So back in January I bought, along with several others, a Kindle edition of Ellen Klages’ The Green Glass Sea. This was as y’all may recall because I got an Amazon gift card and I wanted to spend it on something, and had highly recommended it.

Problem was, when I actually got the ebook opened up, I found that something was broken in it. The whole damn thing was in italics, which made it very hard to read. I found this quite a bit frustrating, which is the main reason I haven’t actually tried to read the book yet. (Side note: I’m aware that the technology to hack into the book and fix it probably exists, but I haven’t mustered enough give-a-damn to actually seek it out.)

Also, just to be sure, I yoinked down the sample of the same book off of Barnes and Noble’s site, thinking that I’d doublecheck to see if their version of the book was also broken. It was. So as far as I can tell, whatever’s actually wrong with the ebook was in the version issued by the publisher.

Fast forward to this weekend. I finally thought “screw it” and bought a print copy of the book, and while it’s now five months after the fact, I thought I’d also just email Amazon’s customer support and go “hey, by the way, this particular ebook is broken”. I very specifically told them that it was okay with me if they couldn’t issue me a refund, given that it was five months after my purchase (since Amazon’s official policy is to not issue refunds on Kindle books more than a week after purchase).

But! Their customer support people gave me a refund anyway, apologized for the inconvenience, and said they’d be working on fixing the broken ebook. I gotta admit, Amazon’s had its share of fail in the ebook arena, but this? This was a win. And I gotta give ’em props for it. Go Amazon. 🙂