Amazon Removes Books From Kindle Unlimited After They Appear On Pirate Sites (torrentfreak.com) 74
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Several independent publishers have had their books removed from Kindle Unlimited because they breached an exclusivity agreement with Amazon. The actions of the book giant are covered by the mutually agreed terms. However, in many cases, it's not the authors who breached the agreement, but pirate sites who copied them, as pirates do. [...] Over the past few weeks, several authors complained that Amazon had removed their books from Kindle Unlimited because they violated their agreement. The piracy angle is front and center, raising plenty of questions and uncertainty.
Raven Kennedy, known for The Plated Prisoner Series, took her frustration to Instagram earlier this month. The author accused Amazon of sending repeated "threats". This eventually resulted in the removal of her books from Kindle Unlimited, ostensibly because these were listed on pirate sites. "Copyright infringement is outside of my control. Even though I pay a lot of money to a company to file takedown notices on my behalf, and am constantly checking the web for pirated versions, I can't keep up with all the intellectual theft. "And rather than support and help their authors, Amazon threatens me. The ironic thing is, these pirates are getting the files FROM Amazon," Kennedy added. A similar experience was shared by Carissa Broadbent, author of The War of Lost Hearts Trilogy. Again, Amazon removed a book from Kindle Unlimited for an issue that the author can't do much about. "A few hours ago, I got a stomach-dropping email from [Amazon] 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," Broadbent noted.
These and other authors received broad support from their readers, and sympathy from the general public. A Change.org petition launched in response has collected nearly 35,000 signatures to date, with new ones still coming in. Author Marlow Locker started the petition to send a wake-up call to Amazon. According to her, Amazon should stand behind its authors instead of punishing them for the fact that complete strangers have decided to pirate their books. Most authors will gladly comply with the exclusivity requirements, but only as far as this lies within their control. Piracy clearly isn't, especially when it happens on an almost industrial scale. "Currently, many automated systems use Amazon as a place to copy the e-files that they use for their free websites. It's completely absurd that the same company turns around and punishes an author by removing their book from KDP Select," the petition reads. From the commentary seen online, several authors have been able to resolve their issues with Amazon. And indeed, the books of Broadbent and Kennedy appear to be back online. That said, the exclusivity policy remains in place. Amazon notes that the books removed from Kindle Unlimited still remain for sale on Amazon's regular store. They also stress that authors are issued a warning with an extended timeline to try and resolve the issue before any action is taken.
"The problem is, of course, that individual authors can't stop piracy," adds TorrentFreak. "If it was that easy, most authors would be happy to do so. However, if billion-dollar publishing companies and the U.S. Government can't stop it, Amazon can't expect independent authors to 'resolve' the matter either."
Raven Kennedy, known for The Plated Prisoner Series, took her frustration to Instagram earlier this month. The author accused Amazon of sending repeated "threats". This eventually resulted in the removal of her books from Kindle Unlimited, ostensibly because these were listed on pirate sites. "Copyright infringement is outside of my control. Even though I pay a lot of money to a company to file takedown notices on my behalf, and am constantly checking the web for pirated versions, I can't keep up with all the intellectual theft. "And rather than support and help their authors, Amazon threatens me. The ironic thing is, these pirates are getting the files FROM Amazon," Kennedy added. A similar experience was shared by Carissa Broadbent, author of The War of Lost Hearts Trilogy. Again, Amazon removed a book from Kindle Unlimited for an issue that the author can't do much about. "A few hours ago, I got a stomach-dropping email from [Amazon] 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," Broadbent noted.
These and other authors received broad support from their readers, and sympathy from the general public. A Change.org petition launched in response has collected nearly 35,000 signatures to date, with new ones still coming in. Author Marlow Locker started the petition to send a wake-up call to Amazon. According to her, Amazon should stand behind its authors instead of punishing them for the fact that complete strangers have decided to pirate their books. Most authors will gladly comply with the exclusivity requirements, but only as far as this lies within their control. Piracy clearly isn't, especially when it happens on an almost industrial scale. "Currently, many automated systems use Amazon as a place to copy the e-files that they use for their free websites. It's completely absurd that the same company turns around and punishes an author by removing their book from KDP Select," the petition reads. From the commentary seen online, several authors have been able to resolve their issues with Amazon. And indeed, the books of Broadbent and Kennedy appear to be back online. That said, the exclusivity policy remains in place. Amazon notes that the books removed from Kindle Unlimited still remain for sale on Amazon's regular store. They also stress that authors are issued a warning with an extended timeline to try and resolve the issue before any action is taken.
