Rethinking Markets

Yesterday, my partner emailed me with the odd question, “did you somehow “return” the book 1984?

No, it turns out that Amazon re-appropriated the book they sold me. Thanks for the refund, go ahead and take the book back, apparently. Better than just taking it I guess.

From the Amazon forums

Here’s the response from Amazon CS:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

I don’t see anything about this in their terms of service:

Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

But the good people at Amazon don’t give a crap. Incredibly, I received a Kindle literally two days ago as a birthday present. I have gone from pretty excited to go screw yourself, Amazon, in 48 hours. It is a horrible practice. What’s to say that another publisher won’t do the same? Why doesn’t their terms of service provide protections for users?

Assessment: Amazon does not care about its customers.

I was going to encourage my students to buy their books this year on Amazon instead of buying them at the CU bookstore. Now, why should I bother?