Many of the people who purchase books from Amazon have noticed that occasionally an author’s book is removed from the site or removed from Kindle Unlimited. What people do not know is that it’s not always the author that makes that choice, in fact this is something that is usually done to them because they are a victim of piracy.

Amazon’s KDP policy for Kindle Unlimited is that an author’s work can not be widely accessible online, meaning that if a copy of their book is found on any other site Amazon removes the book from their market. This means that now authors that have had their work stolen have also lost their ability to sell that work. This may be inconvenient for a reader, but it’s detrimental to an author. They lose the ability to sell their book and collect any income or royalties for their work until they pay to have someone find the copy of their pirated book and remove it. They are being hit in three places, their work is stolen by the pirate, their income stream is stopped by the distributor, and they have to pay to fix the issue. This is not fair or right.

If Amazon does not want the publication to be accessible elsewhere then they should deal with the pirate, not punish the victim of the crime. The purpose of this petition is to ask Amazon to change their policy and only remove a published work if the book is being distributed on behalf of the lawful owner of the publication. This means that Amazon should work with the authors and gather more information about the new copy that was found.