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How to Return a Kindle eBook You Bought by Mistake


Did you know you can return any Kindle ebook or digital comic that you purchased?

It doesn’t matter whether you accidentally pocket-bought a title, or got it at a price higher than you intended to pay, or thought it was a full novel rather than a short story. Amazon will let you return it (most of the time). 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.

Here’s how you can do that.

The first method for returning a Kindle ebook is to cancel it right after. Just click the "cancel order" link on the purchase confirmation screen on your Kindle app or device, and Amazon will immediately reverse the sale.

Or at least that is what I have been told is the easiest way; I just tested this with a couple new ebook purchases, and I didn’t see a cancellation link. (This could be because I returned an ebook a few weeks ago, and Amazon decided not to make the next return quite so easy to accomplish.)

The one sure-fire way to get a refund is to visit the Manage Your Content & Devices page on Amazon.

Select the Content tab, and then find the ebook you want to return. Click on the three dot ( … ) button next to the book’s title.

Next, select Return for Refund.

A pop-up should appear, asking you to confirm that you want to complete the return. Click the orange button that says Return for Refund.

All done. Yes, it is that easy.

There are a couple times when Amazon’s effortless review policy really comes in handy. The first is when the price on a Kindle ebook changes and you don’t notice, which is something that I suspect happens a lot as ebooks go on and off-sale. I see titles jumping from the Top Free to the 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 $0.99 to $8.99.

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 deceptively-labeled study guide. 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.

image by kodomut via Flickr

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