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Lose Your Amazon Account and Your Kindle Dies
Mike writes "If you buy a Kindle and some Kindle ebooks from Amazon, be careful of returning items. Amazon decided that one person had returned too many things, so they suspended his Amazon account, which meant that he could no longer buy any Kindle books, and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working. After some phone calls, Amazon granted him a one-time exception and reactivated his account again." Take this with as much salt as you'd like.
He clearly states that he regularly returns big ticket items because they're 'defective'. I know a number of people that utilize this same exploit on a regular basis. They only shop at places with excellent return policies. They order big ticket items and when they realize they maxxed their CC or decide the novelty has worn off, they return them because suddenly they notice a defect. Most of the time this defect was either imaginary or simply the result of several days/weeks of playtime.
As this becomes a hit to company profits, they will have to be much more careful on returns....making it much harder on those of us with valid returns. Too bad they reinstated his account.
This is just another reason why DRM is not a benefit to the consumer and why consumers should *not* support DRM.
Which reminds me, anybody know the status on TechCrunch's open source tablet?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I believe they suspended his Amazon account because he had returned several purchases made on Amazon.com, not because he wanted to return eBooks. Since his Amazon account also serves as his Kindle account, he was then locked out of purchasing books for his Kindle.
Poor policy on their part but if you are really worried about this you could always just set up a separate account for your Kindle. If you never use it to make regular purchases I don't think you would ever have to touch it except to update your payment information when necessary.
I wonder what the Office of Fair Trading or Trading Standards would have to say about Amazon UK banning people's accounts for returning defective goods.
I know companies are free to serve people or not at their own discretion, but that right is not absolute (racial discrimination etc.).
If a company were explicitly banning a person because they were a victim of that company's repeated shipping of defective goods, I'd like to think that would be unlawful. Perhaps I'm being too idealistic.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
However note that they COULD deactivate books he had previously purchased. That means that in the future they could do it intentionally for whatever reason suited them at the time.
In the past week they have demonstrated the ability to censor a large swath of publications and now to deactivate the right to read already purchased works. I.e., they have intentionally built the capabilities to do such things.
You can think whatever you want about the particular events that caused these capabilities to become evident, but they WERE revealed. Publicly.
Perhaps these two times were accidents. Next time it might not be. Next time it might be removing the ability to either read or purchase politically inconvenient items. Or religiously inconvenient. Or commercially. Or any other reason that suited them.
Decide for yourself if you want to trust a company that has intentionally implemented such capabilities. It's up to you. But if they've built the capability don't be surprised if they use it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So you clearly never shop at Fry's. I have roughly a 50% failure rate for things I buy there -- and there has been more than one case where I had to exchange something several times before giving up and asking for my money back.
I don't shop at Fry's if I have a choice anymore, but my returns didn't make _me_ a bad person.
What does DRM have to do with this? The previous books he had bought would still be accessible. I have wireless turned off all the time on mine, sometimes months at a time, only when I buy something from the kindle store do I turn it on. Never has a file been unavailable.
The problem he had was the account was disabled. IE: There were no files being delivered. At all. He wouldn't have gotten books, mails sent to his @kindle account or subscription. The account was disabled, ergo it couldn't be accessed.
Or in other words: DRM is not the root of his woes.
It also means that if the company you purchased a DRM-infected product from goes out of business, you will have a problem using the products you purchased. Ask the people who once used the "Urge" music system to buy what they thought was music they'd always be able to play. Yes, there may have been some little-known and difficult way to get your "licenses" renewed, but the people who bought those mp3s did not think they would someday have to work so hard just to keep playing them.
Buying a product with DRM is as dumb as buying a car from a company that's about to declare bankruptcy. Sure, you might be able to get it fixed in the future, but do you really want to go through all that?
You are welcome on my lawn.