This comment from Steven Zacharius, Kensington CEO, is interesting:
"KU is going to end up being only Amazon published titles or indie published books. So I don't think you can claim that it's built on sustainability. I know that many of our most popular books in KU are being removed because they were too expensive for them to be kept in KU when they had to pay publishers a full royalty. I would never be able to explain to an author or be able to calculate royalties due to an author if they weren't receiving the full amount normally due. It's a shame because I do think that the program did allow readers to experiment with many authors that they may have not read before. I also didn't see those sales cannibalizing the traditional purchase of the same title. Both were doing quite well. Romance is a very difficult category to have in a subscription service as I explained to Amazon, Scribd and Oyster when they all started."
So sounds like Amazon is actually removing some trad pub from KU, similar to Scribd's actions. According to Zacharius:
"Not all books yet, but a lot of the more popular titles that were being downloaded heavily..."
http://www.idealog.com/blog/what-oys...#disqus_thread