for games, steam offers a trial of the game which can be refunded in full if you do it within two hours. It's a great feature for consumer protection imho.
I'd like to try a chapter or two of a book first, and if it doesn't grab, get a full refund. This is how you can prevent sinking time (and money, presumably) into a bad book.
I don't know where the divide comes from (cultural, generational, social class, or something else) but the idea of thinking "I want to get my money back" for something like a book, music, or a video game is strange to me.
Sometimes I make bad purchases, and that's just too bad.
The more that media becomes a product, the harder it is to feel like you're conning an artist by getting a refund on a purchase.
It's gotten incredibly easy to put media out there, and it's great that people are able to tell the stories they want through the medium they want. At the risk of sounding like I'm just bootlicking, traditional outlets used to be able to filter out some of the more low-effort content and it was easier to expect that you were at least getting mediocre stuff. At this point, a lot of really low effort and low quality junk is in the ecosystem and it's harder to just buy something that looks cool.
In all reality, I've eaten larger purchases as losses than some dumb $20 steam game or ebook or whatever. I just don't think that people are terribly unreasonable if they feel burnt badly enough to press for a refund. It's never been easier to do the old "if I can get x number of people to give me $5 each..." bit
for games, steam offers a trial of the game which can be refunded in full if you do it within two hours. It's a great feature for consumer protection imho.
I'd like to try a chapter or two of a book first, and if it doesn't grab, get a full refund. This is how you can prevent sinking time (and money, presumably) into a bad book.