Comments on: Why I Will Never Buy an Amazon Kindle

By: garetz

garetz — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 09:28:48 +0000

This is why i only by real books, and the price is almost identical. Sometimes the kindle is more expensive than the printed word.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:41:10 +0000

I vote for the heuristics-with-no-human-oversight explanation. I suspect no, there is in fact no human being anywhere in the loop, because that would cost too much money.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:37:56 +0000

This is all over the net now, and it’s a major PR disaster for Amazon.

I’m guessing the user has either voilated some obscure part of the pages and pages of EULA that nobody ever reads, or some sort of heuristics algorithm looking for “bad behaviour” has thrown up a false positive.

The boilerplate replies she keeps getting makes me wonder if there is an actual human being anywhere in the loop at Amazon.

By: Steve Dunn

Steve Dunn — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:29:04 +0000

This is pretty shocking service. Well, disservice, really. I’m already a Kindle owner, but most of my content is either PDF format, or “free” books e.g. classics on Project Gutenburg. It’s been a very fine piece of kit for me, but the emails cited are pretty shocking and poor from a company should know better.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:20:08 +0000

The question of convenience is always a matter of what angle you attack it from. People who only use technology as it is given to them never realize that DRM is an inconvenience until something like the above disaster happens. For those of us who actually like to know what we’re getting ourselves into and to what end, DRM is a horror. (A necessary horror, but a horror all the same.)

By: khooke

khooke — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:14:08 +0000

Agreed this is an awful and extreme example of poor customer service and how they handled her inquiries for more information, but even still, everything has it’s pros and cons. Since using the Kindle app on my Android tablet for the past couple of years, I’ve bought and read more books than I have for several previous years before that. The convenience factor alone for me far outweighs the disadvantages of the DRM. Since you can run the Kindle app on most devices, you can pick up the last book you were reading from anywhere, for example read a few pages while standing in line at the supermarket on your phone, and then later on continue reading where you left off on your tablet later that evening since the app syncs your last read page. I’d rather not buy DRM protected books, sure, and I’d rather pay less than Amazon’s prices, but for what it is, Amazon offers a great service.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:35:47 +0000

Yeah, it sounds to me at least as much as a case of heuristics gone haywire with no human oversight as it does a case of DRM being problematic. I suspect her account got flagged because of some weird behavioral issue (accessing it from overseas? who knows?) and triggered an audit which was never looked at by human eyes.

Unfortunately, I suspect messes like this are the only ways such oversights can ever get addressed.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:29:37 +0000

It does sound like a serious customer service fail, and judging by the way this one’s gone viral on Twitter, Amazon’s PR are going to have to do a lot of damage control on this one.

Will be interesting to see how this one turns out.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:26:30 +0000

Given that I’m an author and I have a vested interest in getting my material out to people through as many broad channels as possible, I kind of don’t have a choice but to deal with the Kindle.

I don’t like DRM, for precisely these reasons, but I know I’m foolish to ignore trying to publish through channels that use it. I am, however, not foolish enough to throw too much money at it only to have something like this happen.

(The very, very optimistic side of me says problems like this are hiccups with the implementation and not institutional issues, but I know better than to try and convince anyone else of that.)