Some Authors Against Amazon E-book Return Policy

I’ve heard a few complaints, and read about a few complaints, when it comes to Amazon’s Kindle return policy recently. And it seems to be more evident with this web site, where thousands of authors have signed a petition to stop what they are basically referring to as e-book refund fraud. I know very little about this because it’s never been an issue for me personally.  In fact, here’s a link to something I posted in April about this topic.

As I stated in that post, I’ve had readers e-mail me because they purchased the wrong books in the Chase series and I’ve made the book exchange myself so the reader would avoid having to get a refund from any retail outlet, including Amazon. And I haven’t signed the petition and doubt I will.

But other authors feel very strongly about this, one comment from the link above reads:

As an author, this policy allows people basically to steal my work. They buy the book, read it, then return it.

As I said, I don’t know much about it. But steal is a very harsh word.

But then this article titled, Should Amazon Change Its Kindle Book Return Policy?” is even more interesting.

Do you think readers are abusing Amazon’s digital return policy? The petitioners argue that Amazon gives readers enough time to read the book and still return it.

This piece links back to the link I’ve provided above, where you can read more about all this. As a reader, I’ve never actually returned an e-book. I don’t even know how I would go about doing it, and trust me, not all the books I’ve read are books I’ve loved. I also know that the books I’ve read and loved are books I want to remain in my e-library forever, and I think most readers feel this way. So this is something that’s hard to relate to…for me.

The reason why all this seems to be coming up again is because I’ve heard that Amazon is closing the accounts of people who abuse and return too many e-books in a European country. But that could be the rumor of overzealous bloggers looking for attention, and I hesitate to link here because the facts are not clear this time.