No official Amazon announcement is available, but it appears this feature has now disappeared from all Kindle ebooks. The Author’s Guild and the UK Society of Authors are both praising the change, with the Society of Authors calling it “a major improvement for authors of books available on Kindle.” Presumably, readers will realize they’ve “accidentally” purchased a book within the first 10% of the text, and further help for returns is available through customer service.

For readers, while it may limit their ability to freely read and return ebooks, it’s a fair change. This is a positive move for authors whose books were essentially being pirated through the ebook return loophole. The policy is set to go into effect before the end of the year. Otherwise, users will need to contact a customer service agent in order to process ebook returns. Readers will now only be able to return ebooks within seven days of purchase if they’ve read 10% or less of the ebook in question. On September 23, Amazon responded by announcing they will change their Kindle return policy for accidental purchases.

A petition about the return policy gained over 75,000 signatures. Authors begged Amazon to fix this problem, pointing out that Amazon had the tools at hand to see if readers had finished the books they claimed to have purchased mistakenly.

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