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.
> 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.
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.
> You need a department that can take responsibility for account lockouts and resolve them! STAT!
Most companies have teams similar to this, but they are often used wrong, have the wrong type of staff, bad/poor procedures and processes or are under/over-utilized for escalated problems (so too much or too little goes to them).
Additionally, you might be surprised by how difficult it is to find quality staff (especially at the relatively poor salaries often on offer) that has the "right" mindset to be successful for a role like this. The level of customer service, problem resolution skills, knowledge of possible problems & their resolution (without checking a manual, notes, colleagues), quick response and thick skin/hardheadedness for the abuse you will get, when you are trying to help. Sometimes customers are irrational, make mistakes, blame the company for their errors and won't accept it was their error. More often the case (when I did this role), it was a joy to help customers to resolve the problem so they are happy (or happier) with the result.
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.
Last week Apple locked me out of my iTunes account, and I can't even update the apps I already have installed on my iPad.
I'm done with cloud-based content. I'll continue to use dumb storage like Dropbox and S3, and I'm ok with subscription services like Netflix and rdio. But any service that pretends that I "own" content that can be yanked away with the flick of a switch to be restored only after weeks of haggling with an understaffed and indifferent bureaucracy can go fuck itself.
Of course, once again, it's only the people that play by the rules that suffer.
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.
I still have MSN Music and Buy.com purchased albums in WMA format hanging around my music folders on backup drives... paid in full, "purchased" music that was turned into junk data I can't decrypt and play when the stores turned off their licensing servers.
I have a first-generation WiFi-only Nook. I have never registered it with B&N and have it permanently in airplane mode (i.e. WiFi disabled). For over a year I used it only for DRM-free EPUB (mainly O'Reilly e-books).
Last week I finally broke down and bought a DRM book from B&N's website. It let me download an encrypted EPUB file, which I transferred to my Nook over USB. Without having to enable WiFi or register my Nook, I was able to open and read the EPUB just by entering my name and the credit card number used to purchase the book. (By the way, I only had to do this once.)
It still sucks because it's DRM, but I'm reasonably confident that with this setup, B&N can't remotely kill my books, and it should keep working even if B&N goes bust. You might want to consider it.
So I guess one concern with that is, what about four years from now? Obviously by then you'll of course be using an iPad 5 or 6 or whatever, because it will simply be the Greatest Device Ever Until the Next One Is Released, and you no longer have the same credit card? Is that book lost forever? I'm not criticizing your decision to break down and buy a NookBook, I'm sure I'll do it too at some point -- I just can't help that little nagging voice saying "You'll be sorry!"
I mean, I'm not super-concerned with the prospect of wasting $15... it's the principle of the thing.
He'll get a new expiry date.
Credit card companies don't issue you a new number unless they really have to (card was use fraudulently)
Instead they just issue you a new expiry and CVC - and often even update merchants who are charging you on a regular basis with the new info, or allow transactions to continue to go through even with expired date/cvc
Still a valid concern regarding the card # being replaced due to fraud. I keep an encrypted list of all my past CC #s for this very purpose: Far too many places use the CC# as a life-long immutable number (think SSN).
I realized after re-reading the original comment that he only has to valid date his CC on first opening.
What I was wondering is if he had to re-validate at some point in the future, would the expired card trip him up or would his encrypted copy still work?
I'd guess it would still work if he is doing this all without a network connection. If that works though, I hope their using the credit card info as a hash instead of directly storing it in their encrypted files... because that would be scary.
To be 100% honest, I've bene nothing but very very happy with my Kindle.
Purchased a book by accident? Refund instantly or done within 5 minutes.
Switching devices? No problemo, pages are synced up to the last page you read.
Wiping your device? All your books are online and available for download.
This seems like a fringe case that I'm not too worried about. I have a full purchase history on Amazon.com and if anything fails, I am pretty sure their customer service wouldn't become huge pricks to me for no reason at all.
They aren't intentionally being pricks; they just don't care. Caring costs too much. It's cheaper to have an unresponsive automated customer service system that lets a certain percentage of customers suffering from edge cases fall through the cracks. This guy was the unlucky one today.
I also have been extremely happy with my kindle. The closest I have to a complaint is the limit on the number of devices that can be authorized for certain books, and even that is normally reasonable. The cloud based reader accessible through a browser also makes that restriction less painful (though I wish they would enable highlighting...)
But I still have concerns about the DRM. Amazon seems extremely stable, but things in tech move fast. Even if Amazon survives, I may eventually want to move to a completely different reader from a company that doesn't exist now, and the DRM will make it hard to take my library with me.
