I have received multiple reports (here, here,here) today that Amazon is now refusing to allow their Canadian customers to buy Kindle ebooks from Amazon.com.

Over the past couple days several of those readers have reported that many Kindle titles are showing up on Amazon.com as not being available to Canadian customers even though the same titles will show up on Amazon.ca as being available.

So far as I can tell, the only ebooks still available to Canadian Kindle owners are titles distributed via KDP, seriously limiting their ability to make use of their Kindles.

First, while Amazon claims that any purchased ebooks will be available* after a Canadian Kindle owner transfers their account that’s not completely true. The ebooks might be transferred, but I’m told that a customer’s purchase history is not transferred and the wish lists are also abandoned. That’s going to make it a lot harder for some readers to keep track of what they own and what they want to buy.

Oh, and that claim about the Kindle content transferring isn’t exactly true. Amazon.ca doesn’t yet support subscriptions, nor does it offer Kindle Serials. That means this Kindle content will be lost in the transfer process along with any back issues that had been saved. What’s more, Amazon.ca doesn’t offer music and video so transferring an account will prevent customers from accessing media they’ve already purchased.

After speaking to Amazon Kindle support they informed us that this change was not their doing. They said a change like this would have been made by the publisher only. One of the major publishers affected responded back to me saying, “It certainly wasn’t our intentional doing; although it may be a side-effect of our pricing model. I’ll investigate and see what I can do.”

Thank you for the information you provided regarding the following book(s):

A Long Time Ago: Growing Up With And Out Of Star Wars (2353856)

Your book(s) contains references to the trademarked term, “Star Wars (Trademarked Term)”. We have reviewed the information you provided and have determined that we will not be making the book(s) available for sale in the Kindle store at this time. While we cannot advise you on trademark laws, we encourage you to conduct your own research by possibly going to your local library or using other online resources that may be available to you.

Remember how Waterstones was going to sell the Kindle and take a sales commission on the hardware and any ebooks bought from that device? Apparently they decided that the subtle but positive relationship of simply making money off the Kindle wasn't good enough; now they've turned the Kindles they sell into billboards.

The Kindles sold by Waterstones got a firmware update in early November. This update wasn't rolled out to all the Kindles, and for good reason. According to a couple different users (this story has also been confirmed by Waterstones) the only change in the update was a new screensaver.

I have not yet seen it myself, but the Kindle owners are reporting that all the screensavers have been replaced by a Waterstones logo. Furthermore, there's no way to disable or replace that screensaver, so every time these Kindle owners pick up their device they will be reminded where they purchased it.

Thank you for your email regarding your Kindle Paperwhite from Waterstones.

I am sorry you are disappointed by the addition of a Waterstones screensaver after the recent software update to Kindle. It is our view that this screensaver does not constitute advertising and differs substantially to the advertising-supported Kindles available to the US market. The Waterstones screensaver is a non-dynamic, static image that will change infrequently and not advertise any specific product, offer or website.

It is not possible to remove the Waterstones screensaver to replace it with the former Amazon screensaver. We apologise that this change was made without consultation, and hope it does not detract from or alter your reading experience. However, if you feel it does, please let us know and we will arrange for the return of the device and a full refund.

I am sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

Yours sincerely,

**********
Customer Service Team
Waterstones.com

"There are substantial difficulties for us around working with our major competitor," Daunt said at the Independent Publishers Guild Digital Quarterly Meeting on Tuesday, according to The Bookseller. "But we think we have an agreement which protects some of the most significant bear traps that sit there, and there are some major upsides for us."

At yesterday's IPG event, Daunt revealed a few more details about Waterstones' Amazon partnership. "Waterstones-specific Kindle screensavers, bestseller lists and a Read For Free offer are among the plans," The Bookseller reports.

When her ebooks became unavailable, Linn Jordet Nygaard, the customer in question, contacted Amazon to find out what had happened. She received the following reply:

We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled.

