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...
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...