
Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs - petercooper
http://consumerist.com/2011/11/amazon-puts-your-1000-kindle-library-on-hold-apologizes-shrugs.html
======
noonespecial
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 called "stealing" and no one bats an eye, I'm going to go
ahead and call account lockouts with resolution refusal stealing as well.
$1000 is well within the bounds of small claims courts in most jurisdictions.

~~~
maratd
> 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.

~~~
noonespecial
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.

------
rickmb
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.

~~~
zotz
If they called it Digital Permissions/Privileges Management, sales would
suffer and we all know that's worse than the winds of Hell.

~~~
jamesbritt
Digital restrictions management

------
jordan0day
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 expandable storage via microSD, but these don't
get placed into your "Library" on the device in the same way files on the
internal storage do). I'm sure many of these same concerns apply to the
Kindle. (And more, since Nook books are EPUB format, while Kindle seems to use
a variety of formats, including some proprietary formats & DRM).

I really like the convenience of an e-reader, and the e-ink screen really is
fantastic, but so far I've only loaded files from Project Gutenberg and some
e-books from Manning (who provides free pdf and sometimes EPUB format e-books
when you buy the hardcopy). I'm already bumping up against the (artificial)
230 mb-or-so limit for books _not_ purchased directly from B&N.

I'd be more open to buying e-books from B&N if I wasn't afraid of a scenario
similar to what's described in the article. As far as I can tell, B&N ships
their Nook books with DRM, what guarantees do I have that I can still read
those books if B&N goes under, or my account gets screwed up in some mix-up?

Edit: I must have phrased something in a confusing way. The Nook allows you to
load 3rd party, non-DRM'd EPUB and PDF's (although as I mentioned, you only
get about a quarter of the device's internal storage to use for 3rd-party
content). My concern re: DRM was the books you buy directly from Barnes &
Noble.

~~~
zdw
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?

~~~
rmc
I have a Kindle 3, and I only use 3rd party content, i.e. none of the 100ish
books on my kindle were bought from Amazon. None have DRM. I can read them
fine.

------
interknot
So we've definitely arrived in Stallman's Right to Read future:
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>

------
azov
What happened to the books on his device? $1000 worth of books should easily
fit on one Kindle, even if he can't login to his account - how did he get
locked out of his content? Did Amazon remotely wipe out his purchases? Did he
buy books on site and never synced them? Does he have access to them from some
other app or device, but can't sync a new one? Is he using a device at all? Is
he using Kindle for the Web? Or, can he still read all/some of his books?

Consumerist could really give us more details...

~~~
ajross
It's that an irrelevant technicality though? Say he reads only on his phone,
and lost it. Does that make the case more or less important? What if some nice
person buys him physical copies to replace the DRM'd ones? Does that get
Amazon off the hook?

There's a principle here. The specifics aren't really the point.

~~~
azov
In principle I doubt anybody thinks that "trick you into paying for books,
close your account, and run away with your money" is Amazon's new business
model. Obviously it is some sort of mistake/miscommunication and they will
eventially sort it out.

It's the details that make the story interesting.

------
FilterJoe
This makes for a great story but how do we know it wasn't totally made up?
There is no link from the consumerist article to a post from the original
source (someone whose purported first name is Ryan). Searching for word-for-
word sentences from the article on Google, I just find this consumerist post
and pages that quoted from it more recently.

Even if Laura Northrup was really given this information by someone who is
really named Ryan, how do we know that Ryan isn't making this story up? Or
perhaps there's a part of it that is true but important parts of the story are
omitted or exaggerated?

This kind of thing seems to be happening more each year on the internet -
widely circulated stories considered credible just because it's widely
circulated.

All that being said - I own both a Kindle Touch and Nook Simple Touch but have
spent a total of $0.99 on content, for the same reasons cited by many in this
thread. However, I'm very comfortable with a Netflix model. I've used the Nook
to read in stores a little and I intend to use the Kindle Touch with my prime
account to read borrowed books.

I predict that some day, Amazon or Barnes and Noble will come out with some
kind of "content guarantee: you buy it, it's yours, forever." And I think this
guarantee will quickly be copied by all competitors. The market for e-content
will then be extended to nervous Nellies like me.

------
mikecane
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.

------
notatoad
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.

~~~
jordan0day
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.

~~~
nekojima
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 occasion it took a week or two if it was
especially complex, but we'd contact the client directly and offer to give
them a daily update so they'd know what was going on.

I'd be quite surprised if Amazon didn't have a similar team, even if just a
dozen or two staff, if they are experienced, that's all that's usually
required. The savings lost to poor public relations, and improved customer
relations, easily make up for the cost of the team.

~~~
cube13
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.

~~~
nekojima
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.

------
phuff
Amazon usually has really good customer service all the times I've called. It
seems like this really is a fell through the cracks thing. I'm glad venues
like Consumerist exist to publicize this kind of thing.

------
RyanMcGreal
This, of course, is the difference between ownership and permission-to-use.

~~~
estel
No ebook license (or any other "virtual" good) will ever have a license that
confers 'ownership'.

A license can be more flexible and allow free transfer, copying and backup;
but I don't think the law allows for a concept of the ownership of trivially
duplicable data.

~~~
TillE
I'm not a lawyer, but I really don't see a fundamental difference here -
photocopiers have existed for a long time.

You can own a book. You just don't have the _right_ to make _copies_ of that
book. Why can't you own an ebook?

~~~
estel
The way I see it: you own the book itself, but don't own the writing and story
- the information - contained within it. In my mind, ownership as a concept
for non-physical goods is much closer to the idea of copyright.

Oddly enough, I suppose every book I own here has legalese in it saying that I
don't have the right to lend, sell or "otherwise circulate" it without the
publisher's consent.

------
moskie
Is it safe to assume that eBooks will eventually go through a similar
lifecycle as mp3s? Where, at first, publishers force DRM on items sold, but
eventually give in because of customer complaints and demands regarding stuff
like what happened in this article?

