Oh, I had an experience with Amazon myself. But the retail store. I ordered the music CD from the States, and it didn't come. I mailed them, that my package hasn't arrived, so they sent another one.

And they politely asked me, if the other one arrives, I sent it back to them (on their cost).

I never experienced anything like that in Poland. Polish company would rather have you wait 3 months or more until they resolve the problem with undelivered package on their end, and just then they would send you another one.

GOG support has been unable to fix the edit functionality of the forum for ages. I don't trust much in the GOG service capabilities.

Not Support. Support deals with your personal issues by the means they have at their disposal. Support is "can't login", "can't purchase", "please resend order confirmation", "want to change username", "want to change thread title", "any news on the German version", "ban that asshole". Support cannot fix a forum software bug (theoretically, they could reformat your mangled post for you - I think everyone understands that's too much to ask). What they can do is forward a follow-up to whoever's responsible for the cms, but even that has limited effect.

Heh, they can take their very "cloud" and stick it up their own evil ass :-D

Latest update from the second link on this subject

Update @ 23:55 - Linn just contacted me to say her account has been mysteriously re-activated and she's busily downloading her books. Hopefully Amazon will have more news for us all soon. Even positive arbitrary actions disclose how much Kindle customers read only with the grace of Amazon, of course...

Update @ 00:30 - Amazon PR just wrote to say: "We would like to clarify our policy on this topic. Account status should not affect any customer's ability to access their library. If any customer has trouble accessing their content, he or she should contact customer service for help. Thank you for your interest in Kindle."

As usual, media attention solves any problem :P

Maybe it was starting to rain too much on their stinky cloud....

I hate this kind of DRM where your purchases are all tied to an account that can be closed, thereby cutting off your access to your entire media library.

When Steam updated their Subscriber Agreement and I did not want to agree to the changes that took away my ability to take part in a class action lawsuit, they shut off access to my hundreds of Steam games until I eventually was forced into the ultimatum of 'click agree or lose your account'. I went back and forth with their customer service for about two months without the ability to play my Steam games and they would not give me any other options. Eventually I just clicked agree because it was clear that I couldn't win and they also had in their Subscriber Agreement that if you don't fully close your account (meaning you get rid of all games and uninstall Steam) within 60 days, then you have given tacit agreement.

Until you've had your account closed like this, and then be forced into some annoying and unwinnable argument with customer "service", it's really hard to understand just how bad of an idea it is to have all your purchases tied to an account that you can't back up like you can here on GOG.com. I was a believer in DRM-Free before, but after that experience, I hardly buy anything unless it is DRM-Free. It's just terrible to have everything you think you "own" in somebody else's control.

This is really a lesson in ownership. We don't own our digital content. Even here on GOG, everything in the TOS is described as a "license" to a product, not ownership. The major difference here though is that you can back up and reinstall your GOG titles without interference, even if you don't technically own them. Over at Steam, Amazon, and other places that tie your purchases to an account, you can lose everything in an instant and not be able to get it back.

Regarding the whole ebook situation it's not as epub doesn't offer the very same DRM abilities as amazon's ebook format. Although I don't know if for example Sony can pull books from Sony PRS players or other companies from other players?

But in the end I hope the way to go will be as with music. People can easily circumvent the ebook DRM and having DRM is just a nuisance, so it's better to drop it before customers skip the paying step. Only it seems to take much longer than with music.

I'm glad things eventually got fixed for her. I was a bit surprised it was Amazon involved with the problem, but any company can have it's issues. I do like them saying a person's account status shouldn't effect them accessing their content.

More digital distribution companies should adopt policies like that.

"If any customer has trouble accessing their content, he or she should contact customer service for help."
I thought that was exactly what she was trying to do to no avail in the beginning, until the news spread... :-)

Speaking only from a North American (and specifically US) perspective, that's my experience as well, like straight up "1 man shop" type customer service policies and the awesome software tools that only a major company can bring to bear.

Again, this person could be legit or full of shit, if she's legit then I fully expect Amazon to fess up to the mistake.
This is pretty much how they operate. They just sent me a 120 dollar coffee maker (extremely specialized method of brewing) without me having yet returned the broken one (it has a lot of ceramic and glass, so the idea it could break during shipping wasn't surprising to me). In fact it just arrived today, I should check of this one is in one piece...

Arg, it's broken in the exact same fucking place! I just called, it sounds like the complaints have made Amazon pull the entire inventory for this item and they're using a third party to provide replacements to affected buyers. I guess that's good service (I'm not paying shipping back for either item, Amazon is) so I can't be too mad, I just wish my damned coffee maker wasn't broken.