A article from 2012 on Amazon’s return policy seems to continue getting hits here on Teleread! The updated comments came at an opportune time for me because I just returned a Kindle book yesterday. Here is what happened.
The book was a re-purchase of an oldie-but-goodie I had in paper. I did a casual glance at the preview just to make sure it wasn’t Topaz, and then I bought the book for $4.99.
I realized midway through the first chapter that I was in trouble. There seemed to be an issue with the letters E and C; I was seeing words like ‘believc’ and ‘cdit.’ Additionally, I was finding words without spaces between them. I marked the first few, then went on the book page and reported to Amazon that the book had errors.
By the end of the first chapter, I had marked over 20 errors. I reluctantly went back to my Amazon account and asked for a refund. It just was not enjoyable for me. I don’t like feeling like a copyeditor.
I do worry about making TOO many Kindle returns, since I don’t want to be flagged as a trouble-maker. But I never return a book simply because I don’t like it. That is what sampling is for. The few times I have returned one, it has been because of egregious typos and editing issues, and I think that is a fair reason to return it.
I did do some internet searching to see if I could track down the author of this one. He has neither website nor Twitter account, which is a shame. So I reported it to Amazon, which is all I can do. If the author of this 1997 title is still alive, and working, he probably will have no idea what happened. But since he has no way for me to reach him, I had to look out for myself and return his badly mangled book.
Sounds like OCR errors. I’ve seen book reprints with the same problem when the original was pre-digital files, and the blinking publisher couldn’t be bothered to have someone give a quick proofread of the results.
It’s not always the publisher at fault. A few years ago I downloaded a sample of an infamous science fiction novel from 1972 that was out of print. The sample was so bad there were probably 20 plus errors on the first few pages. But I don’t think it was put out by the publisher – I suspect it was a random fan or maybe the author himself in an attempt to self re-publish. NO SALE. I checked back a few months later and was no longer available. Of course it could have just been a pirate edition that got swept away.
This article had me look it up again. Lo and behold – it’s available from SF Gateway. No obvious errors at first glance. Only $2.99. Sold.
Don’t worry about what Amazon does or doesn’t think about your return. If you get flagged for demanding quality, regard that with pride not dismay. Vetting these ebooks is as easy as pie and should be done. That’s particularly true when Amazon is pretending to take on the role of publisher, as with KDP—and I do stress pretending.
Unproofed OCRing tends to be so awful, that a quick, automated spellcheck of the contents would invariably flag badly done ebooks. Amazon only needs to put enough of a human factor into the mix they aren’t unfairly flagging books with a specialized vocabulary.
I’ve said it a hundred times before, I’ll say it again. Amazon isn’t a genuine publisher, because it has no professional concern for the quality of what it sells. It will sell anything, even typo-ridden ebooks. And it doesn’t care about authors because in many cases it is paying authors half or less the royalties that Apple and Smashwords pay for that same title.
All those are facts that simply need to be accepted.
I wouldn’t worry about returning books for fact based quality issues. If Amazon isn’t verifying that your complaint about typos is warranted then that’s their problem. I believe you’re doing them a service by notifying them of the problem. If you’re returning books because of subjective reasons like the quality of the writing then you might have to consider how many you return.