The Elephant in the Reading Room is Amazon and its policies that hurt authors.
Patricia Bates hosted a Zoom conference on Facebook titled "Storming The Castle" which I highly recommend. Well informed authors and a lawyer from Authors Guild discuss the problem of readers who repeatedly buy, read, and then return ebooks for a full refund.
Some would call that pretty dishonest. Perhaps the readers do not understand the difference between paying for a KU subscription in order to read KU books, and lending Amazon the price of an ebook for a week.
https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaBatesauthor/videos/1782326232158387/
One can enjoy the production without logging in to Facebook.Kobo, Google, Barnes and Noble, and Apple are much more author-friendly in their ebook policies. By and large, they will help a reader who buys an e-book and then has difficulty accessing the pages, but they make it very difficult to return an ebook once it has been downloaded or opened.
Rightly so. An online buyer can read several chapters of an ebook on the bookstore site before making a purchasing decision.
It is fair to be able to return an ebook that was bought by accident, which appears to be the intent with the Amazon Kindle book return policy, but it should not take seven days to discover that one has bought something accidentally.
In the seven days that Amazon allows, a reader can easily read the entire book, and still return it for a full refund. People do that, and boast about it on TikTok, apparently. Perhaps those people do not understand that it is the author that they are ripping off. Amazon does not pay the author when a book is borrowed and returned through the ebook sales program.
Amazon controls about 80% of all ebook sales in the USA, and therefore, in theory, 80% of all ebooks sold in America are susceptible to being read and returned.
Cheryl Davis, of Authors Guild is asking for as much data as possible to refute Amazon's claims that the problem is not great and few authors are affected. Any author who has experienced excessive returns is asked to contact staff@authorsguild.org.
She warns that businesses that claim that all calls are recorded are not keeping the recordings for the benefit of the caller. Recordings may not be made, may not be kept, may not be retrievable. Anyone contacting Amazon about Amazon's policies or returns should be sure to put their issues into writing, and if sending an email, they should cc themselves for proof that they have made contact.
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