"The problem is, of course, that individual authors can't stop piracy," adds TorrentFreak. "If it was that easy, most authors would be happy to do so. However, if billion-dollar publishing companies and the U.S. Government can't stop it, Amazon can't expect independent authors to 'resolve' the matter either."
Amazon is no friend to authors. (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon seems like a friend to authors, but is not.
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well, if those books really did sell, you can be damn sure amazon wouldn't have delisted them. amazon is evil, but reality is sometimes harsh on its own, karen.
oh, wait, maybe starting a twitter campaign to get them relisted will bring another few sales and a headline!
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well, if those books really did sell, you can be damn sure amazon wouldn't have delisted them.
Nope. They don't care. Amazon revenue was 514 billion dollars last year. Sorry, but even outstanding sales on a small press book is not going to make enough profit to make them notice it.
They notice how many million titles are on their list. Any individual title is beneath their notice.
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If those books really didn't sell then the authors wouldn't be so distressed about being delisted. A book might have very tiny sales in terms of Amazon's volumes yet be significant to its author's revenue.
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They are being removed from Kindle Unlimited, not from the main Kindle store. Kindle Unlimited has a reverse profit motive for Amazon. They receive the same revenue regardless of which books get read, but they have to pay out to the authors based on readership. So if you have a popular book that is often read quickly then you are less profitable then a less popular book that is read slower.
I could see how they would keep War and Peace which may be checked out by thousands of people who aren't actively rea
Re:Amazon is no friend to authors. (Score:5, Insightful)
What kills the sales on those books is the piracy.
Do you have any idea what it's like to have a pirate site promoting your book as 'The Best Book of the Month! Get it here for FREE!' and then you see that thousands have downloaded your book - FOR FREE - while only a dozen paid for it on Amazon?
Have you ever had people who STOLE YOUR FUCKING BOOK sending you emails and bitch at you for not writing the sequel because you didn't even make back the money you paid your cover artist?
Pirates are scum. People who steal books are scum. People who think that authors don't deserve to be paid for their hard work are scum. I stopped writing a series that was making me money because the piracy got so bad I was losing money on it. And those fuckers had the GALL to COMPLAIN to me because I stopped writing it.
Be careful of just who you're calling 'Karen' there.
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while only a dozen paid for it on Amazon?
yeah that was exactly my point. thank you, karen.
keep enjoying your anger at a world that doesn't understand nor value your precious "you", since "you" trying to understand the world seems so hard. good luck.
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I've made more money as an author than you've made in whatever job it is you work at.
I'm just relating a personal experience that happened to me when I started out, and what I did to solve it (switched genres to one where people are willing to pay).
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so "piracy" wasn't really the problem, right? what's with all the whining then?
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Re: Amazon should be targeted too (Score:2, Insightful)
While we're at it, why not target HP, Dell, Lenovo, Compaq, Sony, Toshiba, and every other company who profits by cloning IBM's hardware. Competition is unacceptable.
Break Amazon up! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed! Capitalism depends on competition to work right, and right now Amazon has insufficient competition in many categories. They can be assholes without consequence.
Re: Break Amazon up! (Score:2)
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If Amazon didn't spend more on lawyers a year than the gross revenues of many companies i'd suggest ...
Sue Amazon for facilitating piracy. If those pirated ebooks can be tracked back to Amazon as the source then go after them claiming they're responsible for ... bla bla bla gross negligence about not adequately securing the IP they've been charged with. Gross negligence also helps to circumvent a lot of the responsibility waivers clauses. Normally this would be silly, but if Amazon is holding an author r
Time for change (Score:3)
It would seem that the distribution model offered by Amazon to authors is broken.
Time for someone to come up with something better and watch all the authors jump ship. Only then will Amazon have to reconsider its policies.
Meanwhile, Amazon (just like YouTube) places no value on anything that doesn't earn them money -- and that includes the content creators that line their servers with the fruits of their labor.
