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Amazon removes books from Kindle Unlimited after they appear on pirate sites
- ilamont 4y agoThis is so dumb on Amazon's part. It just creates further ill will with self-published authors and increases their own support headache. If Amazon is truly worried about exclusivity violations, the KDP Select program should focus its policing efforts on legitimate platforms (Apple Books, Google Play Books, Smashwords, Wattpad, etc.) where the vast majority of readers who don't use a Kindle may be expected to seek out ebooks. There should also be some mechanism for screening out excerpts that might appear on blogs, PR channels, and the like. FWIW, there are new authors who run afoul of the exclusivity terms because they don't understand what this means or why Amazon wants exclusivity. This in turn follows from the fact that self-published authors are often tricked into signing up with KDP Select, following the dark patterns scattered throughout the KDP UI and not understanding how the program works, or even that they will lose control over pricing and ebook distribution rights.
- ChickenNugger 4y agoThis the reason why I didn't sign up for KDP Select for the books I self published. You're effectively giving your copyright to Amazon. Since I didn't I can still give free copies to anyone I want, because I'm the copyright owner.
- withinrafael 4y agoI'm not seeing anything in the agreement [1] that participating in KDP Select requires a copyright transfer. Am I missing something? [1] https://kdp.amazon.com/terms-and-conditions https://kdp.amazon.com/terms-and-conditions
- soneil 4y agoThe difference between "effectively" and "literally". You're effectively giving Amazon your copyright because the contract gives Amazon control of who can make copies (and removes that control from the author).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nirvgorilla 4y ago[dead]
- code_duck 4y agoWe can comment about it here?
- markdown 4y agoMe too. How else am I to know how I'm supposed to react to the news?
- nirvgorilla 4y ago[dead]
- jehb 4y agoI think this is a classic case of one person's bug being another person's feature.
- brewdad 4y agoPlease link us to your manifesto. They way you are ranting on about the most inane "fault", I'm sure you have one.
- nirvgorilla 4y ago[dead]
- maxbond 4y agoI'd rather news organizations focus on their core competencies. When you allow comments, you're now in the business of spam filtering and social media moderation - neither of which are easy. Better to allow discussion boards to host discussions and news organizations and blogs to host articles.
- 4y ago
- kayodelycaon 4y agoAmazon doesn’t care. There will always be another author. It won’t cause any difference in how many kindles and books they sell.
- franze 4y agoTo any Amazon employee at HN. My book is on Amazon [1], I at one point needed to click on "KDP Select" for some extra exposure. And here it is free for H N. [2] feel free to kick me of your monopolistic website. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-SEO-Systematic-Approach-Optimization-ebook/dp/B07L3BSQHG/ https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-SEO-Systematic-Approach... [2] https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news
- SkinTaco 4y agoOK, I've removed your book from the store. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
- InCityDreams 4y agoIt's such a shame, but i refuse to give my cc info out without the "better be worth it" clause, as the undersignee (pin number giverer).
- LoganDark 4y agoGumroad didn't ask me for any credit card since thd discount is 100% off. Just email and boom.
- joshxyz 4y ago
- boh 4y agoHonestly, is it really possible to secure copyright for digital books? It's been ~16 years since the introduction of the Kindle and pirated books are just more plentiful. Publishing exclusively on paper seems to be the only real solution (and even that will likely be only temporary while pirates manually copy the text).
- CydeWeys 4y agoBooks get pirated via OCR all the time. It's barely even a road bump.
- HideousKojima 4y agoAlso any moderate to large library will have book scanners, and even some smaller ones
- fsckboy 4y agoare you talking about photocopy machines, or something fancier like "to your SD card" or something really fancy like "turns the pages for you"?
- renewiltord 4y agoNo, you turn the pages, but you don't have to unbind the book or press the face down to get a good scan. Just place the book facing up and turn the page and it will perspective correct and scan for you. Something like this is what I've used before https://thecrowleycompany.com/digitization-products/large-format-book-scanners/a3-overhead-scanners/zeta-book-scanner/ https://thecrowleycompany.com/digitization-products/large-fo...
- CydeWeys 4y agoAnd it's worth pointing out that this process doesn't take that long. A few seconds per page, plus you're photographing two pages at once so you're only turning N/2 pages, or ~170 times for your average length novel. You can definitely plow through multiple books in an hour this way.
- ipaddr 4y agoSo to get a book removed upload it to the piratebay? I figured most book worthy if they are worthy to someone will showup on pirate sites. Didn't realize it could be weaponized
- llanowarelves 4y agoGreat idea. Can remove competing authors/publishers in the same niche as you.