~~~
timwiseman
That is possible and also my hope.

Unfortunately, I think there are a number of differences that will make that
harder with ebooks than regular books. Most significantly, people consume the
media different. Excluding a few reference books and the Bible, I tend to read
a book once and then I am done with it, and I think most people are like that.
Even people who reread books only do it a few times with some spacing in
between. With music, I keep adding to my collection, but I still have songs I
found years ago in my MP3 player. I want to listen many times, so I have a big
push to preserve every song for a long time and to be able to take them with
me across multiple generations of devices. The push to have full control,
while present, is much weaker for the average consumer.

Another lessor factor is that music was in an unprotected format (CDs) that
could be easily made digital long before DRM existed for music. With books,
the truly unprotected dead-tree form is difficult to digitize, so they have a
different history in terms of consumer expectations.

~~~
felipemnoa
>>I tend to read a book once and then I am done with it

This may be true for novels, but science, engineering and math books are
usually used for a long, long time. I still have all of mine for reference and
every once in a while I do come back to many of them.

~~~
timwiseman
I used to do that a lot with my math books and computer science books (I have
a degree in math and work as a programmer), but I eventually found that while
I prefer to use a book to learn new material, I virtually always use the
Internet for a quick reference and only rarely refer back to them.

------
matdwyer
This is how you "get things done" - complain online to get the most PR you
can, the company finally listens, and will fix it within 24 hours.

It's too bad it has to come to that.

~~~
dangrossman
Except you need to do it _before_ charging back the past 6 months of purchases
from the store. I doubt even going up a few levels of management can get that
account unlocked after that. Even very big retailers have to treat chargebacks
as an attack on their very ability to do business, since riding the 1% limit
can be so hard. He's proven he's not a customer they can take money from, no
matter the facts of the situation.

Once I read that line, my first thought was "chances are his account was
locked by the fraud/risk department".

~~~
matdwyer
Chargebacks are not a quick process (at least in my business). It would take
well over 1-2 months before the chargeback was completed, and with the volume
Amazon likely has to deal with I doubt they are tied to his account already?

~~~
cube13
That's probably the reason that it's still locked. If he initiated a
chargeback, Amazon should put a hold on his account while the entire process
gets completed.

Chargebacks are supposed to be a last resort consumer tool, when every other
option has been exhausted.

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

~~~
absconditus
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.

~~~
ernesth
Really? From a "rest of the world" point of view (I am speaking for France
where Amazon is now officially selling kindles and kindle books, but it is
also true for Germany), it is more the contrary: Amazon has the smallest
selection of e-books compared to the other generalist e-book sellers.

------
pppp
Whenever I buy a book from Amazon, the first thing I do immediately after the
purchase is strip the DRM and store a copy of the unprotected .mobi file. I'm
concerned about Amazon's new announced ebook format that I'll lose the ability
to do this. If and when that happens, I won't purchase anymore books from
them.

~~~
cdmoyer
I was always very religious about backing up my music purchases, and generally
removing the DRM, but had never done so with eBooks.

Your comment (and this article) just inspired me to figure out how to do this,
and backup all me eBooks in a DRM-free format. Turns out, it was pretty
painless.

------
Symmetry
This is why I back up all my Kindle purchases to my hard drive with Calibre.
They're DRMed still, but I know I can crack the files if something like this
happens to me.

~~~
aw3c2
This is why I do not buy DRM-ed things and rather become a criminal who has
control over the things he "owns".

------
heelhook
I don't want to be the "yeah, same thing happened to me!" guy, but I had an
awful experience with E*trade, back when their stock went down I decided to
move some of my money to Bank of america... That wire took about three years
to complete, only a few months ago they freed up my $100k account, which was
not getting interests from them or anything, they could never tell me what had
happened, they said "something" went wrong with the wire and so they locked my
account.

Needless to say, I'm not doing business with them any time soon!

~~~
matwood
3 years and for a fairly substancial sum of 100k? None of that sounds right.
If it really took as long as you say, then a lawyer should have been called.

------
bdrocco
Simple solution. File a small claims court case for the cost the replace your
library. The less offensive option that I've used in the past is finding the
corporate contact from the Better Business Bureau and going directly to them.
It works fairly often and fairly well because most companies value those
reputations.

I agree with some of the comments here, simply because your company is an
'internet company' doesn't mean a 'Help' webpage is all you need for support.
Actual personal support handling is virtually non-existent from large scale
web companies and it's a disappointment.

------
jsilence
<https://www.xkcd.com/488/>

------
rweir
moral of the story: if you're going to give money to a company that uses DRM,
make sure the DRM is pwnable, and make pwning your own purchases a habit.

------
bcl
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.

~~~
nobody314159265
With some technical knowledge and violating federal law - you can get access
to stuff you already own?

That's like saying your banks' ATM network going down isn't news because you
can always get through the vault door with some C4 and take your money that
way.

~~~
bcl
That's not an accurate analogy. You have the books on your kindle (and in your
backup if you made one). They're yours, you bought them. I have the right to
access material that I own, even if that means removing the DRM from it.

The article is _really_ light on details. Without more information I really
don't see why this story has legs.

~~~
nobody314159265
"I have the right to access material that I own, even if that means removing
the DRM from it."

Not according to the DMCA you don't. Accessing material you bought - what are
you? Some kind of terrorist?

