Several authors on Amazon’s Kindle have started an online petition owning to their e-books being removed from the site, citing violations of the KDP Select program.
The KDP Select asks authors to keep their books exclusively with Amazon or have them dumped from the Kindle. While this is reasonable, many cries that unknown pirates are breaking the rules – even for independent publishers – making them helpless.
Punished for Being Helplessness
Long before selling all kinds of products, Amazon is limited to selling books online. This eventually turned into selling e-books as well, added by the Kindle experience to make the lives of everyone much easier. Well, Amazon’s KDP Select program – which onboards new publishers with certain terms, is now a punishment for unknown factors.
The pact contains an exclusivity rule for their e-books to be offered only on Amazon Kindle – which is reasonable as they get a number of perks from this platform. But, several authors are being punished for reasons over which they don’t have any control on.
A few hours ago, I got a stomach-dropping email from @amazonkdp that Children of Fallen Gods had been removed from the Kindle store with zero warning, because of content "freely available on the web" — IE, piracy that I do not have any control over. ????⬇️ pic.twitter.com/FiQb4co2nS
— Carissa Broadbent (@CarissaNasyra) February 5, 2023
One among them is piracy – where pirates are extracting copies of their e-books – even from independent publishers – and publishing them on their sites just hours after they’re made available on Kindle! Though it’s illegal, authors couldn’t do anything but watch.
Well, Amazon, on the other hand, has been punishing them for their e-books being available elsewhere! Several authors have informed receiving threatening emails from Amazon and eventually removed their e-books from the Kindle. Thus, they all – and others who’re against this move – have started a Change.org petition to stop Amazon from doing this.
The online petition has received over 35,000 signatures already, with more adding up daily. This was started by Author Marlow Locker to send a wake-up call to Amazon, who said that Amazon should stand with its authors instead of punishing them for piracy reasons – over which they don’t have any control.
Amazon acknowledged the complaints and said it’s working with the people involved to find an appropriate solution. In response to TorrentFreak, the company said they’d only remove e-books from Kindle Unlimited in case the books are available for sale on Amazon’s regular store.
