They didn’t tell you, did they?
Amazon did send emails in mid-December to advise KDP authors (anyone who publishes on Amazon) of their upcoming change to handling DRM (digital rights management). In brief, any (e)books published with Amazon after 20 January will default to allow download in either PDF or EPUB format; that is, without DRM. You can read more about that here.
That’s not the focus of this post.
Amazon authors may not have noticed (as it appears no email notice was sent) , but there’s been a rather major change to any of your ebooks being sold through Amazon.
A new feature!
Very exciting!
So exciting that authors are not being informed about it by Amazon.
And it’s just on by default. On now.
And there’s no way to turn it off.
It’s called Ask This Book and it’s a super handy (please note the sarcasm) AI summary that your readers can invoke to query your story. Because why should they want to think about your characters and their thoughts and actions when they can just flip through and then Ask The Book.
That’s why you spent all those hours and days and months writing, isn’t it?
In speaking with local, well-known author Sherry Briscoe, she reacted by stating she is considering reducing all her Amazon-listed ebooks in favor of print only.
We also note, for those Idaho authors who only list their books on Amazon, that there’s additional work, but also many benefits to “going wide”; that is, publishing with other vendors besides solely Amazon.
For an excellent and balanced summary, we refer our readers to this Kindlepreneur article.
