What follows is the text of my email to Amazon customer service regarding the Kindle content I downloaded last night. I will post the relevant screen shots later today.
The Kindle content is "Stone of the Goddess" by Grizel Standilands. I looked at the Look Inside sample, and it appeared fine. The sample download, however, is formatted differently than the Look Inside feature. It is in a different font and has no paragraph indents. It is not easily readable.
I would like to buy this book, but I'm tired of getting Kindle content that looks good on the Look Inside feature and then turns out to be junk when I try to read it on my Kindle for PC.
I have deregistered, uninstalled, and reinstalled the Kindle for PC application literally dozens of times since these problems first appeared in July 2012. Not a single one of the problems has been solved.
Angels at Midnight by Norma Beishir
Danger at Mellin Cove by Rena George
Embrace the Wild Dawn by S.K. McClafferty
among others.
Amazon has taken hours and hours of my time in online chat and promise resolution, but nothing has been done. I have been promised responses in three days, five days, a week, but I never get anything. The people I chat with pay little attention to what I'm telling them. For instance, the last time I got into an online chat, it lasted three hours, even though the question I asked at 20 minutes into the conversation could have been answered then, if the person had only been paying attention.
I have sent screen shots of sample pages showing what happens. I have been told over and over and over that there is a team of specialists working on the problem and that it is an Amazon software problem. I began reporting this in July 2012 and I have logs of all the chats to show that.
I know that it is perfectly possible for Kindle content to be formatted just fine to show correctly on the Kindle for PC app, because I read that content all the time. If indeed the problem is in the software, as I have repeatedly been told by Amazon representatives that it is, then Amazon needs to fix it. If, on the other hand, the problem is with the authors' formatting of the document that's uploaded to the Kindle platform, then that needs to be determined so the authors can fix their product.
I have the Kindle for PC app on two computers, an HP laptop operating Windows Vista and a Lenovo desktop using Windows 7. I get exactly the same results on both of them when I look at the affected content.
The Amazon representatives have granted me some Kindle credit in compensation for my frustration and the time I've spent online with them. I'm tired of giving up my time to this. There is absolutely no reason why these books don't display properly on my devices. And I am not going to go out and spend money for a Kindle device that I don't want and don't need and don't have the time to use, because I no longer have faith that these products would display correctly even on the Amazon hardware.
I am also a Kindle Direct Publishing author. I have no way of knowing if Amazon has delivered my product in readable or unreadable condition to readers. I have no way of knowing -- other than trusting the "preview" feature -- what my product looks like on any other device. All I do know is that Amazon has been cheating authors out of sales by not addressing this issue for six months.
This email will be posted on my blog.
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