Quote:
Originally Posted by conan50
That doesn't seem fair that Amazon can take your earnings. Is that to keep you from posting links to the free books?
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That policy was a change implemented several years back because there was an enormous number of websites that only existed to indiscriminately list free Kindle books, mostly by using the Amazon store APIs. Those websites weren't reviewing the books or anything, just raking in cash for doing nothing that added value.
The issue is that Amazon pays affiliate fees on anything bought by a customer coming in via external link redirect for several minutes (15?,30? I forget) to give affiliates credit for all the purchases made by a customer they send over, not just for the linked product (and to give credit even when the customer bought a different product). The options were to not pay affiliate fees to on anybody coing in on a link to a free book (not fair to review sites, especially if a book was temporarily free) or to cap the affiliate fees for sites linking to free ebooks. A compromise.
The "free ebook links" websites are a lot less common these days.
Period piece:
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pag...ntry-1.1640024
Btw, Nook had the same problem with free ebook affiliate fees, even earlier, and solved it by ending affiliate fees for ebooks.