Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

"And this is all before I’ve even got to the disastrous incompatibilities between the Kindle device, the Kindle for Mac app, the Kindle for iOS app, the Kindle Online Reader (read.amazon.com), and the kindle.amazon.com social network — all of which are full of gruesome interface annoyances of their own."

I just bought a Kindle, and besides my first attempt at buying one resulted in returning it to Best Buy because of a damaged screen, I love it. I had been reading Kindle books in my iPad and also loved the app experience. Mostly, the ability to highlight and annotate at will, and have an online repository of that to refer to, were the little details that sold me.

But what are the incompatibilities that he refers to?

However, on the $79 kindle, the details are definitely flubbed. The page turning/return/home screen keys make no logical sense. I apparently ordered one of those "Special Offers" by total accident...I must have pressed a confirm button when I meant to press whatever the hell stands for the "Cancel" button.

At $40 (for an interior design class), that's almost half the Kindle retail price. Not a bad monetization plan, I guess.

I'm 100% sure you can cancel whatever you accidentally ordered on Amazon.com.

Just like One-click ordering, the point is to make a purchase easy and let only the people who don't want to go through with it cancel, not to bilk people out of money via misclicks.

So this "Special Offer" was a LivingSocial deal. I would agree with you but I looked over the email many times, and my own account page. There is not only no easily visible option to cancel, there is no email contact. I have to call to complain.

Even more befuddling is that every Amazon purchase I have ever made has resulted in a confirmation email minutes after the purchase. This "Special Offer"'s confirmation came to me at 2AM, well after I went to bed. I'm willing to chalk this up to me mistakenly hitting the buttons and ordering the offer while awake and that there's a delay to process it on the LivingSocial end. Either way, it was not reassuring.

Amazon seems to delay the confirmations on some of their digital purchases; definitely MP3s and maybe video (IIRC). Believe at least in those cases, it's to make the CC processors happy (batching lots of small single purchases). Apple does the same thing for the iTunes/App store, though it seems to be on the scale of days instead of hours there.

edit: to be clear, by "delay the confirmations" I meant to say "delay the actual purchase"; the purchase(s) doesn't actually get charged until their time threshold hits.

Nothing makes CC processors happier than many tiny transactions. Apple and Amazon defer and batch transactions in order to save a fortune on transaction fees, which traditionally involve a fixed cost on the order of tens of cents, plus a much smaller percentage of the total. It's a huge bite of a ~$1 purchase.

What I meant to say. Way too long of a debugging session earlier...

Yep, I've cancelled digital audiobooks from audible (owned by amazon, if memory serves me right) and even books sent to the wrong address in europe (full refund).

I'm 100% sure you can cancel whatever you accidentally ordered on Amazon.com.

Amazon, in my experience, are very good with returns & customer service.

However, for the record of other readers, if you're in the EU, then you are legally entitled to a refund on anything you buy online within 7 days, even if you buy it non-accidentally and you've just changed your mind.

cf. http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/cons_int/safe_shop/dist_sell/i...

If you haven't returned the Kindle yet, pay the difference to remove the ads:

Amazon Charged me $30 to get the Adverts Off my K4 http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2011/10/05/amazon-charged-...

You can also go to the folder "assets", under "system", delete all contents then chmod 444.

That folder has all the special offers. The Kindle turns the permissions back to the default, but since I don't usually turn on the wifi, I only have to deal with the kindle asking me to go online to see the special offers.

"At $40 for an interior design class"? What is the connection between interior design and the kindle? And/or what is the connection between the monetization plan of a night class at a CC and the kindle?

Why would somebody downvote my question? Is it inappropriate to ask someone what they meant?

He has a Kindle with Special Offers, and at one point accidentally bought one of the Special Offers that came up, said offer being $40 for a class on interior design.

His post seemed fairly straight-forward, so people appear to be downvoting you for asking a question that a cursory re-reading of it should have made clear.

It was not clear to me that he purchased one of the offers by accident. I thought he meant he accidentally ordered one of the subsidized kindles by accident.

I also thought that was what he meant.

Sorry about the confusion. Hey, I'm confused too :)

Do the special offers have anything to do with your reading materials? Do you have design/architecture books on the kindle? Do you think ther offers targeted towards your demographic?

You have thirty days to return your "accidentally ordered" kindle. What's the issue?

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