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Amazon Seeks Court Confirmation of Arbitration Ruling, Inadvertently Shows Just How Badly-Run the Kindle Store Is

05.04.2018 No Comments

In September of last year Amazon filed for arbitration against several companies that were using various nefarious means to scam the Kindle Store.

Now Law360 brings us the news that Amazon has filed in US federal court to get an arbitration confirmed.

An Amazon subsidiary filed suit in Washington federal court Tuesday seeking to confirm an arbitration award against a British man and his book publishing companies stemming from claims that they abused a Kindle self-publishing program, breaching the e-commerce giant’s terms and harming writers and readers alike.

Amazon Digital Services LLC’s petition asks the court to enter judgment in line with a January award issued by the American Arbitration Association after the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary reached an agreement with Jake Dryan and his United Kingdom-based companies, Green Publishing Ltd. and Project Olympus Ltd., to resolve claims that they manipulated the Kindle Direct Publishing service.

The stipulated award that followed the confidential settlement barred Dryan and his companies from future violations of Amazon’s and the Kindle program’s terms and conditions, including publishing works that are essentially duplicates of other books already available for download and using bots or other tools to artificially increase page views, according to court filings.

“Respondents have not sought to vacate, modify, or challenge the award,” Amazon noted, saying it should thus be confirmed under the Federal Arbitration Act.

Amazon says that the defendants:

  • created at least six Amazon publisher accounts, at least one of which engaged linkbaiting,
  • published duplicate content – at one point in 2017, all five of their books on the bestseller list contained content that had been previously included in other works published through the KDP, and
  • used bots or other tools to artificially increase page views in Kindle Unlimited.

Tuesday’s filing notes that Amazon already reached an agreement resolving its claims against this particular group of scammers. Now, Amazon seeks confirmation of the award under the FAA and an order enjoining Dryan and his companies from future violations of Amazon’s rules and policies.

The thing that gets me about this case is that it shows just how badly Amazon is screwing up Kindle Store operations.

As anyone who follows this topic can tell you, scammers are a serious problem in the Kindle Store. David Gaughran has repeatedly shown on Twitter that at any given time the top several spots in the Kindle Store best-seller list have been stolen by scammers like Jake Dryan.

This fellow was such a prolific scammer that Amazon actually filed for arbitration. That is a huge deal considering that we also know that Amazon takes action against authors when it finds sales and borrow irregularities for a single title, often times even punishing innocent authors.

To put it another way, at the same time that Amazon missed this scammer until he grew into a huge problem, it was also punishing innocents. As David explains, this points to not just an algorithm allowed to run amok in the Kindle Store, but also one that doesn’t work very well.

And it gets worse.

This wasn’t even one of the big scammers that David has been watching.

Amazon has huge problems that they are not addressing while at the same time they are letting a bot swat innocent authors.

That is not a business so much as it is a shit show, and it’s a wonder that Amazon’s competitors haven’t taken advantage of the situation.

image by quinn.anya

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