An article on File 770 reports that Audible has been encouraging readers to return audiobooks for refunds. They can return them as much as a year later, after reading the entire book. Surely it should take less time and reading than that to decided that you hate a book and wish you hadn’t spent the money on it.

The return counts as a revoked sale. The author gets no royalties, even though the reader got a year’s worth of use out of the book.

The article notes that readers probably don’t think about the authors when returning books. They just think that Audible (that is, Amazon) is being very generous to them. If some of you reading this are Audible customers, please be aware of this. Please “return” a book only if you think it didn’t justify what you were charged. By that I mean only if it was a sloppy or misleading job, not just that it wasn’t to your taste. Or return it after reading the first ten pages and deciding you don’t want to go on.

For Audible, it’s a way to encourage memberships, since only members can return books. They don’t make money directly from a returned book, but they get money from membership fees.

My ebooks are available through Amazon, and so far Amazon has accounted for more than half the sales of The Magic Battery. I continue to urge you to buy them through Smashwords, which is more author-friendly. Anyway, I can’t give you discount codes for Amazon, since I didn’t enter an exclusive arrangement.

I don’t have any audiobooks on the market, so this doesn’t affect me directly, but it’s an issue of interest to readers of this blog.