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Amazon Has Misplaced Thousands of Free Public Domain eBooks – Bwahaha

try finding something in there

If you’ve been in the habit of sharing links to public domain ebooks in the Kindle Store, you might want to double check your links. According to Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, Amazon has relisted tens of thousands of pd ebooks over the past few weeks:

Let’s start with how I destroyed my eyesight last week, spending approximately 50 hours cut-and-pasting ASIN’s (unique Amazon product identifiers) in the course of four days to update the linked lists of free classics I sell through Amazon for 99 cents. The reason I temporarily unpublished my lists and updated over 3,000 entries is simple. Last weekend Amazon removed the vast majority of free classics that they published (adopted from Project Gutenberg) prior to 2011, after replacing them with the same books using new ASIN’s, meaning new product pages. In doing so, Amazon orphaned millions of links from the web, which now arrive at a “Can’t find what you’re looking for” page, not to mentions tens of thousands of customer created Listmania lists, So You’d Like To guides and Customer Discussions. They are orphaned because Amazon does not redirect, or forward the ASIN’s of eBooks removed from their catalog.

As this gets around, Amazon’s detractor’s are going to imply that Amazon relisted the pd ebooks on purpose. For reasons that aren’t clear (other than to sell more paid ebooks), he thinks that Amazon deliberately changed the ASIN (product codes) for all these ebooks.  I’m not so sure Amazon intentionally relisted the pd  ebooks because frankly I don’t see a motivation.

Moving the ebooks broke the incoming links, and that’s the part that makes little sense.  I remember when Amazon added the first large chunk of pd ebooks. It was in late 2008, I believe, and the ebooks were simply copied over from Mobipocket.com. At the time it was clear that Amazon was offering these ebooks as loss leaders. Sure, it cost Amazon a small amount to host them but it also tied the owners into the Kindle system and gave them a reason to come back.

Morris points out that any external link to one of the pd ebooks is also broken thanks to the relisting. This in particular is why I think it makes little sense for Amazon to have done this deliberately. Each of those links was an opportunity for someone to come get a Kindle ebook and be tied into the Kindle system. It makes little sense for Amazon to give up that aspect of the loss leader ebooks, especially considering the ebooks are still there.

And how many sales would you expect this generate? Again, I have to agree with Morris in that I don’t see that the financial gain outweighs the frustration felt by Amazon’s customers.

Furthermore, when it comes to nefarious misdeeds, Amazon doesn’t screw around. Do you recall the lawsuit that case maker M-Edge filed against Amazon in December? Or perhaps the time Amazon blackmailed POD publishers might ring a bell? Neither of those misdeeds were half measures, and that shows that Amazon can be quite meticulous and thorough if and when they want to be evil.

My point about Amazon being meticulous is that had they relisted the ebooks on purpose, they would have done something about the broken links. That is why I think it’s much more likely that this was a screw-up on someone’s part.  I just don’t think the potential financial gain is high enough for this to be worth the aggravation.

via Foner Books

image by pietrozuco

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Comments


Tom Semple July 26, 2012 um 2:04 am

I think this will be a good thing in the end. Searching for PD books on Amazon was horrible and frustrating as there were too many for each title to choose from, many if not most with atrocious formatting. For some time my way of dealing with this has been to just go and get them from Gutenburg directly (or FeedBooks etc.). Some curation was absolutely necessary IMO.

I believe they consolidate the reviews from the discontinued ASINs into the new one. That has its own set of problems, but the reviews are not gone.

I don’t understand what you mean by 'financial gain' associated with this move. The free titles have low sales rankings now but will eventually bubble up as before. Searches can be sorted from Low to High very easily, and there are tools like ereaderiq.com as well.


Stumbling Over Chaos :: Linkity at your service July 27, 2012 um 3:08 am

[…] Amazon has relisted free public domain ebooks, which breaks external links. […]


George September 13, 2012 um 4:27 am

You ask people to pay for FREE ebooks ? :-s


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