Books being removed from the US Store

[RPatton]

No one knows the whys or the hows. Right now, it's just a matter of gathering information and trying to find enough correlations to guess the reasons.

From what I have gathered...

• This is mostly hitting New Releases (going to assume it's only new releases until someone points out otherwise)
• It's only the US Store
• It's hitting both single books and box-sets

Anything else?

[Tom Wood]

https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/04/06/thousands-of-ebooks-have-disappeared-from-amazon-com-were-your-ebooks-hit-too/

Scroll down to the comments for more info.

[Bill Hiatt]

I was checking the fantasy top 100 earlier today and ran across one  listing that was blank, with an "unavailable" label on it. Since those lists are supposed to update every hour, that struck me as odd.

Is this another example of Amazon having gotten so big that it no longer knows what's going on? A hacker attack? A purge of all books doing well in the store without a sufficient AMS ad spend? (The lasts one is a joke--I hope!)

[RPatton]

I was checking the fantasy top 100 earlier today and ran across one  listing that was blank, with an "unavailable" label on it. Since those lists are supposed to update every hour, that struck me as odd.

Is this another example of Amazon having gotten so big that it no longer knows what's going on? A hacker attack? A purge of all books doing well in the store without a sufficient AMS ad spend? (The lasts one is a joke--I hope!)

That's what I think we're trying to figure out. It seems to be hitting books on the HNR and as far as I know at this time, Amazon has not been in contact with anyone.

[PaulineMRoss]

I monitor the Regency romance bestseller list, and there are several 'not available' messages there. I can't tell precisely which books are missing or whether they're gone from the store, but I can tell you that the main content mill publisher had several books in that list which were Western romances miscategorised as Regencies. Those have all gone, and one book which is American Civil War era is now showing as Regency. So my guess is it's something to do with a cleanup of categories, and Amazon broke something along the way.

ETA: And having said all that, the Western books are all back this morning, and the Civil War book has gone, so... maybe Amazon flipped the switch back?

[Bill Hiatt]

I monitor the Regency romance bestseller list, and there are several 'not available' messages there. I can't tell precisely which books are missing or whether they're gone from the store, but I can tell you that the main content mill publisher had several books in that list which were Western romances miscategorised as Regencies. Those have all gone, and one book which is American Civil War era is now showing as Regency. So my guess is it's something to do with a cleanup of categories, and Amazon broke something along the way.

ETA: And having said all that, the Western books are all back this morning, and the Civil War book has gone, so... maybe Amazon flipped the switch back?

If Amazon broke something, perhaps it flipped the switch back to find a better way to do it. That's terrible for the legit authors whose high-ranking books were gone for a while, though.

[RPatton]

Yeah, as of last night they were back.

Still would be nice to know what the common factor is/was. I think it was new releases, but not 100% sure.

If it only hit new releases, my theory is that they tried to implement an automated process and it ended up throwing back a lot of false-positives. However, that is pure conjecture based on experience and what information I could gather.

[PaulineMRoss]

In the Regency list, the returnees were released on Mar 30, Mar 10, Mar 7 and Feb 19, so newish but not all on the HNR. Some of those did NOT disappear from the store, though. They only disappeared from the Regency list.

[Denise]

Yikes. This is scary, and reminds us how it's terrible to depend on a single retailer.

That said, I'm on KU, very happy with Amazon, and intend to continue being exclusive for a long while.