Amazon Removes Books From Kindle ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon Removes Books From Kindle Unlimited After They Appear On Pirate Sites
That's why I only buy e-books from vendors that offer them in PDF format and store them in a folder tree on my cloud drive. I don't mind paying for an e-book. If it's a good book the author deserves to be compensated for the work he/she put into writing it but I refuse to enrich the likes of Amazon and others who pull crap like this. It also doesn't help that Kindle sucks really badly as an e-book reading app, even Apple's sucky Preview app is way better for that purpose.
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PDF only makes sense when you want to see fixed page images. Very important for lots of nonfiction.
But for most fiction, you want EPUB--something reflowable.
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for most fiction, you want EPUB--something reflowable.
wat [adobe.com]
You've seriously never reflowed a PDF?
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Sure, it was a feature of the iRiver Story HD. Didn't work great.
Looks like the feature you're linking to has to be enabled when the PDF is created. How many PDFs out there have it enabled?
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PDF only makes sense when you want to see fixed page images. Very important for lots of nonfiction.
But for most fiction, you want EPUB--something reflowable.
Well, 98% of what I read is non-fiction. I don't have much time for fantasy worlds unless it's in the form of audio books which allow me to get work done while I listen..
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That's why I only buy e-books from vendors that offer them in PDF format and store them in a folder tree on my cloud drive.
Bah humbug! I only buy ebooks from vendors that offer them in plain old paper and ink format. And I keep my earnins in a tin can buried in the back yard! Bah!
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That's why I only buy e-books from vendors that offer them in PDF format
Fucking gross.
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If you like sci-fi, check out Baen. They have published all their ebooks DRM-free since pretty much forever. I remember ~20 years ago downloading .rtf or .doc files of the early Honor Harrington series and several others and re-formatting them to 2 column to read Fair chance I have them on an old backup drive somewhere even today.
Kindle works fine as a reader - just convert to .mobi so the re-page works. PDF is ... meh for that.
Every Single Amazon Story (Score:1)
1) Amazon doing something stupid/evil/wrong/greedy.
2) Some people complain.
3) Large group of people jump on "Amazon can do no wrong" bandwagon
4) larger group of people jump on " I don't like what Amazon does, but I'm lazy so hey..." Stop using Amazon
pay author directly (Score:5, Interesting)
I you get a book from a pirate, and like it, send some money directly to the author.
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Copyright infringement is not theft. It is illegal, but it is not theft. Theft is a totally different legal domain than copyright infringement, they are not the same thing in any meaningful sense. So, committing copyright infringement is not stealing (even though it is illegal).
Many people consider it morally equivalent to theft. Ok. That still doesn't make it stealing. Words have meanings, those meanings matter, and "copyright infringement" means something different than "theft," even if they are bot
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Many people consider it morally equivalent to theft. Ok. That still doesn't make it stealing. Words have meanings, those meanings matter, and "copyright infringement" means something different than "theft," even if they are both morally wrong.
You stole my heart with that reasoning. Wait -- no you didn't. You infringed my heart's copyright. Yes, much better.
Re: pay author directly (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually "stole my heart" is correct, as the implication is that the person doing the stealing has so smitten the owner of the heart that they are depriving said owner of the ability to ever give it to someone else.
This is meaningfully "stealing".
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That sounds more like restraint of trade.
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Wrong. It's theft.
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I just made a copy.
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Well the law certain disagrees with you.
And if someone takes you to court, you will lose.
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You have convinced me to change my mind with your pointed "Nuh uh!" rebuttal.
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It's a better thought out rebuttal than your original comment.
I'm quoting the law. You're just making shit up.
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It wasn't even my comment. But if you're quoting a law that makes "copyright infringement" and "theft" the same thing, you'll need to cite it.
Until then, you're still batting .000
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If you get a book from a pirate, and like it, send some money directly to the author.
In other words, steal from the author. And yes, you are stealing because people will not send money to the person or company which creates the work if they can get it through theft.
As a general statement, that is not true. Some people will send money to the author, though I agree that some will not.
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No, as a general statement this is true.
I've had tens of thousands of my books stolen.
Over the last ten years only TWO people have sent me money for them.
You really don't get it, do you?
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No, as a general statement this is true. I've had tens of thousands of my books stolen. Over the last ten years only TWO people have sent me money for them.
You really don't get it, do you?
The fact that two people have sent you money means that your statement is not generally true.
