Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Amazon seems to be doing its damndest to segregate the int'l e-book market, removing Mobi from all but American hands. That really bites, for two reasons: One, it limits the potential number of authors who would like to be part of the Kindle store; and two, it limits the amount of foreign works that will be available to Kindle owners (since foreign authors will have little access and less incentive to create books for the Kindle).
Fortunately, independents can still create and sell Mobi-formatted e-books... they just can't do it through the large commercial aggregators. You may see many more indie websites popping up soon.
But I can't see this doing anything except helping to promote more widespread use of ePub.
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I am quite enjoying reading all the comments. But just wanted to come back to some comments made at the beginning of the thread. We're an independent, digital small press - and Canadian. We publish new authors in literary fiction and other genres in non DRM mobi, epub and pdf. With about 25 titles, we are and will be distributing to other ebookstores, including Books on Board, Fictionwise, Shortcovers, and working with Ingram for those we cannot deal with directly.
So a few months ago, I sign up with Mobipocket and get a publishers license through eBookbase - because Amazon tells me/us that's how wants to deal with international publishers. Alas, Amazon does not pick up our books in the Kindle store and after many frustrating days trying to figure out why, now tells me that they will not pick them up, even though they've been successfully added and available on MP's site for at least a month now. But 'don't worry' they say, they'll 'dispose of my paperwork in a secure manner'. Subsequent emails to them tell me the same thing as the first post, that they do not accept titles from non American companies, yadda yadda.
I have asked them how to get our titles on there, and of course, no response. I sit here in the incredulity of it all, trying to do business in this global economy and here is a company whose insular policies preclude the rest of the world from doing business with them! And btw, they won't accept titles from Ingram either (which blew me away), because they (Amazon) prefer to do business directly with publishers.
Anyway, enough of my rant, but I'm frustrated that I have no way of offering our author's books to that market, which despite the fact that I even if I could, I would NEVER buy a Kindle, is big.
Well, thanks for the info all, it's nice to hear that I'm not the only one with these frustrations - Best, Michelle.