I would now like to take the opportunity to give props for excellent customer service to both Amazon and Barnes and Noble!

Y’all may recollect that a while back I had an issue with a Kindle ebook I bought being in all italics, and how even though I only asked about it several months after the fact, Amazon gave me a refund anyway. I had totally forgotten about this until this weekend when I was trying to figure out why I had seven dollars of credit on my Amazon account.

“Awesome,” I thought once I rediscovered the receipt for that refund, “I’ll get something else!”

The problem was, the thing I decided to buy was Carbon Leaf’s EP How the West Was One, which I’d completely forgotten I’d already bought from iTunes. Didn’t realize this until Amazon’s downloader thingamabob plugged the files into iTunes and I saw I now had two copies of every song on the thing. Oops. *^_^*;;

So I flung an immediate, sheepish mail to Amazon’s customer service to ask them if a refund was possible. I got an email back saying that normally they wouldn’t do refunds on digital content, but in this particular case they would. Which was excellent of them, and won them an immediate purchase of another thing, an ebook not available for the nook: The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten!

And speaking of my nook, I just had an excellent experience with Barnes and Noble as well.

I was over at lunch just now reading, and discovered that the lower right hand button on the side of the device, the one I normally press to turn pages, had cracked. This has been an issue with the first run of nooks all throughout 2010, and I’m frankly surprised that mine has taken this long to show the problem, given how much I read on the thing. I wasn’t sure if it was too late for me to get a replacement device, given that I’ve had it for nearly a year. But I called B&N up just now and they said yep, I’m still covered under basic warranty, so they’re going to send me another one!

To wit: AWESOME. I’ll need to wipe all the content off of my current one, deregister it, and send it back to them, and should be getting a new one by the end of the week. 😀

So props to both Amazon AND Barnes and Noble for treating customers right.