If you’re a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt. Sure, libraries are great, but you have to wait if they don’t have your book, you have to transport yourself there and back, and many of them are closed when inspiration strikes at midnight and you realize you want to stay up all night reading some book you literally just heard about but suddenly must have RIGHT NOW (or maybe that’s just me). It’s way better to have a bigger library on your computer. You can try books out and if they’re stupid, at least you only lose the time it took to read it. If you use the kindle cloud reader, you can read on your computer. Then when you’re done, you refund it, and you don’t have to go through the annoying process of shipping anything anywhere, or worry about packaging or it being in the same condition.
Plus if you travel with your laptop, you can then have an unlimited supply of books that weigh nothing, as long as you have internet access, that are effectively free and in a convenient format.
If you’re a slow reader, just buy it, read for a week, return it, then buy it again (and return it again after a week). Repeat until finished.
If you’re a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt.
(Sigh.) It’s bad enough that you’ve chosen to defect; it’s downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
If you must obtain ebooks by extralegal means, there are such things as torrents and ebook sites, where you will find far more books than you will ever be able to read, and where you will only be committing copyright infringement, instead of infringement, wire fraud, theft of resources, and violation of that stupid US anti-hacking law that Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under. (Oh, and let’s not forget the part where you just came pretty close to admitting that you’ve committed those crimes already.)
Advocating law-breaking on LW for ethical reasons might be one thing; advocating it for reasons of petty selfishness is quite another.
[Edited to add: this comment is not about protecting Amazon; it’s about 1) not promoting illegal activities on LW, and 2) it not being a good idea to get into a habit of defecting on agreements (whether social/informal or legal/formal because of self-serving rationalizations like, “they can afford it” or “I can get away with it”.]
(Sigh.) It’s bad enough that you’ve chosen to defect; it’s downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
Amazon can take care of itself. It doesn’t need your paternalistic moralizing intervention. If Amazon believes that on net having a policy that allows returns of possibly already consumed goods will produce more profit than a more defensive strategy then it can do so. Save your shaming for people who need your defence or who are being ‘expolited’ in a way that isn’t straightforward (albeit miserly) use of the deliberately included features of a powerful website.
Something actually ethical to recommend would be the use of calibre to convert and remove DRM and then returning the book while keeping it. That’s clearly illegal and something I incidentally haven’t done. I’ve never bothered looking in to the ‘return book’ kindle feature for those books I have purchased from amazon. (I just use that tool for the purpose of getting things into a format TextAloud can convert to mp3.)
Have you seen an instance of this happening to someone who did not return multiple large purchases? I am worried about this happening, but in every instance I read about, the person who got banned had returned multiple TV’s or computers, not small items. However, the ebook return policy has only been in place for around a year, so it might not show up.
With ebook returns, it seems like they only disallow you from refunding ebooks in the future, but do not ban your account
If you’re a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt. Sure, libraries are great, but you have to wait if they don’t have your book, you have to transport yourself there and back, and many of them are closed when inspiration strikes at midnight and you realize you want to stay up all night reading some book you literally just heard about but suddenly must have RIGHT NOW (or maybe that’s just me). It’s way better to have a bigger library on your computer. You can try books out and if they’re stupid, at least you only lose the time it took to read it. If you use the kindle cloud reader, you can read on your computer. Then when you’re done, you refund it, and you don’t have to go through the annoying process of shipping anything anywhere, or worry about packaging or it being in the same condition.
Plus if you travel with your laptop, you can then have an unlimited supply of books that weigh nothing, as long as you have internet access, that are effectively free and in a convenient format.
If you’re a slow reader, just buy it, read for a week, return it, then buy it again (and return it again after a week). Repeat until finished.
(Sigh.) It’s bad enough that you’ve chosen to defect; it’s downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
If you must obtain ebooks by extralegal means, there are such things as torrents and ebook sites, where you will find far more books than you will ever be able to read, and where you will only be committing copyright infringement, instead of infringement, wire fraud, theft of resources, and violation of that stupid US anti-hacking law that Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under. (Oh, and let’s not forget the part where you just came pretty close to admitting that you’ve committed those crimes already.)
Advocating law-breaking on LW for ethical reasons might be one thing; advocating it for reasons of petty selfishness is quite another.
[Edited to add: this comment is not about protecting Amazon; it’s about 1) not promoting illegal activities on LW, and 2) it not being a good idea to get into a habit of defecting on agreements (whether social/informal or legal/formal because of self-serving rationalizations like, “they can afford it” or “I can get away with it”.]
It would help you argument is you were not to invent quite ridiculous notions just to make something look more scary.
Amazon can take care of itself. It doesn’t need your paternalistic moralizing intervention. If Amazon believes that on net having a policy that allows returns of possibly already consumed goods will produce more profit than a more defensive strategy then it can do so. Save your shaming for people who need your defence or who are being ‘expolited’ in a way that isn’t straightforward (albeit miserly) use of the deliberately included features of a powerful website.
Something actually ethical to recommend would be the use of calibre to convert and remove DRM and then returning the book while keeping it. That’s clearly illegal and something I incidentally haven’t done. I’ve never bothered looking in to the ‘return book’ kindle feature for those books I have purchased from amazon. (I just use that tool for the purpose of getting things into a format TextAloud can convert to mp3.)
Amazon has fired customers before for making too many returns[0]. So be aware that this may get your account banned at some point.
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Have you seen an instance of this happening to someone who did not return multiple large purchases? I am worried about this happening, but in every instance I read about, the person who got banned had returned multiple TV’s or computers, not small items. However, the ebook return policy has only been in place for around a year, so it might not show up.
With ebook returns, it seems like they only disallow you from refunding ebooks in the future, but do not ban your account