E-ink readers are pissing me off

Hello,

Following my previous post on e-readers, where I was pretty enthusiastic about it, I feel compelled to tell the sad ending of this story. My device broke during ISBA 2012, without anything particular happening to it, as far as I know. I can’t believe that a ISBA participant kicked my device like a madman without me seeing it (maybe because he thought my talk wasn’t good enough?), although I can’t be sure. Anyways the screen is broken as you can see on the picture.

Then  the constructor (http://www.onyxboox.com/) and the vendor (http://ereader-store.de/) both won’t replace the screen even though there was supposed to be a 1 year warranty. The reason is that they believe the screen cannot be broken unless the user really did not take care of it.

My experience is that a normal use of the thing can kill it, so I would strongly advise against buying one of those, unless you’re willing to pay a few hundred dollars every six months to fix it. I’d wait a few years and would go for the safer, bigger companies.
Too bad!

Pierre

 

 

Published by Pierre Jacob

Professor of statistics, ESSEC Business School

2 thoughts on “E-ink readers are pissing me off

  1. I had similar problem with my 6 month old kindle. I entered my phone number on the Amazon website, they phoned me, and 5 minutes later the phone call had ended with a new kindle arriving 3 days later. I don’t really like the closed format nature of a kindle, but I can’t complain about the service!

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