31–40 of 102 posts
Amazon should own up and pay. They have effectively stolen from this author. No, we can't guarantee that those people would have bought it for free, but if these were physical books, the law would require that they pay the author. The agreement wasn't that they get to change the price any time they like. The agreement was that they get to match competitors. They violated that.
You list with them, you play by their rules. They're not locking you into their store in anyway shape or form.
Except he was playing by the rules, and got shafted anyway. They erroneously price-matched, making his book free, and depriving him of royalties. Their mistake; his loss.
I think Amazon should be made to pay something, although maybe not the full $13k, simply to make damn sure that they sort out their systems and this doesn't happen again. If Amazon gets off lightly they probably won't change anything, and this could happen to some other unsuspecting author.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this is true, then content piracy should also be legal. (Amazon effectively did the same thing as a pirate posting the file to a torrent tracker: they satisfied some of their potential customers with a free copy, invalidating them as real customers.) Conversely, if piracy should be illegal, then this is false, and Amazon is in trouble.
Content piracy is unauthorized distribution. Amazon here was authorized to distribute the material; they are in trouble if and only if the authorization was somehow revoked when the price reached zero. My point that there was no real loss is tangential to the actual case.
Being the tech dude that I am, had I decided to write a book and do this I think (perhaps - hindsight and all that) I would have changed the title slightly to prevent the automatons from causing such a problem. Akin to how Apple's App Store policies recommend naming the free version of your app differently from the paid version.
It's got a ISBN along with the name.
Being the tech dude that I am, had I decided to write a book and do this I think (perhaps - hindsight and all that) I would have changed the title slightly to prevent the automatons from causing such a problem. Akin to how Apple's App Store policies recommend naming the free version of your app differently from the paid version.
It's got a ISBN along with the name.
An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation (except reprintings) of a book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Num...
Sure, Amazons customer service could be better and should probably at least have sent an email stating that they're lowering the price etc.
Who sells in a marketplace where someone else sets your price for you automatically without your approval? Amazon isn't a distributor in this case any more than the person who owns the tent at a fleamarket allows people to sell underneath it. In any case, Amazon's automatic algorithm to save themselves money from having to pay humans to do it nipped them this time and they owe the author. Do the right thing and settl…
It's a cost of doing business. I do think Amazon should reimburse the guy if only to save on negative publicity over a very small amount.
There may be a start-up idea here: an application to allow authors to easily monitor changes to their ebook prices?