TikTok’s community of readers are known as ‘BookTok’ and is generally amazing. It’s a vibrant and diverse space that encourages people to get into books.
However, a challenge has upset authors and prompted Amazon to change how eBook/Kindle refunds work.
The BookTok challenge tasked people to speed read a whole book before the refund deadline expired, return the book and collect the refund. That sounds fun, demanding and educational, but there was a catch. It’s possible that BookTok thought this would hurt Amazon’s corporate pocket. Authors lost the most, missing out on sales and essentially having to work in a system that let people take their hard work for free.
Authors and publishers took to Twitter to complain. One Change.org petition asked Change Amazon Return Policies for Completed E-books: Protect Authors from Theft! and attracted more than 75,00 signatures.
Read less than 10% of a book
Now Amazon will change the rules for refunds. It won’t be time, and it will be how much of the ebook you read qualifies you in or out for a refund.
The Authors Guild wrote of the development in a post called Amazon Is Changing Its Ebook Return Policy in Major Breakthrough for Authors.
Is this good or bad news, though?
It might be mixed. You can imagine popping into a recipe book and getting a whole recipe for free without getting near that %10.
Marvel’s Multiverse RPG playtest is available on Kindle. Would you get a good idea of whether you like the game after just 10%? You certainly couldn’t scan the book, take a note of the core mechanics and then return it.
On a similar note, Paul Bellow has Random Fantasy Tables 1: Fantasy Role-Playing Game Ideas for Game Masters on Kindle. You could get to some of those tables and get some ideas with that 10%, but perhaps not the one you wanted.
🤖AI Disclosure. Software helped create images in this post. Geek Native's AI Content Policy.
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