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I’d be curious to see what those authors would say if asked if they’d rather refund and get a negative review vs just one or the other since refunding is no guarantee they don’t review, nor is a retailer not refunding a guarantee of a review. It’s also somewhat presumptuous to assume all the negative reviews would be well written vs “This is trash!”. Judging from the Amazon reviews I’ve read that are 3 stars or less I think those authors are greatly overestimating the well written negative review counts.

Too many variables to poll. And yes, that's right--no guarantee that the refunded party won't post a review; no guarantee that the "this is trash" review wouldn't show up, either. But such is the nature of entrepreneurial undertakings--no matter what line of work it is. Whether your endeavor is being a barber, or owning a restaurant, running a book design firm, or publishing books--your own and/or others'--them's the breaks, as they say.

People demand refunds, when their own failings caused an irreparable breakdown in the business-customer relationship (I'm dealing with one of those right now). People post bad reviews, sometimes unfairly. Worse, sometimes when they're simply utterly fake reviews, written by someone who is competing with you. Or, you screw up and you do owe someone some money. All those things happen. I've had all these things happen, over the last 7,000 books that we've done. Happily, I can count all those instances on one hand, but still--they do happen. You can easily stretch those categories to encompass the author-reader/buyer relationship.

Here's the reality with writers--they can choose to continue to try to be trade-published and thus, somewhat insulated from all these decisions, thoughts, and realities--and take their chances that way--or they choose to become PUBLISHERS, which is an entirely different thing than being an author, a writer, a scribe.

If they choose the latter path, then they have to think about and make those business decisions, just like the rest of us. Just because what they proffer to the buying public is a line of work considered "creative" doesn't mean that their entrepreneurial endeavors are any different than anyone else's. Is the movie producer insulated from typical business demands? Do people hesitate to post bad reviews of a movie, when they're disappointed, just because the producer, the director, the DP, the actors, all "poured their hearts into it?" Of course not, don't be ridiculous. Is the art gallery owner protected from unhappy customers? No, of course they aren't. Nor is the publisher.

People constantly make decisions, around things like returning books, based upon emotion ("oh, no, the author worked their heart out over this!,") completely ignoring the fact that this same writer made a decision--an adult decision--that his or her writing was good enough, advanced enough, etc. to be a commercial product. Good enough for you and I to spend our money on; equivalent, basically, to trade-published books, fiction or otherwise. They went into this, as a business. They aren't posting their books on Wattpad or A03 or FanFiction.net, for feedback; this isn't Critters.org, for critique. it's a business. And it's a business, an entrepreneurship, into which they chose to enter.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by graycyn

No, it was the Harper Hall trilogy (Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey. First two have been pulled, or at least I couldn't find them when I looked the other day, but the 3rd is still available.

The quality is BAD. I can excuse a few typos on a backlist book, but these were so bad that I went looking for the publisher's address on the copyright page in order to complain, only to discover THERE WAS NO COPYRIGHT PAGE or any publisher listed. If that doesn't spell pirate...

I read the reviews upon the discovery, no one mentioned they were pirated, just that the ebook quality was poor. So my bad for buying without reading, but I knew I liked the books, and was just so excited to finally see them available in the US as ebook. Never occurred to me that Amazon would be offering pirated books from such a well-known author. I just thought that whatever reason they hadn't been available in the US previously had been resolved. I had been checking for YEARS after all!

It's not all that uncommon for pirated eBooks to be uploaded to Amazon.

My Mary Stewart Arthurian Legend books are all on my bookshelves as hardcovers. I'm aware of the ebook omnibus, but I have long had doubts over the legitimacy of that one.[/QUOTE]

You can go to eBooks.com or Kobo.com and "travel" to the UK and legitimately buy the Mary Steward Arthurian Legend eBooks and/or the Harper Hall eBooks.

[JSWolf]

delete post

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It's not all that uncommon for pirated eBooks to be uploaded to Amazon.

It’s shocking how obviously pirated ebooks can be listed on Amazon for years while Amazon looks the other way.

You can go to eBooks.com or Kobo.com and "travel" to the UK and legitimately buy the Mary Steward Arthurian Legend eBooks and/or the Harper Hall eBooks.

You can buy legitimate copies by this method, but whether or not you can “legitimately buy” them is another issue entirely.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by issybird

It’s shocking how obviously pirated ebooks can be listed on Amazon for years while Amazon looks the other way.

I've said for a long time that Amazon should be vetting every eBook uploaded by non-validated sourced.

You can buy legitimate copies by this method, but whether or not you can “legitimately buy” them is another issue entirely.

I would do it that way. At least the author gets paid.

[Critteranne]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I’d be curious to see what those authors would say if asked if they’d rather refund and get a negative review vs just one or the other since refunding is no guarantee they don’t review, nor is a retailer not refunding a guarantee of a review. It’s also somewhat presumptuous to assume all the negative reviews would be well written vs “This is trash!”. Judging from the Amazon reviews I’ve read that are 3 stars or less I think those authors are greatly overestimating the well written negative review counts.

