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Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

It's barely even usable for buying Kindle books anymore.

Half the time I get tricked into buying a book my Kindle doesn't support and I have to spend half an hour yelling at support to get my money back.

Because they let you do the "buy and deliver to my kindle" thing even when your kindle is not supported. Then only when you grab your kindle to sync you learn the bad news.

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This is very surprising to me. I've got a kindle from 2013 and never had any issue with unsupported books.

Is yours super older or what?

It's a Kindle Paperwhite. I think colour is usually the problem. Doesn't make sense to me either.

Colour?! I’ve never had an issue of my kindle with colour! It’s only black and white! How can Amazon screw up a black and white conversion?

Maybe I'm wrong. I kind of just abduced it because it was the only plausible reason I could think of. My kindle only supports black and white. And I figure newer models might have colour support?

The OS has a full-colour graphics library. It converts to black and white on the device. That's not the issue.

There are some books that just straight up are not supported on kindles or only on Kindle fire editions. Looking it actually recently changed, but "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces," you could buy in kindle format, but it would only work for the Kindle fire editions. Maybe it has gotten better, but I used to run into this a lot with textbooks. Would work on Kindle fires, but not paperwhite.

Speaking of tricks.. a while back I turned off my “reading insights” in the Kindle app. Recently I’ve been re-reading Asimov and kindle reading insights popped up to congratulate me on my reading streak. Wouldn’t you know it — they’ve been tracking my reading this whole time, and I looked into it and there is no opt out short of closing my account (and subsequently losing access to my kindle library). Just absurd levels of stalking in the pursuit of data.

That sounds like a clear GDPR violation, but I guess you are not in the EU?

Agree and correct, unfortunately.

I don't condone this practice, but considering how "lucrative" data is, I read any sort of opt-out like this as "we're still going to collect the data but we'll hide the insights from you to make it look like we aren't." So, same with personalized ads on Google. Not sure how they're planning on implementing Maps location data such that Google "doesn't have" it, but color me skeptical for the time being.

Not only does this almost never happen to me, but Amazon has added a Refund button that works automatically. If you select “Remove from Library” within a time window, it asks if you want a refund now. I have run into some bad scans, but never had a problem getting an instant refund. What’s fascinating is how different experiences are.

Do you know if that's a recent addition? That definitely wasn't the case the last time it happened to me. I'm very fuzzy about when that was exactly. Probably in the last year or so. I had to go through support, who initially told me there were no refunds, but relented after some cajoling.

Could also be a matter of differing practices in different countries, or prime membership(I have none).

I definitely agree it's weird how different people's experiences are though.

Really? That's super surprising, I probably buy a dozen or so books every year now (and used to order far more when I was living abroad and there wasn't a decent english bookstore in my city) and have never had an issue. Now trying to use goodreads... that's a mess

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