Again, Jordet Nygaard not unreasonably sought to find out what the problem was so that she could try to address it. This time, she received an email that is not only willfully unhelpful, but positively insulting thanks to a cheesy veneer of bogus sympathy that has been added for good measure:

We regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.

We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs and will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.

If you didn't take the hint when Amazon erased a couple of Orwell's books back in 2009, maybe this latest case involving the alleged remote lockout from all ebooks will finally get across the key message here: those Kindle ebooks you thought you had purchased, are actually only rented to you, and can be denied to you without explanation, and without recompense, any time Amazon wants to. The only ebooks you will ever truly own are those stored in open formats without DRM, which therefore allow backups to be made, and used anywhere.

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"Most of my months are six-figure months," said Hugh Howey, a 37-year-old Florida author whose "Wool" series of digital books was highlighted by Amazon. "It's more than I ever hoped to make in a year."

The company says some authors, including Theresa Ragen, who appeared in a promotional video during the Amazon event, have sold hundreds of thousands of books.

"Fact is that authors no longer need a publisher," Bernard Starr wrote at The Huffington Post. "And more and more writers are awakening to the realization that if you are not a high-profile author who can command large sales, a traditional publisher will do little for you beyond editing and printing your book."

For Howey, author of the "Wool" series, the direct-publishing platform has opened up a life he never imagined was possible -- one where he is paid to write full-time.

Though Hocking and Konrath were some of the first names to get some serious attention with their impressive ebook sales, today there are lots of other examples. An anonymous submission points us to a blog dedicated to tracking self-published ebook success stories, which has put together a list of over 170 independent authors who have sold more than 50,000 ebooks, including 33 who have sold more than 200,000. Hocking and Konrath still make the top ten, but they have plenty of company:

Barbara Freethy - over 2 million ebooks sold (April 2012)
Amanda Hocking - 1,500,000 ebooks sold (December 2011)
John Locke- more than 1,100,000 eBooks sold in five months
Gemma Halliday - over 1 million self-published ebooks sold (March 2012)
Michael Prescott - more than 800,000 self-published ebooks sold (Dec 2011)
J.A. Konrath - more than 800,000 ebooks sold (April 2012)
Bella Andre - more than 700,000 books sold (May 2012)
Darcie Chan - 641,000 ebooks sold (May 2012)
Chris Culver - over 550,000 (Dec 2011)
Heather Killough-Walden - over 500,000 books sold (Dec 2011)

The post also points out some encouraging statistics from Amazon:

Kindle Direct Publishing has quickly taken on astonishing scale – more than a thousand KDP authors now each sell more than a thousand copies a month, some have already reached hundreds of thousands of sales, and two have already joined the Kindle Million Club.

Under the old system, many of these authors would likely still be sending out manuscripts, hoping for the lucky convergence of circumstances that puts it in the right pile in front of the right reader when they're in the right mood. There's still some disdain for self-publishing in some circles—but with the open playing field that has been created, the increasing number of authors flocking to it, and a growing roster of success stories, it won't be long before that too starts to change.

a.) Bite the bullet and start handing out refunds
b.) Start patching like hell and fire your current Customer Service team
c.) Drain all bank accounts and reorganize under the name Net Sortie, LLC.
d.) Whistle nonchalantly while sweeping bad reviews under the rug

Rakuten launched the Kobo Touch in Japan with the expectation that they would dominate their home market. They are native to the country, and Rakuten does have a sizable retail presence there. Given their technical and CS resources, you’d think they would have been able to pull this off.

Unfortunately, it now looks like Rakuten has paved the way for Amazon to dominate yet another ebook market.This launch is rapidly turning into a debacle and it’s going to damage Rakuten’s reputation. And according to some of the tweets I’ve seen (in Japanese) it already is.

It’s been just under a week since the Kobo Touch started shipping in Japan, and things are going so well that Rakuten has removed from their website all the reviews of the Kobo Touch.

