In which Amazon.com is an idiot

[rolanni]

Waiting in my inbox today is an accusatory note from Amazon.com, stating that "content" in one of Pinbeam Books eChapbooks, to wit: SKYBLAZE has been found in another publication not published by Pinbeam Books.  Amazon.com leaps immediately to the conclusion that we have stolen this "content," and has taken the book off-sale until we prove that we have the right to publish our own damn' story.

So, yo!  Amazon.com!  Listening?

Good.

* * *

Dear Amazon.com.

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (that's me and my husband co-author) wrote a novella called SKYBLAZE and self-published it, first as a paper chapbook: Adventures in the Liaden Universe(R) Number 17, and then as an
electronic chapbook. We are the authors; we own the rights.

Because we are the authors and own the rights, we are able to resell the right to publish to other publishers. This is called "reprint rights." So it is with SKYBLAZE; Mr. Lapine asked us if he could buy the right to reprint the novella SKYBLAZE in his anthology, FANTASTIC STORIES OF THE IMAGINATION and we obliged him.

So! This is why the "content" is in two separate publications. If we're lucky, we may resell the rights to that story -- or any other of our stories -- and you'll find the "content" in other publications.

Honestly, guys, if you're going to run a publishing business, you ought to know this stuff. And thanks for taking one of our most popular books off-sale at Christmas-time.

Sharon Lee

* * *

Now, of course, the real challenge is going to come in July, when a Whole Lot of that "content" will appear in A Liaden Universe® Constellation Volume One.  I can hear the little Amazonian robot brains grinding their gearing now.

Well. 

I'm off to resubmit our eChapbook to the Kindle store.  In the meantime, if you were wishing to purchase SKYBLAZE in Kindle format, please consider purchasing it from Smashwords, as it is not currently available for sale from Amazon.

Comments

RE: In which amazon.com is an idiot

[disassembly_rsn]

I'd've thought the fact that you appear as authors/contributors on FANTASTIC STORIES OF THE IMAGINATION might be a bit of a clue...

Possibly somebody needs to fine-tune an automatic check to actually look at overlapping / subset authors instead of just exact matches. Or possibly just wake up a human brain before sending out letters...

[lagilman]

*facepalms into infinity*

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Maybe Amazon still believes that old sexist crap of Dumb=Cute.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

To be fair, there's been a problem with Amazon.com and plagiarism -- especially of anything that was released under a restrictive Creative Commons license being picked up and re-pubbed without permission, but I'm sure there are other cases. It's good to see AMZN actually trying to, y'know, reduce piracy. Now if only they'd debug the implementation details ...

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Have you seen haikujaguar's post about a similar problem with, iirc, Amazon? Her SPOTS THE SPACE MARINE was taken off because someone else had trademarked 'space marine' -- for uses other than fiction. And in spite of the term being used by Heinlein and someone else, decades previous.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

they just did the same to Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and she was the copyright holder to the previous form too.

What is it with those twits at Amazon?

Skyblaze

[rnjtolch.livejournal.com]

Skyblaze is back on the Amazon book place, both Kindle and pamphlet versions. You win!

[the wol (from livejournal.com)]

In defense of Amazon, they had several incidents a couple of months ago where ripoff scam artists scanned paper books and converted them to ebooks (of terrible quality), put their own names on them as authors and offered them for sale for next to nothing on websites they had set up. Some of them even conned their way onto selling "their" works through Amazon. Steven Brust and C.J. Cherryh were among those whose books they scammed and tried to pass off as their own. Some fans tipped off Steve and C.J. who notified their publishers who raised a stink with both Amazon and the server managers of the scam website and these scurrilous websites got shut down. In typical corporate fashion, Amazon is now overreacting.

[estara.livejournal.com]

Another one for "this is why it is not good to have only one big ebook seller that everyone buys from". I'm so glad I stuck with Sony and .epub from the start. Wherever an author puts their book up, I can buy it (apart from regional limitations of course, which is a whole other kettle of fish altogether).

[ebartley.livejournal.com]

Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) will convert anything(*) without DRM to anything else without DRM. You can even convert from a given format back to the same format and change some default formatting options (e.g. how paragraphs appear) in the process. (Calibre is a law-abiding program and does not break DRM, but it allows unlimited add-ons, and add-ons breaking DRM exist for it.)

(*) PDFs are appearance-based markup instead of logic-based markup like everything else. There's a hierarchy of how well it interprets various format, but basically it goes everything else > HTML > plain text > PDF.

reply to the suspicious comment by ebartley, which I don't think is so suspicious

[estara.livejournal.com]

Yes, Calibre allows you all kinds of stuff - I regularly buy Kindle ebooks - if the owner of the file allows me - at Amazon.com and convert them to .epub (after having taken off the DRM if there is one), but this case of what happened to the authors is dependent of almost everyone buying from Amazon (I get the feeling a lot of casual readers don't know there are ebooks beyond Amazon and Apple), so there are true sales lost even if the book is available at Smashwords.