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

consumerist.com

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

#91

Post by maratd »

noonespecial wrote: post #71

Note to google, amazon, paypal, anyone with a feature that can freeze, ban, hold, or otherwise disable accounts containing things that are valuable and especially paid for by customers: 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 cal…

> You need a department that can take responsibility for account lockouts and resolve them! STAT!

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.

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

#92

Post by Karunamon »

timwiseman wrote: post #30
JonLim wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be 100% honest, I've bene nothing but very very happy with my Kindle. 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 anythin…

I also have been extremely happy with my kindle. The closest I have to a complaint is the limit on the number of devices that can be authorized for certain books, and even that is normally reasonable. The cloud based reader accessible through a browser also makes that restriction less painful (though I wish they would enable highlighting...) But I still have concerns about the DRM. Amazon seems extremely stable, but…

You can hook your kindle up to your PC and pull the AZW files off if you wish to keep the content backed up.

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

#93

Post by Karunamon »

bcl wrote: post #18

You can backup the files from your kindle easily. I also hear it is pretty simple to strip the DRM. I don't see why this belongs on the front page. There are no real details here.

Why is everyone downvoting this? There is quite literally no proof or any corroboration of any kind for this story. The only reason we're seeing it is because it's been widely circulated for a while.

It's a legitimate concern.

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

#94

Post by frio »

jordan0day wrote: post #6

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…

The DRM on Kindle ebooks is actually surprisingly easy to crack, and I do so as a matter of principle. I believe in supporting the author and pay for my Kindle library; I also ensure my ebooks can't be taken from me if the company folds/the publisher decides they don't want my money (ie. the 1984 Amazon debacle).

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

#95

Post by dangrossman »

wrs wrote: post #32
jordan0day wrote: post #6

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…

> what guarantees do I have that I can still read those books if B&N goes under 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!

I still have MSN Music and Buy.com purchased albums in WMA format hanging around my music folders on backup drives... paid in full, "purchased" music that was turned into junk data I can't decrypt and play when the stores turned off their licensing servers.

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

#96

Post by cageface »

rickmb wrote: post #4

Buying DRM-ed content is a contradiction in terms. Period. 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.

Last week Apple locked me out of my iTunes account, and I can't even update the apps I already have installed on my iPad.

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.

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

#97

Post by notatoad »

jordan0day wrote: post #16
notatoad wrote: 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 necessarily that the guy did something malicious, but he could be making it exceedingly difficult for amazon to solve his problem. It seems like such a simple solution to me - if the account is for some reason not unlockable, create a new account, gift credit the guy all his purchases, and permanently close the old account. I know that the CSRs have the ability to do this. If they aren't, there's a reason.

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.

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

#98

Post by engtech »

agwa wrote: post #61
jordan0day wrote: post #6

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…

I have a first-generation WiFi-only Nook. I have never registered it with B&N and have it permanently in airplane mode (i.e. WiFi disabled). For over a year I used it only for DRM-free EPUB (mainly O'Reilly e-books). 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 N…

what happens when your credit card hits the expiry date?

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

#99

Post by noonespecial »

maratd wrote: post #91
noonespecial wrote: post #71

Note to google, amazon, paypal, anyone with a feature that can freeze, ban, hold, or otherwise disable accounts containing things that are valuable and especially paid for by customers: 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 cal…

> You need a department that can take responsibility for account lockouts and resolve them! STAT! 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.

Legal is what happens when the other functions of your company throw an exception that you've got no event handler for. Its the default handler that returns a meaningless "An error has occurred" as your program crashes.

If legal has to talk to your customers directly, your business is broken. Its an unrecoverable runtime error. Gurus are meditating.

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

#100

Post by nekojima »

cube13 wrote: post #58
nekojima wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I led a problem resolution team at a large company. If we ever knowingly received three calls from any client for the same problem (through any method of client contact source), or the complaint was vocal or serious enough on the first call (or first identifiable call), the incident would be forwarded to us and we'd deal with it directly. Rarely did the most complex issue take more than a day or two to resolve. On oc…

Out of curiosity, what would you do if the client got to this point, and your team determined that it was a fraudulent claim? 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.

In the case described in the posting, if I found it to be a valid claim and could not resolve why the problem was occurring within 24-48 hours, I would likely suggest that we create a new account for the client and populate it with the titles we knew he had purchased and perhaps provide a $100 or similar amount as compensation.

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.

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