I love the cloud drive player Amazon rolled out for MP3s, but I have it redundantly backed up on 2 harddrives. With the Kindle content I don't have that option.
Kindle customer service was excellent to me too - bottom half of the screen died and Amazon sent out a replacement device immediately, then made arrangements to collect my broken one, at their own expense. Unlike the iTunes store I was able to get through to the right person by following the instructions provided.
Its not too difficult to imagine edge cases where communication between the person taking the phone call and the person able to resolve the situation breaks down; that can happen in any large company. But then getting things resolved also requires good faith on the part of the complainant; filing chargebacks against a reputable company within a month of the problem isn't the best indication of this.
I don't doubt I'd probably have a very similar experience to yours with my device. It's entirely possible that I could use it as intended for the next ten years and never experience a single hiccup with the service.
I guess worrying about those edge cases just kind of comes naturally, perhaps a little too much personal experience with Murphy's Law?
Perhaps really my chief complaint boils down to the stereotypical issue with DRM: If I paid for a book, why do I need your permission to read it?
Actually, as a device purchaser, I personally don't care about edge cases. (It can happen to anyone.)
However, as a service provider, edge cases are what keep me up at night but are fantastic opportunities for providing even better service. I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't care, but I personally wouldn't care too much about an edge case as long as Amazon does that person good.
As for DRM: if it isn't invasive or affect my experience with the book (Kindle and Steam are good examples here.) then I am okay by it. If it is used in some weird way to censor things? That's uncool.
I've had the opposite experience as you. While the kindle is a very sexy device, all it really does well is the reading part. However, pretty much every e-reader does that part well.
The thing I hate most though is the whole Kindle experience. Buying e-books from Amazon is kind of scammy since there's no confirmation page when you buy books and there's no way to turn off one-click for kindle books. Also, I wasn't able to find where to refund the book at all when I clicked "buy" thinking that there would be a confirmation page.
Also, the syncing is kinda broken because if you click a link in the book and end up in the appendix, there's no easy way to reset the furthest page read. Finally, epub is such a "free-ing" format since I can purchase books from Google books as well. Sync is just a minor convenience since e-book sellers will usually let you re-download the book anyway if you've purchased it.
Books sold on the Kindle Store don't require DRM. You can sell creative commons licenced works using "Kindle Direct Publishing" on the Kindle Store with no DRM at all.
The DRM on Kindle ebooks is actually surprisingly easy to crack, and I do so as a matter of principle. I believe in supporting the author and pay for my Kindle library; I also ensure my ebooks can't be taken from me if the company folds/the publisher decides they don't want my money (ie. the 1984 Amazon debacle).
This is actually the reason I own a kindle vs other devices. If I find that I cannot crack the DRM of a book I purchased, that will be the last ebook I buy from amazon.
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?
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.
So far my first generation Nook likes my side-loaded ePub files real well. I don't put PDFs on it. I also don't buy through B&N as I have an allergic reaction to DRM. :-)
I have 173Mb of files purchased and downloaded separately and side-loaded from PragProg, Manning, O'Reilly and SitePoint. (And a few classics from Gutenburg.)
As far as I can tell, the Nook is perfectly fine with non-DRM'd 3rd-party EPUB's and PDF's (the only limitation being the amount of internal storage on the device allotted for 3rd-party stuff).
I have no idea if it works with DRM'd 3rd-party content, though.
I've had a Kobo Touch for about 8 months now, absolutely love it. I have one DRM book downloaded through the Kobo book store and the rest of them were side loaded through Calibre. No problems, nice and smooth.
The device doesn't require Calibre for side-loading either as you can just drag the epub to the mounted device. Loading and using your own fonts is also a nice feature.
As for PDFs, if they are smaller page sizes it's pretty good, but the zooming and panning functions are kind of a pain--mainly because of e-ink, but partially due to UI.
I've only had one issue with the Kobo Touch when I had to reload my books, as for some reason the database became corrupted.
I have the original no-wifi cheap kobo, it only has free content on it.
I connected it the PC and and simply copied epub and pdf to it using calibre. It comes with 100 free books that you can erase, none of the memory is reserved (except for the OS)
ePub works perfectly.
pdf is a little limited in range of zoom, for technical books I convert to epub with calibre and download that.
The only downside of the Kobo - it takes a long time to boot up if it has fully shutdown. Then once it has started it takes a long time to open books.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily that the guy did something malicious, but he could be making it exceedingly difficult for amazon to solve his problem. It seems like such a simple solution to me - if the account is for some reason not unlockable, create a new account, gift credit the guy all his purchases, and permanently close the old account. I know that the CSRs have the ability to do this. If they aren't, there's a reason.