Would you care to provide a reference to something that you have written? I might wish to read it and pay you.
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Edge cases do not prove your point.
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Edge cases do not prove your point.
In the case of a general statement, a single counter-example is sufficient to show that the statement is false. For example, the statement "Men are pigs", if taken as a general statement, is equivalent to "All men are pigs". If I can find even one man who is not a pig, I have shown that the statement is false.
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Fat load of good that will do if your actions. get their primary source of income completely removed.
Its like compensating an uber driver for stealing and destroying their car by flipping them $10 for the ride you might have otherwise have had.
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Fat load of good that will do if your actions. get their primary source of income completely removed.
Its like compensating an uber driver for stealing and destroying their car by flipping them $10 for the ride you might have otherwise have had.
A single individual who gets a book from a pirate is not responsible for completely removing the author's primary source of income. Rather, all of the people who get the book from a pirate, taken togher, are responsible. If each of those people sends some money to the author, the author will be compensated.
Your comparison is inapt because an act of copyright infringement does not damage your property in a way that makes it unfit for its purpose. If I may quote Thomas Jefferson: He who receives an idea fr [uchicago.edu]
Amazon (Score:5, Interesting)
I have my own silly little sci-fi series I've been putting out for a couple years. I still can't wrap my head around why so many authors fell for the Kindle Unlimited scam. Giving Amazon exclusive rights to anything of mine seemed like a perfect way to prevent sales opportunities, even with their large audience. Stories like this one aren't exactly rare for indie authors either. But spend any time chatting with other indie authors and lots of them claim it's the only way to go. Makes no sense to me. Why, as a little guy, would you tie the fate of your product to such a behemoth? Seems a perfect way to get screwed one way or another.
People having their books yanked? This may be an opportunity to expand your potential audience by finding a better distributor. I'm not going to promote any one in particular, but there are better, less demanding ones.
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I find it interesting that your experience with is different from vendors of physical goods like this comment https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] that says that despite all problems of selling on amazon, it is worth being there because it brings so much more business in absolute than other solutions.
Re:Amazon (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me clarify something: Not tying yourself directly to Amazon doesn't prevent you from selling ON Amazon. Kindle Unlimited is an exclusivity agreement. Running through another distributor that allows you to sell on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, and dozens of other sites, plus some physical locations if you're willing to do the legwork to get there, seemed a better deal to me. I won't claim to be an expert, and it's not like I ever thought my niche product (heavy metal and television refences, along the lines of Community, in an action/sci-fi/horror setting) was going to be some massive best-seller, but it's worked out OK for me. I make enough to make up for the up-front costs of not using a traditional publisher, which is all I really wanted to do.
Re:Amazon (Score:4, Informative)
I have my own mystery series - I put the first book up on Kindle Unlimited and it absolutely does drive traffic to the later books in the series that are not on Kindle Unlimited (my first book has teaser chapters to the next two books, plus a book list of the six so far in the series). I'll add that I searched for my book one day years ago and it popped up on pirate sites - nothing I could do about it. Am I going to play take-down whack-a-mole with pirate sites? It was only the first book anyway - didn't see the others - so that might drive some traffic too. After 6 years I've sold maybe 5000 books total in the series, so it is only a sidebar for me anyway. Oh, and Amazon has never complained to me that it found my books on a pirate site. Maybe this is something new they are doing and they have yet to get around to me.
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Because you will make a lot more money being in KU. That's why authors do it.
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So they say. Yet, the horror stories from people who have done it seem to pile up all around. There does come a point where getting into bed with a giant is a bad idea. They may just roll over and crush you without even realizing you were there.
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No, so I, a best selling 6 figure a year author says. I've been doing this for over a decade.
Horror stories always exist because there are people who break the rules, people who are trying to scam the system, or people who didn't listen to the warnings.
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Best selling authors are a different world from anything having to do with some dude just wanting to sell a few books to like-minded folks. I refuse to give exclusivity to anyone when it comes to my creations. I won't hold it against someone if they decide to. I've just seen too many negatives to exclusivity agreements, especially for the small guy.
On the bright side, I was smart enough to read up on what KU actually was and knew it wasn't for me without having some horror story after the fact be my reason.
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It's an Amazon issue, right? (Score:1)
If they were downloaded and extracted through Amazon Unlimited by the pirates, this is actually an Amazon security issue (allegedly).