No, seriously, all of the reviews are down – both good and bad. I suppose there were too many people writing things like “I’m going to buy a Kindle” and that upset someone at Rakuten.

Luckily one of Rakuten’s potential customers tipped me to the story, including giving me a link to a blog that had collected responses and a screenshot of the review page before Raskuten removed it. That’s why I can show you things like this:

If you can’t see the image above, it says that the Kobo Touch has a 3 star rating largely due to the vast number of 1 star reviews.

Update: My source found a Google Cache page of reviews. Thanks, Bibo!

Folks, they took the reviews down from the website so new customers wouldn’t be warned about the many problems. I want you to look past the fact they did it and think about how customers will feel once they discover the deception. That is what will make this a major debacle and not merely an embarrassment for Rakuten.

A bad launch could be recovered from. This is closer to being a systematic effort to lie to their customers. Okay, eventually people will forgive Rakuten, but in the short run this debacle could drive readers to Amazon.

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.

A major side effect, if not prime effect, of changing all of those ASIN’s, is the loss of their historical sales data. In other words, a customer going to the Kindle store and searching for Jane Austen would once have gotten back a list that started off with free editions of her most popular works, starting with Pride and Prejudice. This morning, the only free Austen book appearing in the first page of the search results is “Love and Friendship”, certainly not her most popular title, but there because it hasn’t been updated since 2006.

The music industry isn't the best at studying pricing (that's for sure), but there's evidence that price tags actually increase overall interest and demand for your music - whether that results in a paid transaction or not. Here's a comment from a seriously DIY artist in the trenches, Steady Fingers, who experienced something unexpected.

"But it's funny that even when I used to give away [my music] for free, there wasn't much traffic nor many downloads, almost nothing. Then we decided that we should put it up for sale so that we might be able to recoup some of the money spent on making the music videos (when it's your brother making the videos, I still consider it DIY.) Anyway, as soon as people saw that the music was up for sale, the website and other related social media gizmos received much more attention. Also, people began looking for ways to download it for free, which isn't always a bad sign."

Welcome to the strange world of 'perceived value,' a murky science that enables all sorts of obscene markups - whether at Starbucks, Gucci, or the Apple Store. But the basic idea is this: the simple presence of an elevated price tag - or a price tag at all - is often enough to convince someone that this product has worth.

There is actually some truth to this idea, but only under specific circumstances and with a whole lot of caveats. Perceived value is a real thing, and it can be pretty powerful—but there are significant limitations on how it can be applied to an infinite good like digital content. A good (non-musical) example is self-published Kindle novels: for an author just starting out, it's actually probably a good idea to charge $0.99 instead of making it free, because of the way Amazon separates the lists of free and paid books. Of course, as authors like Joe Konrath have discovered, books at $0.99 make a lot more money than books at $2.99—so the limitations of perceived value come into force quite quickly. In app stores, paid apps may once have held some clout over free ones—but now many of the top grossing apps are free and ad-supported, and the perceived value of a price tag to download has all but disappeared.

And it's disappearing everywhere, as the lines between professional and amateur get weaker all across the media spectrum. I buy a lot of $5 and $10 albums on Bandcamp, and I also download a lot more free ones—and I can't really remember which is which. For indie music, price is a poor indicator of quality. Besides, pretty much all music can be streamed first in a "try before you buy" fashion now, so any perceived value is quickly supplanted by an actual evaluation of the product. Just as with books in the Kindle store, there may be certain venues in which adding a price tag offers some advantage, but that can only go so far and it could always disappear in an instant.

Beyond that, and perhaps most importantly, there is nothing that says you can't charge for your music and also give it away for free. Or, at the very least, charge for it but accept (or better yet embrace) piracy. When payment becomes optional for fans and prospective fans, then they see it as an affirmative choice to support the artist, and many will make that choice. Dan Bull sold enough copies of his Sharing is Caring single to hit the pop charts, and a lot of the attention came not from the fact that he was charging money, but from the fact that he was also giving it away for free (as he does with all of his music). By offering an option to buy and an option to download for free, you get the best of both worlds: the power of perceived value in those few cases where it counts, and the attention of the growing number of people who don't view content that way anymore.

