Readers and Authors: It's Time to Stop Giving Amazon so Much Power

Amazon's decision to remove Kindle downloads has sparked discussion about Amazon's role in publishing. The good news is, you don't need to make a deal with the devil.

In the last few weeks Amazon made some big waves by making an even clearer statement about what digital book ownership means to them, and what owning one of their Kindle devices really is, which is a way to keep you, the consumer, stuck on the hamster wheel that is the Amazon ecosystem. Last Wednesday they announced they would do away with the download and transfer feature, which mostly benefited those with older Kindle models, or those who didn’t enjoy having their Kindles always online connected to Amazon’s servers. For older, still functional Kindle devices that used older cellular connections, or no longer had the “Send to Kindle” function, this was one of the few ways to get ebooks onto those devices.

This move has largely irked consumers, who see this for what it is: Amazon flexing its muscles and ensuring that there’s no off-ramp for users to move to different devices or ecosystems. As an author, I’ve never checked the DRM (digital rights management) box when uploading a book to Amazon’s KDP, but in truth, that meant nothing. Amazon has DRM on their books no matter what, which is their proprietary Kindle formatting KFX. The hidden in plain sight secret to digital products on storefronts like Amazon has always been in the fine print, where it clearly states that you’re buying a license to access a digital product, and that it can be revoked at any time without compensation. But for most consumers, a big orange button that says “BUY NOW” made an explicit statement that you were buying the product, even if Amazon put a bold-texted statement beneath that you’re only buying a license. There’s been a few isolated incidents where Amazon has had to remove books from the store, but still allowed you to download them. Even fewer where they pulled the book entirely.

That being said, for most people, this is an unnecessary headache.

The feature allowed people to download their books, and using some easy-to-find online tools, remove Kindle’s DRM, and transfer the book anywhere they like. Like I said, as a publisher, books I didn’t put DRM on still had DRM, and if I tried to download them and place them on another device, it wasn’t possible without cracking Amazon’s DRM. In this regard, Amazon has never been truthful. But the idea now is to prevent “piracy.” Piracy remains a divisive concept. For most of us in the creative fields, we’d obviously prefer to be compensated for our hard work and not have it stolen. It was, after all, piracy that led to our books being stolen to be used for training data for LLMs. Meta was just caught doing this exact thing and refutes they infringed upon copyrights.

But, at least the way I see it, most digital goods are going to be pirated at some point or another, and getting upset about it won’t change anything. Hell, I even used to spend $20/mo when I started out subscribing to a site that purported to serve takedowns to infringing sites and I’m not sure that did anything other than lose $20 a month.

The other day I saw a post on a publishing sub-Reddit decrying readers for their reactions to this announcement, and that readers were proclaiming they’d rather turn to piracy than give money to Amazon. This user, in particular, had a problem with this, because they’ve enrolled their books in Amazon’s KDP Select program, which reader-facing is known as KindleUnlimited. If you’re unaware, KindleUnlimited is a program that allows users to “rent” ebooks for as long as they’re subscribed, and read an unlimited amount of books while subscribed (hence KindleUnlimited). The problem for smaller publishers is that Amazon forces exclusivity on those ebooks enrolled in the program. In fact, if Amazon’s bots crawl a site with a pirated copy, certain times they’ll issue a warning to the author that they’re infringing upon the contract and threaten to close their accounts down.

This author went on about how unfair this attitude was, how entitled the readers are, and how it’s not the author’s fault for this happening. You see, this author explained, the genre they write in does better in KindleUnlimited than being published elsewhere, and the entire market for this genre and its ebooks exist on KindleUnlimited. So, it’s not fair. They then offered another complaint, which was they didn’t want to hear from others about them “selling their soul” to Amazon by other authors, because they had no choice.

This is where I rolled my eyes.
Fuck outta here. This is on you. We all get to make our own decisions about how we publish and distribute our work, but the mere fact that people do things another way and will suggest trying it seems to anger people who are doing things “the way it works.”

I’ve been involved with indie publishing since 2012. My first ‘real’ book went live in early 2013. My second in 2015. I gave up for a while, then in 2019 I came back and had a streak that lasted into 2023. Over that ten-plus-year span of time, the industry changed a lot, and it wasn’t for the better. In fact, it was a lot worse. Yes, more indies can sell enough books to make a comfortable living now than ever before, but the cost has been ceding the industry to Amazon in a bow.

Depending on the data source and time period, you’ll see Amazon listed as anywhere from 70 to 80% of the US book market. A number that continues to crawl upwards as brick and mortar stores continue to struggle and online competitors flounder with their inability to match Amazon’s pricing and inexpensive shipping. Amazon has undercut multiple markets for products by studying bestselling products, then copying them to create their “Amazon Basics” product lines. Even if they sell those products at a loss, they’re making it more difficult for people to exist outside of the Amazon ecosystem, which is exactly what this DRM move is with Kindles.

You’ll note, they never had to bother with “Amazon Basics” books. In truth, they didn’t have to, because indie authors became that for them. Indie authors saw KindleUnlimited as a goldmine of an opportunity. KindleUnlimited checkouts counted towards Amazon bestseller rankings, as did when someone read the book, which was all on top of actual sales. This boosting allowed for KU books to soar to the tops of Amazon’s charts. This meant Amazon’s algorithms fed these books out to consumers more often, recommending them in ad carousels, in marketing emails, and suggested books on Kindle devices. In the age of KindleUnlimited, some indie authors saw their income soar to tens of thousands of dollars a month, even millions a year. These authors became Kindle evangelists, who went onto Facebook groups, other social media platforms, and spoke at conferences about how lucrative being an indie author could be.

