I just came across an article from a fellow Twitter user (you can follow us on Twitter via @MacWorksInc) that explained an extreme case of bad DRM practices directly from Amazon.com. Click here to read the original article.
Shocking, disgusting, rude, arrogant — all of those words describe the situation a traveling reader encountered earlier this week. Lynn (last name undisclosed) received an email explaining that Amazon closed her account and wiped her Kindle e-reader. What’s most shocking: Amazon support did this to someone who lived an otherwise uneventful life.
According to Amazon, her account was “directly related” to a previously banned account thus forcing them to ban and destroy everything she had created with her now-deceased account. It becomes obvious that she’s never violated any terms of use or had anything “directly related” to a previously banned account as you read through the rest of her conversations with Amazon. In fact, the support representative was from Amazon UK — a place where she had never purchased anything since she’s a US customer.
After repeated attempts to discuss the problem with UK support, they ultimately told her to bugger off, as there would be no reversal of the banned account. Money drained — lots of it since she was an avid reader. Amazon’s support didn’t care about her and were clearly overly anxious to completely wipe someone’s account from existence. There wasn’t a warning; her account was gone in seconds.
Hopefully, spreading the word on the vast world of the Internet will force Amazon to do something to rectify the situation. Is this something that happens often? What if she didn’t have overly zealous blogger friends willing to bring this to our attention? How many people have lost entire libraries of books, music, videos, etc. just because Amazon felt like pulling the trigger?
It’s scary to know that a company as big as Amazon would do this to their customers. I’m sure Apple has had it’s fair share of kerfuffles, but I’ve never heard of them taking it this far. Tomorrow’s announcement of a cheaper iPad will be a welcome addition to the market and should allow readers to dump their kindles for iBooks.
We also just found a humorous, but accurate set of instructions to help those in fear of the Zon. This link describes how to backup your Amazon ebook purchases and remove the DRM so they can be read elsewhere (just in case the Zon gets hungry).