I'm not a lawyer, but isn't this negligence on Amazon's part? Their DRM possibly has a flaw. Shouldn't there be a watermark somewhere on the pirated files to tie it to the Amazon user who downloaded it?
Perhaps if the affected authors got together for a class action lawsuit they could wake up Amazon enough to go after the pirates. (Authors could drop the suit off they do.)
I'm
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negligence on Amazon's part
If Amazon has any level of legal knowledge, there's a clause in their publishing agreements / contracts that waves any liability they might have had for something like this. Never mind that it would be difficult to prove negligence on Amazon's part for the illegal actions of third parties.
Their DRM possibly has a flaw
According to the people over at mobileread [mobileread.com] Amazon disabled downloading purchased books on older devices, for any book published after January 3, 2023, and Amazon routinely changes the encryption methods on their KFX eboo
So... stop publishing on Amazon (Score:3)
So, as an author, stop publishing on Amazon.
Does Google Play do this? No? Put your shit there.
Apple Books? They also don't this. Put your shit up there.
Ebooks.com? Nope, they don't do this either. Put your shit up there.
You have choices. You chose wrong. Learn from your mistakes and fix them.
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And none of those are an equivalent or even close to the Kindle Unlimited program. All of those are just general ebook sales platforms, more like Amazon's general ebook sales - which does not have the exclusivity clause that is being referred to (and Amazon is not removing them from general ebook sales - only the Kindle Unlimited program)
So your statement is basically useless to the discussion.
Re: So... stop publishing on Amazon (Score:2)
Yes. Yes they are essentially equivalent. They all publish your ebooks. They all provide payment services to your readers. They all pay you a cut.
If you make bad business decisions, don't blame the world. Run the numbers and update your business model.
If you write shit books, you make shit money. Amazon Unlimited doesn't change that.
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You don't know a damn thing about the business - Obviously.
ALMOST NO ONE GOES TO THOSE SITES!!!
Amazon controls over 95 percent of the ebook market. You can NOT make any money on those other sites.
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Punished by the people who failed. (Score:2)
"We'll sell you DRM, and when it fails take away the benefit by removing your item from our program."
Rule of life: Choose Amazon last (Score:2)
Sadly for some things Amazon is the only realistic option. But in the UK there is usually an alternative, so whilst I do resort to Amazon occasionally, I avoid doing so if I can.
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No, in the UK Amazon is still the only alternative.
Really? (Score:2)
For what is Amazon the only alternative in the UK? There are vast numbers of retail websites for everything I buy that usually allow me to avoid Amazon.
Automated decision-making (Score:2)
Here Amazon is not only screwing the authors over, they're also screwing themselves. Removing the books from their site will do nothing to stop them being available on pirate sites. Actually, at that point pirate sites might be the only place these books are available, so even people who would want to buy them will not be able to do so now. So this is just straight up dumb, everyone loses from this. I know money lost from this is peanuts to Amazon, but this will also discourage other authors from wanting to
This is why you should stop getting pirated books (Score:2)
Yeah, this happens. It happens a lot. But I bet most of the people replying to this thread go to pirate sites and download pirated works. You all think it's a 'victimless' crime, but no - it fucks over the author every time you do it and can, as we seen in these cases, destroy them completely.
Stop blaming Amazon - they're not the ones responsible for this.
Blame the pirates.
Blame the companies that support the pirates! (I won't mention who they are, but if you know anything about hacking and pirates you know
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Else, I will keep being a media pirate.
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I think Banners argument (based on all of his posts) is that you can still buy the book on the amazon website but it's no longer part of amazon unlimited. Amazon unlimited drives a lot of awareness for smaller authors as people can risk their time on the book versus their time and their money. If they like the book, they can then purchase the books on Amazon.
It's a chicken and egg problem.
If you have never heard of this author, you wouldn't know to buy or pirate them.
Need more information (Score:2)
It sounds like Amazon discovered the book on some site that offered it up for free and so dropped it from Amazon's unlimited offering. It didn't drop it from the store, just from Amazon's all you can read offering.
How did Amazon discover it being offered? If Amazon has an exclusive right to sell, then why isn't Amazon sending out the takedown notice? Or suing the author for breach of contract if Amazon truly believe