You could apply the same logic to the pirate bay, they're just providing a place to browse torrent files but they're not hosting any of the infringing files the

You could apply the same logic to the pirate bay, they're just providing a place to browse torrent files but they're not hosting any of the infringing files themselves, just metadata about them. The issue with Amazon is not that their services can enable copyright violation (any copy machine can do that), but that even if they're notified of such violations, they don't act on them in a decisive way. I doubt anyone would really complain about book piracy if authors could say "hey this book is in print from so and so publisher, so don't allow third parties other than the publisher to sell it" and Amazon acted on it. Or if authors had a way to say "hey Amazon I'm the owner of this ISBN so other formats for this book need my approval to be listed."