- vorpalhex 4y agoNext ransomeware scheme.
- consumer451 4y agoYeah, but there is no "decrypt on payout" function in this scenario.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- midoridensha 4y agoOr just authors you don't like for some reason.
- cableshaft 4y agoTons of authors are worried about this right now (including my wife, who self-publishes on Kindle Unlimited). There's stories of major authors being taken down every few days because copies are being found on pirate sites, which they can't control. I want to say there was 4 authors my wife heard about that had their works taken down suddenly from Kindle Unlimited just last week because of this. There's some software out there that's like $7/month per book I think, that's supposed to help find and help issue Cease and Desists for this stuff, that my wife is seriously considering getting to at least point to in case hers gets taken down to show she tried to do something about it. Problem is, for each book she releases, that's an extra $7 a month she's paying. Feels like mafia extortion money almost. There's even been some anger lately because of pirated books that keep getting uploaded on Scribd, who now have an ebook subscription service, so Scribd is making subscription money off of pirated ebooks. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of, that Amazon punishes authors for this. If they carried process over to tv, movies, music, etc, they'd have to take down their entire catalog because all of that has pirated copies out there somewhere.
- flatiron 4y agoProbably easier to pirate her competition and upload them to piratebay
- cableshaft 4y agoShe doesn't have to (not that she ever would). The article states that it's already being done automatically in many cases, from Amazon-provided files.
- ilamont 4y agoI'm a publisher for >10 years. At first I used the policing services, but I stopped worrying about torrent sites and other low-grade pirates when it was clear that A) most readers don't use them B) site operators are located overseas and don't give a FF about U.S. C&Ds and C) I have better things to do with my time. As for pirates on Amazon itself, or other major marketplaces: That's a different story. I have a registered trademark on Amazon Brand Registry and do use it to find bogus copies and copyright violations (usually in the marketing copy or cover images) to get them removed, with about 60 or 70% success.
- crazygringo 4y agoIs there any kind of potential law that can be used against this? There are limits to what contracts are allowed to legally do. And the idea that a contract can be broken, to the detriment of one side, due to the actions of a third party that neither has control over, and that the contract isn't primarily about, seems highly suspect. Obviously there are some legitimate reasons for contracts around third-party actions -- betting, derivatives, insurance policies, and so on. Which are either for entertainment or risk mitigation. But what Amazon is doing here simply feels abusive. However I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if there's a legal term for this type of "abuse" in contract law.
- twblalock 4y agoI suspect the terms of service for the Kindle lets Amazon do this. It's been clear for a long time now that if you use a Kindle you don't "own" the content you read on it. Very, very clear. Ironically I think it all started when an Orwell book was taken down. It's hard to feel sorry for Kindle buyers when this stuff has been known for a long time.
- zaphod12 4y agoYeah it was 1984. Which was almost too much and i don't know nobody internally balked at it simply to refuse being that deeply ironic. Or they thought it was hilarious, which I suppose is a possibility.
- twblalock 4y agoPretty dumb stuff happens at big companies all the time, although this is a rare case of it being both public and hilarious. This whole book takedown thing is another dumb move that probably happened because someone thought it was a good idea to zealously enforce an exclusivity contract without realizing what would happen -- especially not realizing the possibility that third parties might put books on torrent sites in order to hurt the authors and get their books removed from Kindles. When big companies do dumb things, people have a tendency to vastly overestimate the amount of thought and intention that went into it. This was probably a dumbass move by some mid-level person who thought they were helping.
- kup0 4y agoSo their reaction to pirated books is to... remove books from their most-competitive-with-piracy service? Does nothing to help prevent piracy and only hurts authors and paying users. Piracy will never end and the only way for businesses to meaningfully reduce it (to an extent) is to provide a compelling option that competes with it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nicce 4y agoNetflix is a great example. Price was fine and watching streams was so easy that people forgot torrents. Now, that they increase prices, include ads and prevent password sharing, people remember torrents again.
- sammyq 4y agoAnother example is Spotify and Apple Music. Not too sure on the stats but I’d imagine there’s been a significant more decrease in music piracy compared to movies and tv shows.
- warkdarrior 4y agoNetflix's goal is to maximize profit (number of paying customers x price/customer), not to eliminate piracy.
