We'll look into the formatting issues in the Mobi version. A couple things:
1. Leanpub is not a "publisher" in the sense of having proofreaders, editors, etc. We're a website that authors can use to self-publish ebooks, including in-progress ebooks. Self-publishing an in-progress ebook lets you iterate based on feedback like this.
2. We have an unconditional 100% refund policy. So if you're unhappy with your purchase for any reason just email your PayPal receipt to hello@leanpub.com and we'll refund your money, no questions asked.
The refund policy is pretty noble of you. Do you find that very many people actually ask for refunds? In particular, how about months down the line? How do you deal with refunds once the author has been paid, do you just deal with the costs yourself?
It's equals part noble and self-interested: ebooks cost us essentially nothing to ship, so why not refund them fully and unconditionally? It's the right thing to do. Also, people will buy more books if we remove the risk.
This is especially true since we're a self-publishing website and we exercise virtually no control over what we sell.
In terms of numbers, we've had thousands of purchases and only a handful of refunds. I think we've had about 10 or 15 refunds in total. (I do the refunds myself, manually, via PayPal's web interface.)
In terms of how we handle refunds with respect to the author: we subtract them from royalties. We pay royalties quarterly so we don't have issues about whether the author gets paid before a refund is requested -- if someone wants a refund they usually ask for it within a day of purchasing!
Now, we may be lucky here, in that the quality of books sold on Leanpub is pretty high, even though almost all the books are in-progress books that the author is iterating on. As we grow we may have more of an issue; who knows, someday we may even need to automate the refund process...
We'll look into the formatting issues in the Mobi version. A couple things:
1. Leanpub is not a "publisher" in the sense of having proofreaders, editors, etc. We're a website that authors can use to self-publish ebooks, including in-progress ebooks. Self-publishing an in-progress ebook lets you iterate based on feedback like this.
2. We have an unconditional 100% refund policy. So if you're unhappy with your purchase for any reason just email your PayPal receipt to hello@leanpub.com and we'll refund your money, no questions asked.
Thanks!
Peter (Leanpub co-founder)