The Kindle experience: this must be a nightmare

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Lessig

So I buy a Kindle book for my Kindle 2. It downloads to my machine. I open up the book — it has no relation (except the relation of “not”) to the book I ordered. Three emails, 4 days later, Amazon has still not responded to the problem. I wonder how they begin to discover/fix such a problem.

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16 Responses to The Kindle experience: this must be a nightmare

  1. George says:
    May 19, 2009 at 6:32 am

    I had a problem with my new K2 (it froze) and I called them and they resolved the issue immediately. I later had a problem where I would purchase a book and somehow they would charge one of my old, expired cards. I called and they resolved immediately.

    I think you might just call instead of emailing…

    G

  2. BrettJB says:
    May 19, 2009 at 7:44 am

    George,

    They’re an internet retailer. Email must work. Period. If they can’t get that part right, then epic fail.

  3. RobertD says:
    May 19, 2009 at 8:48 am

    I’ve had chance to use the cancel order feature as well as the kindle support help page (I called). Both worked as advertised. Snippet below from the Amazon site:

    Cancelling Accidental Purchases

    You have the option to cancel a purchase from your Kindle immediately after it was completed in case you change your mind or make a mistake. After you click “Buy” you will see a thank you page that gives you the option to either return to the store or cancel the order. Use the select wheel to cancel the order, if desired. If the option to cancel the order is no longer available, you can also contact Amazon Customer Service via e-mail or phone by clicking one of the Contact Us buttons on any Kindle Support Help page on Amazon.com. After a purchase is cancelled, the item is removed from your Kindle and a refund will be issued to the payment method used for the original purchase.

  4. RobertD says:
    May 19, 2009 at 8:49 am

    I’ve had chance to use the cancel order feature as well as the kindle support help page (I called). Both worked as advertised. Snippet below from the Amazon site:

    Cancelling Accidental Purchases

    You have the option to cancel a purchase from your Kindle immediately after it was completed in case you change your mind or make a mistake. After you click “Buy” you will see a thank you page that gives you the option to either return to the store or cancel the order. Use the select wheel to cancel the order, if desired. If the option to cancel the order is no longer available, you can also contact Amazon Customer Service via e-mail or phone by clicking one of the Contact Us buttons on any Kindle Support Help page on Amazon.com. After a purchase is cancelled, the item is removed from your Kindle and a refund will be issued to the payment method used for the original purchase.

  5. John says:
    May 19, 2009 at 9:25 am

    The problem with email support is that Amazon uses a database of prefabricated responses and support staff is strongly dissuaded from personalizing or deviating from the verbiage in these “blurbs”. If you have an issue that exists outside of the available responses, you’re likely to end up with any manner of reply; ranging from the utterly irrelevant, or tragic demonstrations of our failure to appreciate even the most simple rules of the English language, to relatively relevant.

    Additionally, this is a content issue, so you can expect no real resolution for Kindle Support. The best that they can do for you would be to issue a refund and escalate the issue to another department that handles content quality. If it is determined that the content received from the content provider is incorrect or corrupted, the onus is placed on the content provider to provide a new version of the content, which then enters into the typical channels of QA before becoming available for purchase again. This process can take months, and that’s only if the content provider decides to resolve the issue. To make matters worse, the team that actually handles content quality issues is notoriously indifferent to customer concerns.

    Good luck with it, Lawrence. You’re best bet is going to be a phone call to Kindle Support. Even still, I wouldn’t expect a fast or satisfactory resolution.

  6. megan says:
    May 19, 2009 at 12:02 pm

    I purchased a book for my Kindle that was great until I got to Appendix A. It was formatted poorly, so it locked up the entire Kindle, and required them to actually send me a new one. When I got the new one, the book was still causing problems every time we tried to access it, so over telephone support we removed the badly formatted book and they refunded my money. The phone support guys were nice, but one did make a few comments about my selections of books (“What are you some kind of outdoor athlete or something?”), which I thought was strange. I was glad I hadn’t ordered anything that would REALLY raise an eyebrow. I don’t think I would have had any luck with my problem over email. They’re not set up for that.

  7. Adrian Lopez says:
    May 19, 2009 at 3:21 pm

    The man behind Creative Commons owns a DRM lovin’ Kindle?

  8. W.R. Chambers says:
    May 20, 2009 at 12:45 pm

    I had the same experience as George. Excellent, fast response to phone call to Kindle customer service.

    W

  9. Claude Almansi says:
    May 21, 2009 at 12:15 am

    Adrian Lopez wrote: “The man behind Creative Commons owns a DRM lovin’ Kindle?”

    Not sure one can actually “own” any “DRM lovin'” device. But if someone studies current information society, and can afford the Kindle, it makes sense to pay for one in order to describe first-hand how it works or doesn’t. For people in countries where the Kindle is not yet available, due to copyright issues, it is particularly useful to have such descriptions in case Amazon does manage eventually to solve said issues for other-than-US countries and starts offering the Kindle internationally.

    See also – and possibly sign if you agree with it – the Reading Rights coalition’s petition about Amazon’s caving in to the Authors Guild and allowing authors to disable text-to-speech on the Kindle: Allow Everyone access to E-books.

  10. Mike says:
    May 21, 2009 at 6:05 am

    you can download many ebooks，transfer to your mobile phone.then read it very convinence
    you can download them at http://www.mobicomet.com

  11. Pete Barr-Watson says:
    May 21, 2009 at 8:57 am

    Hi Larry – I wonder, did you try to download it from your Kindle account page instead? It’s clearly not the way it should be working if you’re in the US with whispernet in place but for us ex-USA folks it’s the only way to get purchases onto the device. Maybe the downloadable version is the correct one.

  12. dan alex says:
    May 24, 2009 at 4:56 am

    I had the same experience as George. Excellent, fast response to phone call to Kindle customer service

  13. angkasuwan says:
    June 10, 2009 at 12:32 pm

    haven’t had many amazon/kindle problems yet, but good to know.

  14. Landon W. says:
    June 16, 2009 at 7:29 am

    I have yet to jump onto the Kindle bandwagon, but is this device really worth its rather high price tag? I could buy a large selection of books for that sum of money. In my opinion, I would like to see a computer based application with this type of functionality/capability.

  15. sargas says:
    June 25, 2009 at 2:03 pm

    @ Landon W:

    Not textbooks. Not even three upper level mechanics textbooks.

  16. dot tilde dot says:
    July 6, 2009 at 3:08 pm

    if you buy a p-book over here in germany and it has any hidden defect and it is still in print, you’ll get a new one from any bookstore, reimbursed by the publisher.

    how hard is it to beat that kind of service?

    .~.

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