- Aaron2222 4y ago
- arijun 4y agoI can sort of see where Amazon is coming from—-they have limited space for hyping up books, and if they spend that on books that are not truly exclusive, that adds less perceived value for the user (“Why am I paying for KU when I can find all the cool books on there somewhere else free”). However, I can’t believe that’s the right move. I could probably pirate everything on Netflix pretty easily, but I pay for the convenience. If my favorite authors newest book was not on KU just because it was uploaded to another site I wouldn’t be happy.
- maxwell 4y agoNone of the streaming services appear to be standalone profitable, seemingly the only way to turn a profit is via anticompetitive tying of services/software/hardware. Or maybe more ads. The standalone services have already started making big cuts to their own original content, with HBO Max removing Westworld and Netflix planning to remove Arrested Development, as (profitable) physical media returns: most CDs sold since 2004 in 2022, DVDs returned to overtake Blu-ray, new cassette music releases, etc.
- MiddleEndian 4y agoI have to say, my favorite use-case for Netflix was the DVD plan. I had a queue that was over 300 movies long. By the time something showed up in the mail, I didn't know what it was. I'd just put it in and watch it blind, a gift from my past self. Then I briefly lived somewhere with unreliable mail, and they decided to close my account on a whim. My queue was lost. Honestly wouldn't mind something like that again, although maybe they could just send me little thumb drives or something, because I don't have any optical drives anymore.
- pessimizer 4y agoThis is obviously Amazon putting intentional pressure on powerless authors (they wouldn't dare with a title from one of the multinationals) to go after book piracy with a bunch of individual lawsuits that Amazon will be happy to help the authors with and to finance. Typically cynical behavior.
- Severian 4y agoWhat, no. They won't finance shit. They are trying to reduce legal exposure with the minimum resources they have to use.
- _23sd 4y agoSmells like gig economy. Because you're an "self-published" author you get to do all the stuff a normal publisher used to help you with arranging, like anti-piracy. But if you don't do it to their standards, you get unceremoniously fired (sorry, "removed from the platform"). Can you feel the independence yet?
- skybrian 4y ago> The company stresses that, if books are removed from Kindle Unlimited, they remain for sale on Amazon’s regular store. Kindle Unlimited pays authors out of subscription fees, based on pages read. There's a price per page read. [1] A pretty obvious fraud would be to get paid for reading (or at least skimming) by taking books you found elsewhere, uploading them, and reading them (probably with a different account). It's not easy for an automatic system to tell whether an author wrote a book themselves. This runs up the number of pages read and lowers the price per page, effectively taking money from other authors. So, this seems to fall under "business models that aren't very seller-friendly because fraud." Amazon, like most businesses, does tolerate some amount of fraud, but I guess there are limits? When people pay for specific books then it might be used as a money-laundering scheme, but at least it's not taking money away from other authors. [1] https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130 https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoI assume this isn't a deliberate strategy and is instead a result of an automated system with almost no human supervision. If it just crawls the web looking for PDFs, it won't be able to distinguish between legitimate and pirate copies. This kind of unsupervised automation is typical of Amazon and other tech companies.
- neilv 4y agoA Web site profiting from thievery, writing articles about effects of that thievery? Will this backfire? A typical pro-piracy talking point is "these big companies are evil, so you should feel justified taking their product without paying them money", but some of these stories have other explanations. Especially when it comes to smaller victims, like independent writers and smaller businesses, who typically are already abused by bigger companies, the "pirates" (glamourizing term) can be seen as further abusing from a different direction. And (in cases of DRM and invasive legislation, etc.) the pirates help justify and enable further abuses from the big companies.
- from 4y agoI don't think Torrentfreak has as much malicious intent as you think but I would agree overall. I love libgen and I would not be able to read as much as I do without it but no one seems to ask how Libgen got its library to begin with. Yes a lot of it is Onedrive and Proquest rips which maybe you can convince yourself is ethical but a lot of the books on there especially the independent more technical ones are bought with a stolen credit card which screws the author over twice: once for the loss of sales and again with the chargeback fee. "They can afford it" is the new hip justification for theft but I don't find it persuasive because it would justify theft from almost anyone in a decently developed country. Though I would never pay for scientific journals so maybe I'm a hypocrite.
- kneebonian 4y agoIt isn't directly related, but a few years back my family purchased "Ready Race Rescue, Paw Patrol" on one of the major media platforms. This last week we wanted to watch it with our kids, or rather we wanted them to watch it so we could have 20 minutes of quiet. I went to turn it on and found out that it had been removed, but I could get access to it by purchasing a subscription to "Universal Unlimited" or something like that. That sent me over the edge, I had purchased and paid to be able to view this and it had been taken from me. Something inside of me snapped and so now my house sails under the flag of the jolly roger, because it's the only way to really own something anymore. So yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, me hearties.
