Viral TikTok ‘hack’ of returning e-books after reading hurts authors
People trying to get stuff for free that they’re otherwise supposed to pay for is nothing new. It’s also something many of us are tempted to do when it doesn’t seem like it’s actually stealing.
When my mom owned The Book Bin in Northbrook, she had a customer who tried to bring a book back for return, insisting he’d purchased it there. Unfortunately for him, she recognized it as the current title from the Book of the Month Club, and whoops! there was the Book of the Month stamp, right there in the interior.
It can be easy to convince ourselves that we’re not stealing in these cases. That guy had paid for the Book of the Month Club book and The Book Bin could resell it to someone else, no harm, right?
Well, no, wrong.
The scale of an individual act like this was no threat to The Book Bin, but what happens when this mentality meets the digital age and comes for individual entrepreneurial authors?
If you return a purchased e-book to Amazon within seven days, you are prompted to answer whether or not you want a refund. Apparently, many readers have caught on to this and are now returning books they’ve read. I learned of this practice via a tweet from Lisa Kessler who is an indie author of dark paranormal fiction, including paranormal romance.
How does she know this is happening? After hearing “rumblings” on TikTok about “hacks” for reading books for free on Amazon, Kessler noticed that some readers were returning not just one book, but an entire series of up to 10 books. As Kessler told me via email, if multiple series are returned, multiple times, that begins to add up.
For Kessler, this meant that as she perused her Amazon sales dashboard on June 1, she saw a negative balance, despite having had numerous sales and apparently satisfied readers.
I suppose it is tempting to believe that returning the e-book to Amazon is sticking it to the big corporation who charged a bunch of money for that Kindle device, but it is important to remember that the big corporations are big corporations because they figure out how to get paid no matter what.
Napster and music file-sharing disrupted the music industry for a time as reams of art were passed around for free, but the industry part of music managed to rebound pretty well. It’s the individual artists, particularly the ones who do not have the leverage of mega-fame who are still being harmed by streaming fees that see literally pennies trickle down to the people who actually make the music.
On TikTok, it appears that word is getting out on how damaging this practice can be, with only a few outliers who insist that if they weren’t satisfied with a book they read, they should be able to return for a refund.
To be clear, it is wrong to take an artist’s work for free that you would otherwise be required to pay for, even if you end up not liking the product. This is stealing. We shouldn’t do it, and I think you’ll see less of it now that authors like Kessler have spread the word of the consequences.
But there is a shorter path to solving this problem. Amazon could change its policy so that when the data it collects about the Kindle user’s reading indicates that the e-book was read, the request for refund is denied.
The technology is already in place, the only question is if Amazon cares at all about the people who provide the content they sell.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”