Amazon's policy on Kindle ebooks states that within seven days of the purchase, a customer can receive a full refund. This applies regardless of how much of the book a customer has read already.
But this is changing now, as Amazon decided to limit ebook returns. Customers can only return a book if what they've read is not more than 10 percent of it, according to The Verge.
This change in Amazon's return policy is expected to happen by the end of the year.
Amazon Changes its Ebook Return Policy
According to The Authors Guild, they had a discussion with Amazon's senior executive team regarding the platform's existing policy.
Eventually, Amazon informed them that it plans to change its ebook's return policy. The platform will now restrict automatic returns of purchases.
There had been an increase in the number of ebooks returned this year, and individual authors raised concerns about it.
According to The Verge, a guild name "BookTok influencers" is behind the high return of ebooks on Amazon. The guild is convincing people to get "free" books by buying and then returning them.
The issue of increasing ebooks return was brought up by The Authors Guild and the Society of Authors to Amazon's senior executives earlier this year.
The Authors Guild said that they are thankful to Amazon's team for taking action on the problematic issue.
According to Amazon, the company has policies and mechanisms to prevent abuse of the ebooks return policy.
Under Amazon's policies, readers who will try to abuse the return policy will be penalized.
According to The Authors Guild, the individual author accounts are being reviewed by Amazon for customer returns abuse.
Authors Protests Amazon's Ebook Return Policy
Last June, authors protested Amazon's ebooks return policy, according to NPR. As mentioned previously, it allows customers to cancel an accidental book order within seven days. Customers will then be granted a refund.
While the policy takes note of accidental book orders, seven days is long enough for customers to finish reading it and return it afterward. It's like getting a "free" book.
Unfortunately, returning an ebook affects individual authors because when an Amazon customer returns an ebook, the royalties that were initially paid to the author will then be deducted from their earnings balance.
In April, a petition on Change.org was started by author Reah Foxx, according to Euronews. The petition garnered 20,000 signatures as of last April.
"There has been a huge upswing in author's ebooks being returned to Amazon AFTER they have been read," Foxx wrote in the petition.
With this ongoing problem of individual authors, The Authors Guild decided to take action and negotiate with Amazon's executives regarding its problematic ebooks return policy.
Amazon eventually took action and decided to change its return policy. With the new policy that will be implemented by the end of the year, customers will not be able to abuse the ebooks return policy.
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