- jalapenos 4y agoRelevant KDP Select terms clauses: "1. Exclusivity. ...you give us the exclusive right to sell and distribute your Digital Book in digital format while your book is in KDP Select. During this period of exclusivity, you cannot sell or distribute, or give anyone else the right to sell or distribute, your Digital Book..." That's not a warranty that no 3rd party will distribute it contrary to your rights, however, so there's no breach if someone else distributes without your permission. However, it doesn't matter since: "3. Period of Participation... We can end KDP Select at any time at our discretion..."
- causality0 4y agoThis type of behavior is psychotic and it's costing us great works. For example, the Salvation War series, military fiction novels involving war against first hell and then heaven, were put on hold after the publisher dropped the author's contract following shitty PDF versions of the novels leaking on a pirate site. Years later the issue was finally resolved, just in time for the author to get killed by COVID shortly after starting the third and final novel.
- jamiek88 4y agoOh my god, that’s what happened?! I knew it disappeared, i didn’t know the back story of why. How infuriating.
- kderbyma 4y agoAmazon sucks as a platform. it's my absolute last ditch effort....and only if all other means seem impossible. This has happened three times in 5 years....Amazon is not necessary and in all three cases....I felt dirty using them.. AWS is also crappy and has hidden costs everywhere with an aweful reporting experience and no simple cancellation process. just scum
- gnicholas 4y agoThe Kindle Cloud Reader used to display book text in the DOM. This was very helpful for people with disabilities who use browser plugins (like mine [1]) to get accessible access to their Kindle books. A couple years ago, Amazon "upgraded" their Kindle Cloud Reader so that it now displays images of text, instead of the text itself. This is of course a huge step backward in terms of accessibility, and we heard from joint users who were upset to no longer be able to access their Kindle books in ways that were easy for them to read. For some people with disabilities, this move essentially 'bricked' their Kindle library. My guess is that they did this for anti-piracy reasons. But how effective can this be? It's not like people can't use OCR to capture text from the new image-based platform. Hell, you can even point your iPhone at a computer screen and capture all the text. And once one person has pirated a book, it's game over. I don't understand how they think they'll 'win' this game of cat-and-mouse. Are they just doing this stuff to appease publishers? Are they willing to sacrifice accessibility for this Sisyphean attempt to quash digital piracy? I understand both sides of the argument from a theoretical perspective, but I don't get how this is supposed to work on a practical level. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifjafammaookpiajfbedmacfldaiamgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...
- apigalore 4y agoDefinitely publisher asked them to do this.
- sterlind 4y agoyou'd think Amazon would have to at least pay lip service to accessibility, at the scale of that company. it's infuriating that they don't seem to care.
- RedShift1 4y agoThere's no money in accessibility. Drop accessibility, lose 1% users. Drop publisher x, lose 10% users. Easy decision.
- joe_the_user 4y agoThere are a number of books I'd be interested in buying paper copies of but which I wouldn't buy on Kindle because I never want to have the "you don't own the device or it's content" relationship with anything.
- sbaiddn 4y agoI'm confused. Amazon has no problem selling fake goods. Ive received fake batteries, fake baby shampoo, etc. Amazon has no problem selling pirated books. But if pirated books are available outside of Amazon, Amazon stops selling the original?
- midoridensha 4y agoExactly: Amazon wants a monopoly on counterfeit goods.
- asicsp 4y agoI've been using KU as a reader for the past four years, about 5 books on average per month (mostly lighthearted fantasy). First became aware of this issue on the fantasy sub last month (https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/106ebm3/sometimes_you_have_to_go_backward_to_go_forward_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/106ebm3/sometimes_...) - read the first book of that series, liked enough that I would've read the sequels on KU but not so much that I'd pay for it (2nd book costs more than 2.5 times the KU monthly subscription cost where I live). Saw a few more such cases on twitter after too. Just can't understand Amazon's stance here.
- HomeDeLaPot 4y agoIt feels like the world is splitting in two... On one side is a world where anyone can download any book for free. On the other side is a world where all books, textbooks, and journals are available exclusively from Amazon/Pearson/Elsevier and can only be read with a crappy official app (or device) and an active Internet connection. Either way, I suppose the big losers are authors.
- mnemotronic 4y agoCreate unique copies of ebooks for sale on Amazon only. If these show up on the pirate sites then accuse Amazon of providing copyrighted material to pirate sites.