Some nefarious, unauthorized person “may have” accessed Joseph’s Amazon account. If you’re thinking, “So what? it’s just an e-commerce account,” note that he not only owns a Kindle and many annotated books for it, but has also now lost his purchase history and his wish list. Sure, Amazon has offered him a gift card to re-purchase the books he lost, but he’s not really keen to trust the company again.
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I’m confused
Have the books on his Kindle been wiped then? Is there no backup on his pc/mac?
Can’t you back up your purchases?
I can understand why they are annoyed but these are the things you agree to.
Other issues: Lost purchase history, you get an email each time you buy something, that would be evidence enough, and although inconvinient it’s not totally lost.
Shippign addresses. If they are his friends he can get them back, and again this information would be on emails.
Have to reenter them onto the system which is a pain but it’s a solution
He got money back to replace his books which is pretty good although if I were him I’d be straight ontop a torrent site and download loads of books for free and use the Amazon vouchers to buy real books or something else.
I’m pretty sure no one agrees
I’m pretty sure no one agrees to Amazon wiping out their account with no notice. Amazon probably buries it somewhere in the fine print, but I doubt people know this is an issue when they first buy a Kindle. Remember, not everyone browses the kind of sites where these issues pop up.
I also don’t keep every email that I get for book purchases. Again, why would you think you would need the receipt for a book you bought 2 years ago? Once it comes off of your credit card, that’s it. Not to mention Amazon likes making a big deal about how you can access everything from your account.
Why not?
>>I also don’t keep every email that I get for book purchases.
Why not? I have a Gmail account and I keep every email I get. I can run a search on Amazon and retrieve every email I have ever gotten from them.
Because…
I don’t like clutter in my inbox or my folders. If an email doesn’t contain useful information, I delete it. I don’t consider an old receipt useful.
Not everyone uses email the same way that you do.
Same way you do
>>Not everyone uses email the same way that you do.
Don’t expect them to. But one neat thing about Google is that you can archive an item without dumping it into a folder. Since all the email is easily searchable you can have an empty inbox and folders that only have what you want but behind the scenes is every message you have ever received and you can search and retrieve them.
Now when things happen that I could not have anticipated and there is a need for an email that I never would have saved in the past I can get the information.
People can do whatever they want but as someone in the information field I like this new capability.
PS
I don’t have a Kindle so I don’t know if you can back it up etc But I remember reading about how to do it so I assume there is a way.
Backup
Any book you buy on Amazon you can download to your computer. You can send this file via USB to your Kindle. This works both as backup and if you don’t have a Kindle with 3G and you are without wi-fi.
The thing I wonder about in regards to this story is encryption. The Amazon Kindle files are encrypted. If they close your account and open a new account the Kindle files are then going to be encrypted for the new account. I don’t know if a Kindle can read two different encryption keys.
If I download a Kindle file to my computer and give the file to someone else with a Kindle their Kindle cannot read that file. The person in this story had one Kindle account shut off so even if they backed up the files they may not be readable on the Kindle. If they are readable the person may not be able to use the Kindle to get new ebooks because the new ebooks are using a different encryption key.