So you have to be exclusive. So what?

This was the Amazon Basics bookstore. Exclusive to Amazon.

It’s almost impossible to figure out how many subscribers there are to KindleUnlimited at any given time, as Amazon doesn’t provide those numbers to authors, nor do they report them in their quarterly earnings. What they provide is how much the monthly KDP Select fund is, which tends to be around $45-55 million a month. That pool is then divided up among all the authors with books enrolled, to where a page read is worth a certain fraction of a penny. Something like a 300-page book is worth $1.50 USD per full read. If I look through my email, I can see that the December 2024 KDP Select fund was $56.6 million (which is up considerably). Amazon purports it takes subscription money and pours it into the fund. Considering Amazon gives 70% royalties to authors normally, and doesn’t explain what portion of KDP Select subscription funds go into the pool, a guess of 70% of the $11.99 monthly fee users pay, that leaves us with $8.40 per subscriber. The simple math here to gain an estimate is 56.6 divided by 8.4, which yields a subscriber count of 6.7 million users. There’s going to be other variables, such as people who are on free trials, etc., but this has been a pretty consistent way to gauge readership.

When you consider Amazon has somewhere in the realm of over 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers, it puts into perspective just how small the KindleUnlimited pool is. Considering in 2024 9.1 million people installed the Libby app and over 118.9 million new users joined global library systems, things are becoming foggier.

The Amazon Kindle is undoubtedly the heavyweight when it comes to ereaders. Amazon dominates market share.

But here’s the thing, and I’m going to speak to indie authors here directly: you aren’t powerless. The more you feed into this system. The more you refuse to believe there’s an outlet for books outside of Amazon’s closed ecosystem. The more you buy into AMS Ads and rapid releasing series and “minimum viable product” to keep this absolutely hilariously small set of users happy and keep feeding Amazon an exclusive library of content, the more power they have.

Disavow yourself of the gurus and bestsellers who tell you that you have to have your books in KindleUnlimited. This revolt from users? It’s not going to get better. Amazon isn’t going to get better. Amazon doesn’t want its users to be able to download their books they purchased, strip out the DRM, and throw the book on a competitor’s device. Because that device isn’t mainlined into the Amazon ecosystem. It can’t feed out Amazon ads. When you finish a book, it can’t direct you to purchasing the book on the Amazon store. When the device fails after they push out updates that nerf the damned thing, and you’ve got hundreds of ebooks within their closed ecosystem, what options do you have but to buy another Kindle device?

As long as you, the indie author, continue to perpetuate this system, it’s never going to get better. There are a lot of indie authors. Facebook groups like 20Booksto50k has 80,000 members. A group like Wide for the Win has 18,400 members. That’s a lot of people. Amazon is creating a walled garden and if a fraction of the indie authors out there put their collective feet down and said “NO” then either Amazon would have to take notice, or other storefronts would thrive while Amazon declined.

There will always be opportunists who don’t care about the health of the industry or the world around them. They’ll see the bottom line for themselves and how they can make money. To be as blunt as I can, they’re class traitors and people you’d never be able to rely on. I’ve beaten on this drum so many times already, but to build a better, more equitable publishing industry, it requires work from everyone inside the industry to try to do better. That includes indie authors.

Stop fucking around with Amazon.

Amazon doesn’t care about you.

Jeff doesn’t care about fucking books (I hate that line so much).

Readers don’t need to pay $12 a month to get unlimited reading when most have access to public library systems. Yes, sometimes you need to wait a week or two. Sometimes they haven’t bought a book yet and you need to request it, but librarians love fulfilling reader requests. Try it out sometime. As an indie author, I can sell books on any major retailer right now, have books available to check out at public libraries, even run my own digital store where I can sell DRM-free ebooks that work on any fucking device any time without selling a revocable license.

Amazon is showing its hand right now. You have a choice to either diversify how you publish and interface with readers, or you can continue whining about how unfair it is that you got into bed with a goliath of a business that doesn’t care about your existence, and who will make decisions like this that hurt you, all because it felt easier and some person charging $1,000 for an online learning module told you this was the way to make money in publishing.

Go get a Kobo or something. They have a direct partnership with Overdrive/Libby. Their devices are just as good, if not better than Kindles. Get a Boox. You can load every storefront’s Android app onto those things. They’re awesome. Send a message to Amazon and leave them far behind.
Grab the Calibre app for your computer. Download your ebooks and import them into that library. Load those books onto any device you want to read on. There are shops where you can search specifically for DRM-free ebooks, too (Kobo, Ebooks.com, . Some books aren’t going to have that option, but still, buying it on a storefront that ISN’T Amazon and reading it on an ereader that ISN’T a Kindle sounds cool, right? Hell, you can even buy DRM’d books on places like Google Play and transfer them to a Kobo device. Even if a book has DRM, you don’t have to be stuck in the Amazon ecosystem. You’ve got options.
Readers, you aren’t stuck.
Authors, you aren’t stuck.

You can support me right now on my quest to create art worth reading and communicating directly to like-minded people who would enjoy my writing by picking up Iconoclast, my next book, right now via my direct shop in ebook or paperback, or on any store you’d like.