The Digital Reader

by Chris Walters of Booksprung

This may seem obvious to some of you, but yes, it is possible to get a refund on a Kindle book. Whether you accidentally bought a title, bought it at the wrong price, or thought it was something else entirely when you bought it, all you have to do is contact Amazon within seven days and request a refund. Amazon will refund your money and automatically delete the book from your Kindle account.

There are a couple of times when this is really handy. The first is when the price on a Kindle book changes and you don’t notice, which is something that I suspect happens frequently with on-sale and promotional copies. I see those titles jump from the Top Free to Top Paid lists every week, and just last week I heard from a reader who clicked through on a daily bargain and hit “Buy” without realizing the price had jumped from $0.00 to $4.99.

It’s also a nice option to have when you thought you were buying a full book but end up with a preview, excerpt, or short story. Without being able to see a physical copy, it’s sometimes hard to tell, and since pricing is all over the place you can’t use that as a guideline either.

As an aside, a good way to tell if you’re buying a full-length book is to check the File Size and Print Length attributes under Product Details (the section that usually comes right after Editorial Reviews). Short stories tend to be under a couple of hundred KB, while novels tend to be 300 KB or more, although this is only a rule of thumb.

But back to refunds: if you’ve bought a book directly from your Kindle device, you’ve already seen the option to cancel the purchase right then. If you decide you want the refund later, just go to the Kindle Support section of the Amazon Kindle Store and look for the orange “Contact Us” button in the right column.