Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs
consumerist.com
consumerist.com
You need a department that can take responsibility for account lockouts and resolve them! STAT! It is not acceptable for no one in the company to know why an account was disabled or how to go about reinstating it!
If piracy can be called "stealing" and no one bats an eye, I'm going to go ahead and call account lockouts with resolution refusal stealing as well. $1000 is well within the bounds of small claims courts in most jurisdictions.
They already do. It's called legal. I've been in this situation numerous times already with PayPal and a few others. They won't even look at the matter until your lawyer sends a nasty letter. At which point they'll look at it. And then either cut you a check or kindly tell you to go fuck yourself, politely.
If legal has to talk to your customers directly, your business is broken. Its an unrecoverable runtime error. Gurus are meditating.
Most companies have teams similar to this, but they are often used wrong, have the wrong type of staff, bad/poor procedures and processes or are under/over-utilized for escalated problems (so too much or too little goes to them).
Additionally, you might be surprised by how difficult it is to find quality staff (especially at the relatively poor salaries often on offer) that has the "right" mindset to be successful for a role like this. The level of customer service, problem resolution skills, knowledge of possible problems & their resolution (without checking a manual, notes, colleagues), quick response and thick skin/hardheadedness for the abuse you will get, when you are trying to help. Sometimes customers are irrational, make mistakes, blame the company for their errors and won't accept it was their error. More often the case (when I did this role), it was a joy to help customers to resolve the problem so they are happy (or happier) with the result.
It should be made illegal for sellers to pretend this constitutes the purchase of the content itself. Call it a lease, call it a service, but stop scamming consumers.
I'm done with cloud-based content. I'll continue to use dumb storage like Dropbox and S3, and I'm ok with subscription services like Netflix and rdio. But any service that pretends that I "own" content that can be yanked away with the flick of a switch to be restored only after weeks of haggling with an understaffed and indifferent bureaucracy can go fuck itself.
Of course, once again, it's only the people that play by the rules that suffer.
I really like the convenience of an e-reader, and the e-ink screen really is fantastic, but so far I've only loaded files from Project Gutenberg and some e-books from Manning (who provides free pdf and sometimes EPUB format e-books when you buy the hardcopy). I'm already bumping up against the (artificial) 230 mb-or-so limit for books not purchased directly from B&N.
I'd be more open to buying e-books from B&N if I wasn't afraid of a scenario similar to what's described in the article. As far as I can tell, B&N ships their Nook books with DRM, what guarantees do I have that I can still read those books if B&N goes under, or my account gets screwed up in some mix-up?
Edit: I must have phrased something in a confusing way. The Nook allows you to load 3rd party, non-DRM'd EPUB and PDF's (although as I mentioned, you only get about a quarter of the device's internal storage to use for 3rd-party content). My concern re: DRM was the books you buy directly from Barnes & Noble.
As the MSN Music shutdown (and others) demonstrated, quite possibly none at all. That's how DRM works.
There's no DRM media allowed in my house. I plan to live a lot longer than most companies' digital media divisions will!
Last week I finally broke down and bought a DRM book from B&N's website. It let me download an encrypted EPUB file, which I transferred to my Nook over USB. Without having to enable WiFi or register my Nook, I was able to open and read the EPUB just by entering my name and the credit card number used to purchase the book. (By the way, I only had to do this once.)
It still sucks because it's DRM, but I'm reasonably confident that with this setup, B&N can't remotely kill my books, and it should keep working even if B&N goes bust. You might want to consider it.
I mean, I'm not super-concerned with the prospect of wasting $15... it's the principle of the thing.
He'll get a new expiry date. Credit card companies don't issue you a new number unless they really have to (card was use fraudulently)
Instead they just issue you a new expiry and CVC - and often even update merchants who are charging you on a regular basis with the new info, or allow transactions to continue to go through even with expired date/cvc
Still a valid concern regarding the card # being replaced due to fraud. I keep an encrypted list of all my past CC #s for this very purpose: Far too many places use the CC# as a life-long immutable number (think SSN).
