Kris purchased the new biography of Steve Jobs through the Kobo e-bookstore as a gift for his dad, but here’s the trouble with buying an e-book: no one knows where it went, and no one at Kobo is capable of helping him. The Kindle version cost $3 more, but actually worked.

I decided to gift a Kobo e-book version of the new Steve Jobs biography to my dad for Christmas, but little did I know that I would soon be descending into madness to try and save the couple dollars in price as compared to Amazon’s Kindle store.

After purchasing the e-book as a gift to my dad’s e-mail address, I received confirmation that it had been sent, but not claimed. The only problem was that he never got it.

After checking the e-mail address, and the junk folder, I tried to resend the e-mail several times to no avail.

Contacting the customer service line, I first asked if it were possible to try another e-mail address in the hopes that it could send to his company e-mail. I was told that there was nothing the customer support centre could do to help, and that a support staff member would e-mail me in 24-hours.

After asking for a supervisor, I was told that there were no supervisors working at all, and that the support department had no phones and would only correspond by e-mail.

Giving up, I resigned to waiting for an e-mail from the support staff, which never came.

The customer support rep I spoke with on my phone summed up my concern with an incident e-mail describing it:

“I sent a Giftcad [sic] to a wrong email address, and I would like to get this changed.”

I’ve recontacted the support centre via e-mail, and am waiting for open hours in the hopes that someone at the customer service centre is available to help.

In the meantime, I’ve gone ahead and purchased a copy of the book through the Amazon Kindle site, which worked flawlessly, and may have been worth the extra $3.

I’m still waiting on a refund.

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