Underlining the lightning

Aug 1, 2025 Kindle Books Bugs Support Amazon

Well, this is one of those 21st Century problems.

I saw a book recommendation on Hacker News a while back for “Too Like the Lightning” by Ada Palmer. One of the great (and expensive) things about the modern world is that buying a book is a few clicks away, so I bought a copy for my Kindle.

So far so good, I got a few chapters in; it’s quite dense and opaque, but I was starting to get into it when… suddenly every word in the chapter I was reading became underlined. It turned out it was not just the chapter I was reading; it was all of them. That’s unbelievably annoying as you can see.

To cut a long story short, it wasn’t any of the various highlighting features on the Kindle; the original file had become corrupted with this formatting error over on the Amazon end - presumably the publisher had pushed an update out with an unclosed tag and nobody had noticed.

You can verify this for yourself (at the current time) by checking out the “Read Sample” feature on the Amazon UK website. Apart from some of the preliminary blurb every single chapter (and the table of contents) is underlined. The one on the Amazon US site does seem to be ok though.

Explained the problem to the chatbot which asked if I had accidentally turned on highlighting then gave me a list of options that did not include “talk to a human” - happily on closing the list it offered to connect me to an “Amazon Associate” so I picked that.

Explained my problem to the Amazon Associate. The Amazon Associate apparently had no context from the chatbot conversation so I explained again. They asked if I had turned on highlighting by mistake. I verified that I was talking to a human at this point. We went through several iterations of “look, if you just look at your own website you will see the problem cannot be on my Kindle” before they eventually did actually check and accept that, yes, the problem was not at my end.

Ideally I want the damn file fixed so that I can read it on my Kindle, but I realise that might not be achievable. I’d settle for just getting a refund - but they won’t do that because I bought the book too long ago. This seems unreasonable; the book I bought did not have every word underlined.

I am currently in limbo waiting for the “Advanced Technical Team” to get back to me - the Amazon Associate required my Kindle device serial number in order to pass the ticket to that team. If they get back to me telling me to check I don’t have highlighting turned on I will scream. I guess we’ll see; I’m supposed to get a response within 48 hours but as a cynic I assume this means that in almost exactly 47.5 hours they’ll send me a message saying they’re still thinking about it.

Paperbacks don’t have this problem.

Update - well, they were supposed to get back to me within 48 hours, but four or five days later not a peep. However I chased them up again today and they issued me a refund. I already bought a paper copy so I can actually finish reading the damn thing, so we’ll call that a win. To be fair, Amazon’s chat support has generally been pretty good, so while it’s a shame they couldn’t fix the underlining instead of issuing the refund it’s still better than your average human-free-zone in tech support.