What I was wondering is if he had to re-validate at some point in the future, would the expired card trip him up or would his encrypted copy still work?
I'd guess it would still work if he is doing this all without a network connection. If that works though, I hope their using the credit card info as a hash instead of directly storing it in their encrypted files... because that would be scary.
Purchased a book by accident? Refund instantly or done within 5 minutes. Switching devices? No problemo, pages are synced up to the last page you read. Wiping your device? All your books are online and available for download.
This seems like a fringe case that I'm not too worried about. I have a full purchase history on Amazon.com and if anything fails, I am pretty sure their customer service wouldn't become huge pricks to me for no reason at all.
But I still have concerns about the DRM. Amazon seems extremely stable, but things in tech move fast. Even if Amazon survives, I may eventually want to move to a completely different reader from a company that doesn't exist now, and the DRM will make it hard to take my library with me.
I love the cloud drive player Amazon rolled out for MP3s, but I have it redundantly backed up on 2 harddrives. With the Kindle content I don't have that option.
Its not too difficult to imagine edge cases where communication between the person taking the phone call and the person able to resolve the situation breaks down; that can happen in any large company. But then getting things resolved also requires good faith on the part of the complainant; filing chargebacks against a reputable company within a month of the problem isn't the best indication of this.
I guess worrying about those edge cases just kind of comes naturally, perhaps a little too much personal experience with Murphy's Law?
Perhaps really my chief complaint boils down to the stereotypical issue with DRM: If I paid for a book, why do I need your permission to read it?
However, as a service provider, edge cases are what keep me up at night but are fantastic opportunities for providing even better service. I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't care, but I personally wouldn't care too much about an edge case as long as Amazon does that person good.
As for DRM: if it isn't invasive or affect my experience with the book (Kindle and Steam are good examples here.) then I am okay by it. If it is used in some weird way to censor things? That's uncool.
A kill switch is a capability one party has over another. Once in place, it can be used for any purpose.
The thing I hate most though is the whole Kindle experience. Buying e-books from Amazon is kind of scammy since there's no confirmation page when you buy books and there's no way to turn off one-click for kindle books. Also, I wasn't able to find where to refund the book at all when I clicked "buy" thinking that there would be a confirmation page.
Also, the syncing is kinda broken because if you click a link in the book and end up in the appendix, there's no easy way to reset the furthest page read. Finally, epub is such a "free-ing" format since I can purchase books from Google books as well. Sync is just a minor convenience since e-book sellers will usually let you re-download the book anyway if you've purchased it.
There's a link for "Made a mistake?" which I clicked once, thinking I would get a confirmation page as well, and the refund was instantaneous.
Not really. I have a Kindle 3, and have loads of non-DRM-ed, 3rd party books on it.
I've totally written off the Kindle because of similar 3rd party content issues - anyone have first hand experience with the Nook or Kobo when used with ePub (mainly) and PDF (rarely) files?
I have 173Mb of files purchased and downloaded separately and side-loaded from PragProg, Manning, O'Reilly and SitePoint. (And a few classics from Gutenburg.)
I have no idea if it works with DRM'd 3rd-party content, though.
The device doesn't require Calibre for side-loading either as you can just drag the epub to the mounted device. Loading and using your own fonts is also a nice feature.
As for PDFs, if they are smaller page sizes it's pretty good, but the zooming and panning functions are kind of a pain--mainly because of e-ink, but partially due to UI.
I've only had one issue with the Kobo Touch when I had to reload my books, as for some reason the database became corrupted.
I connected it the PC and and simply copied epub and pdf to it using calibre. It comes with 100 free books that you can erase, none of the memory is reserved (except for the OS)
ePub works perfectly.
pdf is a little limited in range of zoom, for technical books I convert to epub with calibre and download that.
The only downside of the Kobo - it takes a long time to boot up if it has fully shutdown. Then once it has started it takes a long time to open books.
Consumerist could really give us more details...
There's a principle here. The specifics aren't really the point.
It's the details that make the story interesting.
Even if Laura Northrup was really given this information by someone who is really named Ryan, how do we know that Ryan isn't making this story up? Or perhaps there's a part of it that is true but important parts of the story are omitted or exaggerated?
