Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 12 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Six months ago I got my daughter a refurbished 2nd generation Amazon Kindle from woot! and she has been inseparable from it. Thus, it was a distressing day for her this past Thanksgiving weekend when she turned it on and found just a series of black lines on the screen. None of the reset methods I tried would restore the screen to its former working state. The USB connection to my laptop still worked, however, so I was able to backup all of her files/books.

woot! had indicated the Kindle had a 1-year warranty from Amazon, so I called up Kindle Support (or rather, they called me once I initiated the request from their support site, which is pretty cool). The support rep (an extremely friendly, American gentleman) told me refurbished devices only have a 90 day warranty, not a year, and the warranty on my particular device expired in July 2011 (a month after I got it, so that must have been tied to the original warranty before the unit was refurbished and then purchased by me).

I was dismayed by this, since woot! claimed the 1-year warranty which turned out not to be true. The rep told me my options were to (obviously) buy a new Kindle or for $40 they would replace my broken unit with another. Digging a little deeper with the rep, I learned that the $40 replacement fee would get me a 3rd generation Kindle (now called the Kindle Keyboard) with the same free 3G service my daughter’s current Kindle has. Basically they would give me the closest current device to what I already owned. That sounded almost too good to believe so I went ahead with the replacement request.

Two days later (thanks to my Amazon Prime membership), my daughter’s new Kindle Keyboard arrived. Not only is it smaller and thinner than her 2nd gen device, it has the free 3G plus WiFi, has more storage, and it’s not the “with Special Offers” version either (it’s the $189 one). Very nice! Except for the fact that the new Kindle didn’t fit in her M-Edge GO! case, my daughter was thrilled. I was able to easily re-download her all of her books by “pushing” them from the Amazon web site and she was back in business (except for having to re-create her Collections).

I’m sad the Kindle 2 screen only lasted six months before inexplicably dying (I see a few other people on the woot! thread reported the same problem, so maybe it was just a bad batch of refurbs) and I’m a little upset at woot! for misrepresenting the warranty, but overall I’m very satisfied with Amazon’s support and the final outcome.