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Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

consumerist.com

11–20 of 106 posts

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#11
post #5

i feel like there's a part of this story that we're not hearing. given amazon's excellent customer service reputation (including my own experiences) it's hard for me to believe that this could happen without there being a reason.

Agreed. At the same time, it's a good warning that wisdom might be to backup your books in preparation for bugs.

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#13
post #2

Paging all e-book sellers, this is a chance to get great publicity for the one-time-only price of $1,000.

I do not believe that any other e-book seller has the selection that Amazon does. It would be terribly embarrassing if some seller tried to use this for PR and then realized that they do not have some of the titles.

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#14

I just received a Barnes & Noble "Nook SimpleTouch" (the basic, e-ink screen one), and while I like it, this sort of thing has me very worried about using most of its (limited set of) features. That is, while the Nook has something like 1 gb of internal storage for books, about 75% is reserved for content you have to purchase through Barnes & Noble. That leaves about 230 mb for your own files. (The Nook does feature…

Anyone know if the Kobo has similar issues?

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?

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#15
post #7
post #5

i feel like there's a part of this story that we're not hearing. given amazon's excellent customer service reputation (including my own experiences) it's hard for me to believe that this could happen without there being a reason.

I'm inclined to agree. 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.

What? You always call websites whenever you can't log into them? You don't allow for downtime at all?

They are disputing the charges because amazon stole their content!

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#16
post #5

i feel like there's a part of this story that we're not hearing. given amazon's excellent customer service reputation (including my own experiences) it's hard for me to believe that this could happen without there being a reason.

Amazon is a sufficiently large organization such that I'm sure this sort of thing actually happens more often than you think.

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.

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#17
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree. 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.

What? You always call websites whenever you can't log into them? You don't allow for downtime at all? They are disputing the charges because amazon stole their content!

No, I call websites whenever my content that I paid for is broken or inaccessible. Not to mention they already did it once, and were told to wait 24 hours, but instead they waited a month?

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.

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#19
post #5

i feel like there's a part of this story that we're not hearing. given amazon's excellent customer service reputation (including my own experiences) it's hard for me to believe that this could happen without there being a reason.

Amazon is a sufficiently large organization such that I'm sure this sort of thing actually happens more often than you think. 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 br…

Not to take anyone's side, since I don't know the details, but maybe they suspected the account was using an stolen CC? I know companies tend to aggressively protect credit card holders (specially since rollbacks are so expensive). I'm sure amazon must be the target of stolen credit cards consistently.

That said, regardless of their size, they should expedite this type of check, specially for accounts that are not new!

Re: Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

#20
He'd still have access to his books if he'd installed the Kindle desktop application and had synced all of them down to his desktop.

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.

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