I normally avoid game guides, unless I'm buying them for the potential nostalgic value they might have some day. I couldn't resist the collector's GOTY edition of the guide, though. It's a beautiful 752 page hard cover with full color glossy pages throughout. Something more guides for certain games should aspire to. I liked it enough that I considered buying two -- one for me and one to preserve.  And, at $23 ($35 most places), I couldn't pass it up.
 
But, when UPS delivered it yesterday and I opened it, the cover was damage din many places, including a huge chunk torn out of the text-book-quality hard cover on the front. It looked like someone had thrown it into an augur or under a bulldozer's tracks. I figured it wouldn't be a problem, because Amazon is wonderful about returns and replacements. I'd go online and they'd have me a new copy at my doorstep before I could even repackage the damaged book to ship back to them.
 
Only . . . no. You can't even order the book any more from them, because they've frozen the product due to the flood of complaints about the shitty shipping job Amazon did (so I'm not the only one that got screwed). It is absolute baffling that they shipped this heavy "collectors edition" of a book in a flimsy intra-office envelope while they typically ship a bar of soap in a refrigerator box using more packaging materials than an entire UPS store. Shipping books was initially the foundation of their entire business!

So, did anyone else here buy a copy from Amazon and get screwed by the damage? Are you thinking of keeping your damaged copy, anyway? Especially since it seems to be hard to find another place with a copy (at least at a reasonable price).
 
And yes, I know Fallout has been out for ages, but my entire collection was stolen months ago and I put off replacing my in-progress copy of Fallout 3 until GOTY came out.