New Amazon Kindle update will change the way you read ebooks, and TikTok’s to blame
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If you don’t follow Amazon Kindle news closely — or spend too much time on BookTok, the TikTok reading community — you may not be aware of the ongoing drama over ebook returns. But now it has prompted Amazon to change the way it handles its digital books.
A TikTok trend encouraged readers to quickly read and then return ebooks on their Kindle, with the automatic return program giving them a full refund even if they’d read the entire book.
This didn’t hurt Amazon, as readers probably expected, and the action left the authors out of money, as it was they who had to pay the refund. Numerous ebook authors have made statements criticizing this move, and it sounds like Amazon has been listening (see testimonials on Twitter here (opens in new tab)and here (opens in new tab)and a change.org petition (opens in new tab) about this).
1/2 Every time you return an ebook to Amazon, the author is charged more than what they paid for the sale. Yes, that means we could owe Amazon something at the end of the month. Since TikToks went viral saying ‘it’s okay to return ebooks’June 3, 2022
In a Post created by the Author’s Guild (opens in new tab), a US-based organization designed to protect the rights of authors, it was confirmed that Amazon’s return policy for ebooks is changing. As of the end of the year, you can no longer automatically return ebooks if you have read more than 10% of them.
In the future, if you’ve read 11% or more of a book, you can still file a return, but it will be reviewed by a physical person, and Author’s Guild reasons that this will act as a reasonable deterrent to stopping people with gaming the system.
There are still some things to clarify – collections of poems or short stories, which you might jump around in, might mark you as having read more than 10% if you only read one excerpt half way through, for example, and it’s not clear how easy it will be to get a refund through this manual system. But it is a step in the right direction.
Analysis: good or bad for readers?
For some books, 10% is enough pages – if you (for some reason) read Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that’s over 500 pages in itself. But for novellas or shorter texts, the difference between 10% and 11% can be one accidental page turn.
This new change is undoubtedly good for authors, and it means that opportunistic and bad faith readers will no longer be able to abuse the system to read for free without spending any money. Now more authors will be able to rely on their writing to support themselves, which is great news for literature.
It’s not so good news for your mainstream readers, though, who can really get about 15% of their way into a book before realizing it’s just not for them, and wanting their money back.
Of course, it’s the readers who took the gamble we should blame for this change, with the TikTok trend (and other users doing the same – we can’t just blame this one community of readers) likely to do so. turn small quirk of Amazon’s return policy into a bigger problem.
This update may affect the way some people read books, making them much more wary of their book progress rate (displayed on Kindle e-readers) than they otherwise would be in deciding whether to go beyond 10% or not. But if it means authors can keep writing, maybe it’s a positive after all.