I think it depends on the genre (and the subgenre). Before I buy a YA fantasy novel, I look at the negative reviews because many of them will point out issues with worldbuilding.

OTOH, negative reviews of reprint anthologies often tell me more about the reviewer than the quality of the stories. You have people complaining that the stories are confusing or too literary. (Then you look at the table of contents and realize that reviewer must not get out much.) Or the ones complaining that reprints from the 1940s and 1950s are too dated.

[Quoth]

I read a review of Verne's Carpathian Castle, which pre-dates Victorian Dracula. It complained that it was unrealistic etc, as if it was set in contemporary times.

I'm old enough to have stayed in houses with no bathroom or inside toilet, or in one case it had those and no mains electricity. In my first job we typed the weekly report on a mechanical typewriter, though minicomputers and the first CP/M 8080 based homecomputers existed.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I read a review of Verne's Carpathian Castle, which pre-dates Victorian Dracula. It complained that it was unrealistic etc, as if it was set in contemporary times.

I'm old enough to have stayed in houses with no bathroom or inside toilet, or in one case it had those and no mains electricity. In my first job we typed the weekly report on a mechanical typewriter, though minicomputers and the first CP/M 8080 based homecomputers existed.

Yeah, I'm with you on that one. It's as though schools these days don't teach social history along with the glitzy bits, let alone logical thinking. I read a review of an alt hist novel once which 'called out' the author for not including Native Americans (is that the current term?) in a story set in a version of North America which was uninhabited apart from magical megafauna when Europeans arrived. Duh - why would there be Native Americans in an uninhabited continent?

As a teen we used to stay at my godmother's cottage which was a converted shepherd's hut in the middle of a field in Wales. It had an inside loo of sorts (you used to have to dig a hole in the garden at the end of your stay and empty the commode bucket into it), and when it rained, you had to wear wellies in the kitchen. There were mice in the roof - we'd hear them at night. Everything used to be damp when you first arrived as there hadn't been heat for a couple of weeks - it would take a couple of days to air out.

So yes, I agree history is far too clean!

[Apache]

In the US they are called Outhouses. I have friends who lived in a mobile home while they built their house. Someone robbed them and set fire to the mobile home. They decided to live in the barn while the house was finished. They put a flush toilet over the septic tank and built an outhouse around it. It is the only flush outhouse I have ever seen.
Apache

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by maddz

Yeah, I'm with you on that one. It's as though schools these days don't teach social history along with the glitzy bits, let alone logical thinking. I read a review of an alt hist novel once which 'called out' the author for not including Native Americans (is that the current term?) in a story set in a version of North America which was uninhabited apart from magical megafauna when Europeans arrived. Duh - why would there be Native Americans in an uninhabited continent?

Logical thinking? Perish the thought. I was forced to take logic and language courses in school, along with ethics (this was regular everyday school, not college/university) and they've all served me well. Hell, for that matter, my mother insisted I take typing and Spanish, too, and ditto, as it happens.

But...there's only so much you can do to "teach" logic. It's innate for some folks and not for others. I deal with the latter all the time. I explain something; they seem to get it and then in our next correspondence, they're back with the same question--because they can't apply what they learned with Question A to Question B, even though they are effectively the same question. It's like computers (or word processors, for that matter). Some people will always learn by rote and push buttons. They won't understand what that button really does.

I first truly observed this, a million years ago, when I was beta-testing an IBM OS/6 installation (yes, really) in 1978. That system (like Wordperfect which followed) clearly showed the surrounding (HTML) tags, opening and closing paragraphs and the like. Some of the women (yes, natch, pink ghetto, amirite?) could "get" it and understand what the tags did; some never would no matter how earnestly others tried to show and teach them.

Logic is a gift. It can be honed and refined and perfected (one hopes) but I don't believe it's genuinely teachable to someone not born with it.

As a teen we used to stay at my godmother's cottage which was a converted shepherd's hut in the middle of a field in Wales. It had an inside loo of sorts (you used to have to dig a hole in the garden at the end of your stay and empty the commode bucket into it), and when it rained, you had to wear wellies in the kitchen. There were mice in the roof - we'd hear them at night. Everything used to be damp when you first arrived as there hadn't been heat for a couple of weeks - it would take a couple of days to air out.

So yes, I agree history is far too clean!

Every time I hear authors/readers of romances talking about the sex scenes in some of these historical romances, I have to leave the room to cover up my giggles. I mean...the idea of modern-day sexual practices on "nethers" that weren't so clean...slays me.

We spent 7 years building a log home for my (late) FIL, atop a mountain in western Wyoming. We didn't have power, running water for the first few years, or a (good) place to sleep indoors, etc. We had an old hunting cabin that had been built by my FIL 30 years earlier and the sound of mice in the sod roof was a nightly event. (Not to mention all the other critters!).

Hitch