Initial guess, from some experiences with chargeback happy customers, is that the guy started initiating chargebacks before giving amazon a chance to resolve his problems, and amazon is refusing to help him until he cancels the chargeback process.
Your parent has past (positive) experience with Amazon. He has never met or even spoken to the customer. Why should he immediately trust the customer over Amazon? Because Business Is Evil?
Not to take anyone's side, since I don't know the details, but maybe they suspected the account was using an stolen CC? I know companies tend to aggressively protect credit card holders (specially since rollbacks are so expensive). I'm sure amazon must be the target of stolen credit cards consistently.
That said, regardless of their size, they should expedite this type of check, specially for accounts that are not new!
My own anecdotal experiences with Amazon customer service aside, something feels amiss about this whole situation. Why did they not call/email Amazon after a full 24 hours had gone by? Why are they disputing Amazon charges to their credit cards?
The letter clearly states he has contacted every Amazon support option he knows of:
I have filed a complaint with the BBB, emailed everyone I
could at Amazon, called the Customer Service Line, the
Kindle "Executive" support line, and Corporate. I have
been apologized to by everyone I have spoken to and been
told that they have never seen this situation before.
None of them can tell me if I will ever receive the
content I have paid for.
No, I call websites whenever my content that I paid for is broken or inaccessible. Not to mention they already did it once, and were told to wait 24 hours, but instead they waited a month?
I understand why they're disputing charges, but that seems silly if they haven't made some concerted effort to figure out what's going on.
I think that it's silly to blame the user because they waited a month. You have no idea what was going on in that person's life to cause them to wait that long. You also don't know that person's personality. Maybe they are a major procrastinator. Maybe they are phone phobic.
To say that the person was obviously in the wrong/doing something shady/to blame just because of how long they waited seems like you're really stretching to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt.
Didn't say they were obviously wrong, just that something feels missing.
However, not sure how it's silly to blame a user if they waited a month. Personal issue? Fine. But procrastinator and phone phobic aren't really excuses for this. If you're really concerned about your Kindle (I would be VERY concerned if it were more than a day.) then I would do almost anything in my power to fix it.
Wait a month? But that's a whole month of me not reading my books!
this whole thread is ridiculous, because he clearly stated that he did contact amazon several times, with no result besides "sorry, we don't know/can't say what's going on either"
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.
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.
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.
Actually, I'd say that the underlying issue is that the very concept of "ownership" simply cannot be made to apply consistently to goods that cost basically nothing to replicate.
All the hubub about IP and DRM and piracy follows from this mismatch.
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?
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.
>>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.
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.
I hope so, though what a waste of money for the people that bought in early. I spent way too much money legally purchasing music during the DRM days... I can't play any of those WMA files anymore since the license servers to authenticate my "rights" are no longer online.
Personally I'm refusing to buy DRM'd books at all, and it's also so far kept me from buying a Kindle (which, if I were to buy it would be only used for non-DRM content).
The Kindle works great with all kinds of non-drm-ed content, fyi. Mobi, epub converts easily, html, etc. I have read a ton of non-drm-ed stuff on mine.
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".
Honestly, they should have contacted him before removing his ability to access his content. I view the chargebacks as no more severe than what they did. They removed access to the books, he removed access to the money.
They said they'd contact him in 24 hours, they didn't.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I don't really subscribe to your argument in a cloud-based market where - to me - the biggest looming threat is to lose access to all your data.
There was another incident (Amazon again) where they lost a person's annotations for the Jobs biography in a software update[1]. Amazon seem to be botching the cloud aspect of e-books, and while their selection is orders of magnitude better than iBooks in my country (because I can buy from Amazon.com), the reason I buy e-books in the first place is because of what the cloud offers - with marginalia/annotations being the best selling point over dead-tree books.
Annotating e-books on the Kindle app on iOS is also a ridiculous pain in the ass, but that's for another time. I love the selection Amazon has, especially the self-published articles from bloggers, Ars Technica, newspapers or magazines and such, but the way Apple keeps screwing these things up, I plan on choosing the iBooks version, if available. I honestly think I might have thrown my phone against the wall, if all my Isaacson biography annotations had been wiped.
But that's just me as one customer. I am sure that some people have the priorities you do, but I wouldn't exactly predict an unequivocal PR failure. :)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Why is everyone downvoting this? There is quite literally no proof or any corroboration of any kind for this story. The only reason we're seeing it is because it's been widely circulated for a while.
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.
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.
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.