Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Nov 12, 2018 18:13:57 GMT
Posted on November 12, 201820 Comments
A situation blew up at Amazon over the weekend which has made most KDP ebooks unavailable to purchase for international readers who use the US Kindle Store — one which has also exposed a glaring security problem.
This issue — which is either a bug or a badly bungled roll-out — is causing great confusion as its effects are only visible to those outside the USA, which might explain why Amazon has been so slow to address it, or even understand the problem, it seems.
The first reports were from a few weeks ago, when Australian readers who use the US Kindle Store were unable to see a handful of new releases. It seems to have spread significantly since then. This weekend I noticed the issue myself for the first time. Buy buttons had disappeared from a couple of my ebooks and they were no longer appearing in Search results or on my Author Page. It was as if they had been ghosted. Readers around the world confirmed the same thing — except those in the USA, where all these books continue to be visible in search and purchasable by readers there.
Looking around the Kindle Store this weekend, it seemed like half of the KDP books I checked were unavailable for purchase to international readers, and similarly missing from search results (and, in some cases, author pages). They were undiscoverable by international readers, in other words, and even if those readers navigated to the pages of those Kindle editions directly, price tags were gone and Buy buttons had been removed.
The issue has proved difficult to explain to some of those in the USA, including Amazon apparently, as they literally can’t see what international readers are seeing. While these titles are all still available in the 11 other Kindle Stores around the world, some authors seem unaware that millions of readers worldwide routinely use the US Kindle Store, including all those readers without a Kindle Store of their own. (I know because I’m one of them.)
The problem is even more pronounced this morning, and a quick check of a random list of KDP books shows about 80% of those I looked at are now affected, as well as lots and lots of Amazon imprint books too. And despite numerous calls and emails to Amazon about the issue by myself and lots of other international authors and readers, there is no indication that Amazon grasps the problem.
And that’s not even the most disturbing part of all this, as it has revealed a giant security mess for Amazon that could have huge legal ramifications too.
Some screenshots should illustrate the problem for American authors and those otherwise unaware. This what readers in the USA see when they search for my book Strangers to Superfans.
You can see the screenshots on David's blog - davidgaughran.com/2018/11/12/amazon-kdp-books-unavailable-international-readers/
