[Indio777]

I quite liked the first part of your post. It brought up some points I did not know and made me think again about some of the other issues you raised.

Originally Posted by ATDrake

I have few qualms with authors choosing to KDP Select their new e-book releases as an Amazon exclusive. It's their prerogative if they want to see if they get better sales that way.

But I really don't like it when authors yank existing releases from other stores to go with the KDP experiment. It's still their prerogative and perhaps they only have a tiny pittance of sales from those outlets compared to Amazon, but if they have any at all, they're doing a distinct disservice to their readers in those other stores, who may not be able to pick up the rest of a series they've grown to enjoy if their reader happens not to be a Kindle or even if it is, be charged a premium for each title if they happen to live in certain regions of the world.

I wasn't aware that some authors were pulling all their releases from other stores. I can understand why they might initially try KDP select, but I agree, they are locking out readers who don't have a Kindle reader. Of course there are currently workarounds using K4PC, although evidently not if one runs Linux (as far as I can tell). That is, if one is aware of the workarounds and has the desire/skills to do so.

As far as pricing based on region, has Amazon offered any logical reason for doing this?

I don't consider it a good thing when a book that used to be available worldwide at the same point-of-purchase pricing to all in multiple formats that could be openly loaded or converted onto the reader of one's choice goes to only becoming available to a relatively select few at differential pricing in a proprietary closed format that may well also be DRM-restricted, with no longer any way to tell for sure until after purchase.

I agree.

And I think it's going to backfire on authors in terms of useful exposure. A book I could once point people at and say "you might like to read this, and it's readily available to you in your obscure locale and can be easily put on your niche gadget" is now not only missing the two latter parts of something that might be an added-value attraction, but now I'd also have to hedge a potential recommendation with "you might pay $2 extra for it if you're overseas and here's a pointer to a tutorial on learning how to strip DRM and convert, the former of which may be considered illegal where you live and the latter of which may be beyond your limited tech skillz".

Well, I can see one potential outcome--increased piracy. People who know of the workarounds and want to recommend a book to a friend who reads on a different platform might be tempted to strip the DRM, convert the title to a format that works for their friend and just "give" it to the friend.

And seriously for serious, how many of you people reading this (assuming you've gotten this far and haven't just skipped to the freebie listings) would actually, if the books of an author you kind of mildly liked to read suddenly disappeared from the store you were used to buying them, would really and truly follow the author to another store just to get their books in a different and possibly incompatible-with-your-reader format?

I suspect many people would say "oh well" and move on to another author.

Going KDP Select with an established book cuts out the author's previously established audience, and while they may get many more eyeballs seeing that their work exists, the lock-in of the exclusivity automatically limits the potential audience for that work again.

Yes, in the long run, authors may be doing themselves a disservice.

Since then, Amazon has broken the K4PC/Mac tools twice in various ways, and also messed with the actual Topaz and Mobi formats so that merely altering certain metadata will thwart any future attempts to remove DRM on the very same files.

These things did get fixed, but at the moment, there are perhaps 2-3 people actually actively working on maintaining the tools and all of them are following over from the work of other people who used to work on the tools and have since lost interest and "retired", as the apprentice himself did. There's no guarantee whatsoever that anyone will be maintaining them in the future, much less be willing to try and reverse-engineer whatever Amazon changes the next few times around.

Yes, I have been a bit concerned about this. Who will "step up" the next time current tools no longer work?

Despite that cozy suburbian safe-and-conveniently-applianced everything-within-driving-distance neighbourhood feel that Amazon likes to promote, the virtual arms race going on behind the scenes is considerably more one sided when it comes to the balance of power than Mutually Assured Destruction.

I have been an Amazon customer for a long time now. I do like the convenience of being able to buy nearly anything I want from them. But at the same time, I recognize that Amazon basically would like nothing more than to lock everyone into an exclusive Amazon-only ecosystem. Despite the convenience, I would still like to have other options.

And I really don't think this trend is something I want to continue, even though I've been benefitting from and enabling it for several weeks now.

Hmmm, does this mean that you are considering stopping your listings? If so, I will most certainly miss them, but will also completely understand and respect your decision.