Compare this to the situation in books. Although it had some small-time forerunners, the Kindle, like the Rio MP3 player, brought portability to a mass market. But the Kindle launched with licenses rather than lawsuits from the key rights-holders in its domain, and offered more than 90% of the day's best sellers when it shipped.

This meant that consumers discovered digital books through a licensed experience that delighted them. Exciting hardware, a critical mass of titles and Amazon's retail sensibilities were all integrated into a single elegant package that piracy has never matched.

Of course, piracy emerged anyway. Countless unlicensed e-books can be found online, and millions of people use them. But sales figures suggest that relatively few of these downloads represent foregone purchases. Most Kindle, iPad and Nook owners seem to view piracy as a low-rent and time-consuming experience compared with the sanctioned alternatives. They probably wouldn't if the publishers had kicked things off with a five-year content boycott.

However, as subsidiaries of large media conglomerates, the executives who ran the big six had all been given their marching orders about the internet: DRM restrictions would be mandatory on all ebook sales, lest rampant piracy cannibalize their sales of paper books.

(This fear is of course an idiotic shibboleth—we've had studies since 2000 proving that Napster users back in the bad old days spent more money on CDs than their non-pirate peers. The real driver for piracy is the lack of convenient access to desirable content at a competitive price. But if your boss is a 70 year old billionaire who also owns a movie studio and listens to the MPAA, you don't get a vote. Speaking out against DRM was, as more than one editor told me over the past decade, potentially a career-limiting move.)

It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.

If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

I often blame Napster for the typical book publisher's fear of piracy. Publishers saw what happened in the music industry and figured the only way they'd make their book content available digitally was to tightly wrap it with DRM. The irony of this is that some of the most highly pirated books were never released as ebooks. Thanks to the magic of high-speed scanner technology, any print book can easily be converted to an ebook and distributed illegally.

Some publishers don't want to hear this, but the truth is that DRM can be hacked. It does not eliminate piracy. It not only fails as a piracy deterrent, but it also introduces restrictions that make ebooks less attractive than print books. We've all read a print book and passed it along to a friend. Good luck doing that with a DRM'd ebook! What publishers don't seem to understand is that DRM implies a lack of trust. All customers are considered thieves and must be treated accordingly.

The evil of DRM doesn't end there, though. Author Charlie Stross recently wrote a terrific blog post entitled "Cutting Their Own Throats." It's all about how publisher fear has enabled a big ebook player like Amazon to further reinforce its market position, often at the expense of publishers and authors. It's an unintended consequence of DRM that's impacting our entire industry.

As ebook sales mushroom, the Big Six's insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy, it has locked customers in Amazon's walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon's leverage over publishers. And unlike pirated copies (which don't automatically represent lost sales) Amazon is a direct revenue threat because Amazon are have no qualms about squeezing their suppliers — or trying to poach authors for their "direct" publishing channel by offering initially favourable terms. (Which will doubtless get a lot less favourable once the monopoly is secured ...)

If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position. But it's not clear that the folks in the boardrooms are agile enough to recognize the tar pit they've fallen into ...

• 6,956,562: Method for controlling a handheld computer by entering commands onto a displayed feature of the handheld computer (originally a PalmSource patent)
• 6,466,236: System and method for displaying and manipulating multiple calendars on a personal digital assistant (originally a Palm Inc. patent)
• 6,950,645: Power-conserving intuitive device discovery technique in a bluetooth environment (originally a PalmSource patent)
• 7,506,064: Handheld computer system that attempts to establish an alternative network link upon failing to establish a requested network link (another PalmSource patent).
• RE40,459: Method and apparatus for communicating information over low bandwidth communications networks (and, yet again, PalmSource)

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

But does it seem likely that Amazon will put that much emphasis on Silk just for the Fire? I don't think that's likely. Amazon has several jobs posted for Silk engineers, and while mobile is mentioned, it's not exclusive. I strongly suspect that Amazon is going to be releasing a Silk desktop browser eventually. Probably not in the near future – Amazon needs to make sure that its infrastructure can handle the onslaught of all the Kindle users before trying to scale to an unknown number of desktop users.