This kind of thing seems to be happening more each year on the internet - widely circulated stories considered credible just because it's widely circulated.
All that being said - I own both a Kindle Touch and Nook Simple Touch but have spent a total of $0.99 on content, for the same reasons cited by many in this thread. However, I'm very comfortable with a Netflix model. I've used the Nook to read in stores a little and I intend to use the Kindle Touch with my prime account to read borrowed books.
I predict that some day, Amazon or Barnes and Noble will come out with some kind of "content guarantee: you buy it, it's yours, forever." And I think this guarantee will quickly be copied by all competitors. The market for e-content will then be extended to nervous Nellies like me.
In fact, something is a bit weird here, because whatever books were on the Kindle itself should still be there. There's no mention of it having been remotely wiped.
Edited to add: I don't want to minimize this issue, though. Because being locked out of your account means you can't buy books or grab the freebies that pop up. Right now I'm suffering a bit like that due to account confusion I need to resolve with Amazon. Seems I have an older account they won't delete and from time to time Amazon gets confused and sends me to it -- and the first time that happened, I thought all my books were gone (the older acct never had books). A phone call straightened it out. And now I must do that again.
By the tone of your comment, I'm assuming the "part of the story we're not hearing" involves the customer doing something wrong, rather than Amazon? If that's the case, I can't really think of what that thing might be that would give Amazon the right to lock this guy out? Also, why would he bring this issue to light and risk exposure if he really had done something so wrong?
I find it much easier to believe that a large corporation allowed an individual customer to fall through the cracks than some fraudster launching an elaborate plan to scam Amazon out of $1000 in e-books.
I'd be quite surprised if Amazon didn't have a similar team, even if just a dozen or two staff, if they are experienced, that's all that's usually required. The savings lost to poor public relations, and improved customer relations, easily make up for the cost of the team.
Obviously, if it's legitimate, you would have the ability to fix the issue right away. However, what if there were enough red flags that it didn't seem entirely right?
Not saying that this is the case either way, but I'm curious what the standard procedure is in that case.
For this case, my team would have resolved it within 24-48 hours, based on the information that he's posted. It doesn't seem overly complex, assuming no fraud (or his account was mangled in a data transfer or deleted in someway and he hasn't mentioned that), and the resolution takes a few hours of someone making the new account and searching for titles to add to the account.
As a longer answer...
We didn't deal directly with public relations or issue press releases concerning significant public domain complaints, as to the best of my recollection, we didn't have a large PR nightmare to deal with while I was with the team. So that aspect I can not comment on.
If it was an issue of fraud, and we had several instances of fraudulent claims, we would clearly state that was our conclusion to the customer (or claimed customer). Our company did not actively pursue legal action against fraud cases, including a significant internal fraud case that was discovered, because of the possible negative publicity and loss of public reputation/brand quality.
Though through escalation, if I could not personally (as head of the team) find a solution to the issue and we felt it was fraud, we would offer to arrange an in-person meeting with the customer and ask that they bring their (or a) lawyer as the department VP, along with our legal team, would like to discuss the issue in detail. I don't remember more than one client coming in for a meeting in a two year period and we had security officers in the next room (with blinds down and listening in) in case there was a problem.
I can easily imagine several scenarios; the one I'm having trouble imagining is one where they can't tell him why he's locked out.
Honestly, the only thing that is even remotely reasonable is an investigation by a three-letter agenchy.
Initial guess, from some experiences with chargeback happy customers, is that the guy started initiating chargebacks before giving amazon a chance to resolve his problems, and amazon is refusing to help him until he cancels the chargeback process.
That said, regardless of their size, they should expedite this type of check, specially for accounts that are not new!
My own anecdotal experiences with Amazon customer service aside, something feels amiss about this whole situation. Why did they not call/email Amazon after a full 24 hours had gone by? Why are they disputing Amazon charges to their credit cards?
I just feel like something is wrong here.
