bad kindle ebooks

[dugbug]

I just had my first purchase regret: an 8-book compilation of childrens classics for $10.00. I was excited to find it, but it has the following issues:

Title is corrupted
Table of contents are not links (800 pages, 8 books... you need links)
Illustrations are gone. Not even a cover page.


Very disappointing. I wish I could have previewed it but that was not offered. I sent a complaint to customer service with the order #. Has anyone gotten a refund on kindle ebooks?

-d

[Nate the great]

I've gotten every refund I asked for. Their customer service is excellent.

[dugbug]

ok good. How long did it take until you heard back? I assume I won't hear from them over the holidays.

-d

[tsgreer]

I never buy a book without getting a sample first. But I did accidentally buy one--that's how I found out that one-click is really one click--ok, so I am an idiot!

They refunded me right away. They usually have good customer service.

I hope it works out for you.

[TallMomof2]

I received my refund within 24 hours. I bought a cookbook without working chapter links. Unusuable.

[Hadrien]

I think that one of the main reason why they have such problems is because they treat the TOC like any other content in the book.

When you create an e-book, you shouldn't have to manually create the TOC yourself. On Feedbooks, the TOC is created automatically (PDF/epub/Mobipocket) using the semantics of the book. A system that treat a book like a huge chunk of text/HTML, without any sort of mark-up dividing the book into multiple elements will always have this sort of problem.

This is a huge problem. It means that if one day, Amazon switch to another format, let's say epub, they'll have to ask every publisher to re-upload their books.

[dugbug]

They just got to me and reimbursed me. Very nice, thanks amazon.

Also, several books DO have the table of contets correctly links, such as freakonomics. I don't know if the problem is self-publsihing or not. I downloaded several samples of "alice in wonderland". One had pictures and a correct linkable table of contents, three did not.

(There are over six published kindle alice in wonderland books, all identical other than the publisher and whatever ebook conversion process they used).

-d

[Alisa]

So far every book I've purchased from Amazon has had a working ToC. If you want classics for free, Feedbooks.com is very good with their formatting and so easy to download to the Kindle through their guide.

[ctitanic]

A cooking book without a TOC does not make sense. In another hard in a novel I really don't have any problem with not having one. I just bookmark the page. I like the work Fedbook is doing for us with the conversion of almost all the not copyrighted material but I'm more used to have the Toc at the beginning and not at the end. That saves time. I hope you reconsider this in the future.

[bob315]

I just finished reading a Kindle ebook and sent Amazon a dozen minor typos (mostly hyphens left in when words were unsplit). I didn't complain or ask for a refund -- I just sent the list culled from my clippings file (handy way to note such things). The reply from Amazon was boilerplate apologizing for the errors, promising a full refund and telling me the book will be removed from my Kindle. This seems a somewhat aggressive way to solve the problem, but perhaps it works out cheaper for them in the end. I read the book, enjoyed it and now it's free. Perhaps this is a good reason to send in bug reports, but wait til you have finished the book before doing so.