Each Kindle is tied to an Amazon ID, which gives Amazon a great deal of information about you already. Introducing Silk into the mix and Amazon is going to be in a position to know a great deal about your Web browsing habits along with your buying habits and media habits. Now Amazon is in a position to know what books you buy, what shows you watch, the Web sites you visit and much more.

One smart thing Silk does to speed up web browsing as seen by the user of the Kindle Fire by “pre-loading” content into Amazon’s “cache” in its own “Amazon computer cloud” (i.e. Amazon’s servers)–and to optimize them for the Kindle Fire (e.g., a 3MB image is scaled down maybe to 50k because that would look the same on the Kindle Fire as a 3MB image, but could be transmitted more quickly). But to do this Amazon’s servers have to store copies of files obtained from other websites, including images (as explicitly stated at 3:07 to 3:26) and other files which, of course, are covered by copyright. At 3:54, it’s explained that if Amazon’s computing cloud sees you looking at the New York Times home page, and it predicts, based on other user statistics, that you are somewhat likely to next click on some NY Times subpage link, then the Amazon servers will go ahead and download that next link, and cache it, in case you do click on it next, so that it can serve it up more quickly. Now this makes sense technically, but what it really means is Amazon’s servers are making copies of other people’s copyright-protected content: images, files, NYTimes web pages, and serving them up to Kindle Fire users as if the Amazon computer cloud servers are the host of those images. It is a bit like if Amazon ran a site called NYTimes2.com, and had its servers constantly copying content from NYtimes.com and duplicating it on NYTimes2.com, and serving up the content on NYTimes2.com (which was copied from NYTimes.com) to browsers.

Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon’s self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense.

Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book.

These ebooks are listed for sale – often at 99 cents – alongside more traditional books on Amazon’s website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want.

"Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable."

Whether Amazon anticipated users organising themselves into a lending club or not, we're not sure but it's likely to result in many lost sales. After all, most books can be comfortably read in 14 days. If all you need to do to get hold of Kindle books is to request a loan from a stranger online, how many will you actually bother to buy?

Whether library organizers anticipated users taking out books or not, we're not sure but it's likely to result in many lost sales. After all, most books can be comfortably read in 14 days. If all you need to do to get a hold of books is to go to the library and take one out, how many will actually bother to buy?

"Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable."

Due to a technical issue, for a short window of time three books were temporarily unavailable for re-download by customers who had previously purchased them. When this was brought to our attention, we fixed the problem and those books were once again made available for re-download. We apologize for the inconvenience.

"Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable."

So what happens if you ask how many "printed books" Amazon sold, instead of using the smaller number of "hardcover books"? Following the same ratio, Amazon would be selling approximately 334 paperbacks for every 100 hardcover books -- or a total of 434 printed books for every 180 ebooks. That would mean over 70% of the books Amazon sells are still printed books -- 180 out of 614 -- with ebooks accounting for just 29.3% of all the books that Amazon sells.

According to Amazon's own figures, no ebook has ever sold more than one million copies. (Though Stieg Larsson's three ebooks, added together, total one million in sales -- an average of just 333,333 per book.) PC World reports Stephenie Meyer is close to selling one million ebooks -- though she's sold over 100 million printed books.

A month ago I bought a kindle and was really excited to use it on vacation. I bought a few books and when I was done, I bought another. Then they froze my account, so I called in and logged a case.

Within 48 hours I got a call back, saying it was an error on their side and they'd unfreeze it for me, but I'd just need to re-order the book. I thought no problem, thanks for the help. So I bought the book a second time and it automatically freezes me out again. I call in and log another case, but get no phone call back as promised from an account specialist.