I have filed a complaint with the BBB, emailed everyone I
could at Amazon, called the Customer Service Line, the
Kindle "Executive" support line, and Corporate. I have
been apologized to by everyone I have spoken to and been
told that they have never seen this situation before.
None of them can tell me if I will ever receive the
content I have paid for.They are disputing the charges because amazon stole their content!
I understand why they're disputing charges, but that seems silly if they haven't made some concerted effort to figure out what's going on.
At least that's my take on it.
To say that the person was obviously in the wrong/doing something shady/to blame just because of how long they waited seems like you're really stretching to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt.
However, not sure how it's silly to blame a user if they waited a month. Personal issue? Fine. But procrastinator and phone phobic aren't really excuses for this. If you're really concerned about your Kindle (I would be VERY concerned if it were more than a day.) then I would do almost anything in my power to fix it.
Wait a month? But that's a whole month of me not reading my books!
A license can be more flexible and allow free transfer, copying and backup; but I don't think the law allows for a concept of the ownership of trivially duplicable data.
You can own a book. You just don't have the right to make copies of that book. Why can't you own an ebook?
Oddly enough, I suppose every book I own here has legalese in it saying that I don't have the right to lend, sell or "otherwise circulate" it without the publisher's consent.
You've forgotten about the public domain.
All the hubub about IP and DRM and piracy follows from this mismatch.
Unfortunately, I think there are a number of differences that will make that harder with ebooks than regular books. Most significantly, people consume the media different. Excluding a few reference books and the Bible, I tend to read a book once and then I am done with it, and I think most people are like that. Even people who reread books only do it a few times with some spacing in between. With music, I keep adding to my collection, but I still have songs I found years ago in my MP3 player. I want to listen many times, so I have a big push to preserve every song for a long time and to be able to take them with me across multiple generations of devices. The push to have full control, while present, is much weaker for the average consumer.
Another lessor factor is that music was in an unprotected format (CDs) that could be easily made digital long before DRM existed for music. With books, the truly unprotected dead-tree form is difficult to digitize, so they have a different history in terms of consumer expectations.
This may be true for novels, but science, engineering and math books are usually used for a long, long time. I still have all of mine for reference and every once in a while I do come back to many of them.
It's too bad it has to come to that.
Once I read that line, my first thought was "chances are his account was locked by the fraud/risk department".
They said they'd contact him in 24 hours, they didn't.
Chargebacks are supposed to be a last resort consumer tool, when every other option has been exhausted.
There was another incident (Amazon again) where they lost a person's annotations for the Jobs biography in a software update[1]. Amazon seem to be botching the cloud aspect of e-books, and while their selection is orders of magnitude better than iBooks in my country (because I can buy from Amazon.com), the reason I buy e-books in the first place is because of what the cloud offers - with marginalia/annotations being the best selling point over dead-tree books.
Annotating e-books on the Kindle app on iOS is also a ridiculous pain in the ass, but that's for another time. I love the selection Amazon has, especially the self-published articles from bloggers, Ars Technica, newspapers or magazines and such, but the way Apple keeps screwing these things up, I plan on choosing the iBooks version, if available. I honestly think I might have thrown my phone against the wall, if all my Isaacson biography annotations had been wiped.
But that's just me as one customer. I am sure that some people have the priorities you do, but I wouldn't exactly predict an unequivocal PR failure. :)
[1]: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2011/11/21/kindle-annotations-lost-in...
Your comment (and this article) just inspired me to figure out how to do this, and backup all me eBooks in a DRM-free format. Turns out, it was pretty painless.
Needless to say, I'm not doing business with them any time soon!
I agree with some of the comments here, simply because your company is an 'internet company' doesn't mean a 'Help' webpage is all you need for support. Actual personal support handling is virtually non-existent from large scale web companies and it's a disappointment.
I don't see why this belongs on the front page. There are no real details here.
It's a legitimate concern.
That's like saying your banks' ATM network going down isn't news because you can always get through the vault door with some C4 and take your money that way.
The article is really light on details. Without more information I really don't see why this story has legs.
Not according to the DMCA you don't. Accessing material you bought - what are you? Some kind of terrorist?