Mobipocket worst service ever

After reading alot of good things about Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People I decided to get the ebook; the only place I could find that format was at Mobipocket.com. Mobipocket is an Amazon-owned company that creates ebook reader software and also sells them on their site.

Dale Carnegie’s book is very interesting, but as I was reading I noticed quite a few spelling errors and words that ran together. I shrugged this off as bad OCR-scanning from the conversion process, it didn’t really bother me. In fact, How to Win Friends and Influence People more than lived up to its reputation for me so I decided to buy the audiobook from Amazon.

As I’m listening to the CD version, I start to realize that there are passages I’ve never heard or read before. It’s clear that the ebook is an abridged version, which is not indicated anywhere on the Mobipocket site. At this point I’m not too upset. I try to get in touch with their customer service. It turns out that their customer service is only available through a bulletin board, that’s kind of unusual. But, keeping in mind the principles of Dale Carnegie, I post a friendly message on the Support forum, asking for a refund since the version they are selling appears to be missing many passages.

A day later the following response is posted from their support team:

I’m sorry but we can not refund you for this reason. You may contact the publisher of this book to give him your point of view about this problem

Best regards,
Aurélien

Er, wut? So I respond, again in what I hope is a Dale Carnegie-esque rational tone:

That doesn’t make sense. You advertise this book on your store. You take payment for it. If it is not the complete book, if entire passages are missing, then you should indicate that on the product page. I should not have to deal with your suppliers directly, that is your responsibility as the seller, don’t you agree?

While I’m waiting for a response I check out some of the other support requests. Some fellow purchased an ebook guide to Paris, but he finds that the maps are unreadable, which makes the guide useless. This guy is very polite in his request for a refund. So what is the response from Mobipocket?

I’m sorry you have bought a book that does not fit with what you’ve expected but we are not responsible of the content of the books and especially their descriptions. You have to contact directly the publisher of the book if yo uhave any remark on the book content.

Beside you should have first download the demo of the book before buying it. It is easy to say that after having bought it.

I just hope you will try to buy other eBooks (maybe from other publishers). You can also post a customer review on the website saying this book is useless.

Sorry for that.
Best regards,
Aurélien

Wow! Is this the Twilight Zone of customer service or what? “It’s your fault, you should have tried the demo first. Go ahead and warn other shoppers if you’d like.”

I don’t know, Mobipocket is a French company so maybe that has something to do with the fact that these people seem to act like they can’t get fired no matter what.

Written by Parker on July 27th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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