Buying a Kindle in Beijing

What a fiasco! I have a lovely old Kindle. It was a present from Lynn Richardson, a good friend and fellow English teacher in Panama. It had over 200 books downloaded on it when it came to me, and I have so thoroughly enjoyed reading the novels that Lynn left for me. You can imagine that it would have been impossible to carry this load of books to China with us. Well, I could tell the Kindle was soon going to quit. I was having to force reload it often. And on Thursday, the monitor finally went blank and I could not revive it. I was prepared. I knew it was coming. I had purposefully read almost all of the books Lynn left me. I even had staked out a Kindle dealer about a mile from our home.

So on Saturday at noon, we went to the mall and found the dealer. I told him I would only buy a new Kindle if he could migrate my 300+ books that were being stored in my Amazon library to the new Kindle. I have 4 or so sites I check every day for free books, and download a few every week….to the tune of about 370 free books. I knew I could not move Lynn’s library off my kindle, but I thought I should be able to move the free books over. (Most are worth reading and some just get ignored. Haha)

Well, he started working on it. I had checked to be sure I had the right ID and password to my Amazon account….but not when I got there. We were messing back and forth with only understanding about 2/3 of the whole conversation. A lovely young woman, just stopped and asked if we needed help. This is just a lady, walking by in the crowd and seeing us struggling with English/Chinese! She was able to help. (Like what is the Chinese word for “password”?)

Well, of course Amazon was not going to accept an entry from a computer and area they did not recognize. The man called Amazon and got a new password, but it was sent to my email. So we had to find and get into a laptop and the hassle of opening my email on a new computer, but we did it. By this time we were on our third request for a password, because each password was only good for 10 minutes. Success! The man was able to download the books onto a Kindle…but it was an older sample Kindle that was being displayed on the counter top. It was not the new Kindle that I was going to buy. So we started the process again to get it onto the new Kindle. But Amazon will only send out a new password 3 times in one 24 hour period. We had used up our chances, and there was no way to get a new one! 

I was going to just accept the older display model when I realized that I was only getting 4 gigs, when the new one would have 8 gigs for only $4 more. Therefore after 2 hours of work, I left without a new Kindle and a less than happy salesman. I will go back on Tuesday or Wednesday and try to work through the process again and try to get the books downloaded.

A strange side note is what I had to offer the young lady who stopped to help me and stuck with it for the whole 2 hours. It is not appropriate to tip here, so money was not acceptable. Instead I invited her to our Friday night study. English practice is a priceless commodity to most Chinese.  This seems so small and just funny, but I know she appreciated the invitation to the study and also she was thrilled to be “friended” on wechat social media. I pray I can get the Kindle situation worked out.