by Jay Hartman
Imagine you’ve spent years building an impressive hardcover and paperback collection. You’ve got a library in your home full of bookshelves of all your favorite authors. You’ve supported your local bookstores and bought books online.
One day, you come home to find every single book in your collection is gone. Shelves are empty, nothing left in the library except the faint smell of spine glue and dust. You find a card on the shelf from the local bookstore saying to contact them with any questions. When you call to ask what’s going on, they explain you never actually owned the books, you were only being given permission to use them under license from the bookstore.
Sounds like a ridiculous idea, doesn’t it? Except, in February of 2025, that’s exactly what Amazon rolled out to Kindle users.
Amazon notified all customers they turned off the ability to download purchased titles to the buyer’s computer. The only access would be through Kindle apps and devices. They went even further by changing the wording on Kindle pages to specifically tell potential buyers they are not purchasing a book but merely license to use it.
Let’s be clear.
This means Amazon is no longer a bookstore. If you only have access to titles by licensing the material, it makes them a library. You do not own the titles you’ve purchased.
Also in February, Amazon felt my publishing house had “misrepresented” one of our new releases to potential buyers (sorry…licensors). They couldn’t tell me what the issue was, but said it was one of the following: a) the title was too similar to another title or b) the author’s name was too similar to another author’s or c) the cover was too similar to another cover or d) there was content inside that “misrepresented” the publisher of the book.
The title in question was Wolf Whistle by Marilyn Todd. In January of 2023, all rights reverted to Marilyn from her previous publisher and she had the letter to prove it. She signed a contract with us. The title and author were similar to another publication because…it literally was a republish of the same title. The cover looked similar to other covers, for sure…the other covers in the series, because we’re trying to show a cohesive series through similar covers.
Amazon said in an email they take these things seriously. Mind you, the number of pirated titles available for sale on Amazon right now is the highest it’s ever been. The original authors have struggled to prove they own the rights to their own books. We submitted a copy of the reversion letter and Marilyn’s contract.
Amazon suspended our entire account while they reviewed the paperwork. That’s right, not just the title they were concerned about, but every single title in our catalog. For a week, none of our titles were available for sale on Amazon’s platform, not in ebook or print. And, because people don’t own their purchases on Amazon, the shutdown caused readers to lose access to the titles they had purchased if they hadn’t already downloaded the file to their device. Fortunately, we don’t put all of our eggs in one basket and had our titles available from every bookstore in the world. After a week, Amazon restored all our titles to sell.
If you think this can’t happen to you, it most certainly can. Now that Amazon doesn’t allow you to download your “purchased” titles, you and your readers can lose access to your titles at any time. You can do nothing about it because, by using Amazon and its Kindle products, you agreed to their terms. I’ve warned authors and publishers for several years now that the new CEO of Amazon does not want to be in the ebook business and that only the hardware makes them any money. $0.99 full-length novels are a losing proposition. By going to strict licensing agreements with their users, they’re now free to shutdown the Kindle service at any time and they’re under no obligation to compensate anyone in any way for anything they previously purchased.
So, what’s the solution? There are a few:
- Diversify your distribution so your titles are available through as many vendors as possible.
- When possible sell ebooks directly from your own website or direct people to your publisher’s website. It’s better royalties for you and it ensures your reader gets to keep the actual files.
- If you’re not selling directly to your reader, send them to ebook vendors who do allow the reader to download the physical file to their computer. This includes retailers such as DriveThruFiction.com, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Google Play Books.
- Educate your reader. If you direct them to Amazon, do not say “buy my book from Amazon.” That’s false information. Your wording needs to be “you can license my book from Amazon, but you don’t actually own it.”
Let me reiterate, if you tell readers to buy your book from Amazon, you are misleading them. There is no longer a way for a reader to buy an ebook from Amazon. They own nothing. They can only obtain a license to read it, which is no different than using their public library to check out a copy. And, yes…you do have an obligation to present the situation correctly to your reader because it’s your brand and your title you want them to pick up.
Join the discussion! Send your questions to jhartman@mistimedia.com with TPG in your subject line.
WPN Vice President Jay A. Hartman has worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. For 13 years he served as the creator and editor-in-chief of Untreed Reads Publishing before the company was acquired in 2022. In 2023 he created Misti Media, a company dedicated to book publishing and author education.
