Why do you think that Amazon is removing titles from their platform?
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Saw this on ANN, but looks like Australia is actually banning several of the No Game No life novels outright, as in they're illegal to buy or import. This impacts volumes 1, 2 and 9.
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In this other article, there's talking of removing SAO in Australia too. If SAO goes due to child exploitation, then if say about 40% of LNs would be fair game.
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Well I was bemused to see their pre-orders for High School DxD light novels and that Testament of Sister New Devil is still up.
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@mwbworld said in Why do you think that Amazon is removing digital titles from their platform?:
Testament of Sister New Devil
Wait, it's licensed? Wow, that's uh... daring....
...Oh, just the manga.
My talking sword has a point. And is also right.
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@Gamen Yeah just the manga but still. Mind you I'm fine with it, but surprised by them having it.
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@tgquan67 said in Why do you think that Amazon is removing digital titles from their platform?:
Well, the most popular belief is that Amazon depends too much on their machine learning algorithms, and they don't have enough personnel (or neglect) to manually check everything properly (or at least respond to all the complaints). The current situation of covid may also contribute to that.
Amazon went almost entirely WFH for everything but its physical labor jobs (fulfillment centers, data center maintenance, .etc); this situation is continuing until at least summer. In the Software Engineering land of Amazon, people were working from home a lot even before Covid hit so it's not like they're hurting for manpower at all. Regarding how Amazon is checking its Kindle titles for complaints, if physical people are involved, then they're working from home.
TL:DR I highly doubt covid has anything to do with this.
@Jon-Mitchell said in Why do you think that Amazon is removing digital titles from their platform?:
I think (not based on evidence, admittedly just my intuition):
- this is a small group of puritanical minded influencer-wannabe's that are targeting titles based on image search or keywords (and haven't actually read/purchased the ebooks)
- amazon doesn't care enough about the lost revenue/bad press, yet to fix the reporting system
I fear that:
- this is a 'trial run' of a system exploit that some group of a-holes who has a larger objective of censorship via social engineering
I don't think it's a big group, but it probably is a group. I seem to recall that there was a successful, concerted campaign to get anime titles delisted from the Steam store which worked despite Valve's stance that nearly everything is okay.
@raddevlin said in Why do you think that Amazon is removing digital titles from their platform?:
My best guess is that some of the more fanservicey titles got flagged a few times by regular shoppers and then manually reviewed. Since they're listed as young adult books, it's likely certain images were considered inappropriate for that age range. Once one novel was de-listed, it makes sense that the system would automatically flag other associated titles (by publisher, series, author etc) for review and more books would end up being de-listed for the same issue.
This is almost certainly what happened. There are apps out there where people can share things they dislike so that they can mass flag. It's not an organized group: it's just people who virtue signal. There are even points you can get for successful "crusades." The only one I've seen is the Israeli one, but if for whatever reason you run afoul of one of them, you will run afoul of all. They proactively look for these titles: the stuff you're seeing in Australia is probably an example of this. Australia has a lot of problems, but like all democracies they enjoy wasting their time on things that don't matter, haha.
@jpwong said in Why do you think that Amazon is removing digital titles from their platform?:
@raddevlin That would make more sense if Amazon's KDP team would just come out and say your ebooks were removed because of this or that issue. It's that they're coming back and basically telling publishers "Your books violate our terms of service and are being removed. Also because of the terms of service, we aren't obligated to tell you the reason why they were removed so you can fix the problem". It's that they appear to be completely unwilling to work with any of the affected vendors on this issue that's pushing people to think it's a fully automated process that's causing this. And a fully automated delisting process is abusable by third parties even if they're only say kicking off a chain reaction process by flagging one novel in a given series.
Your mistake is assuming Amazon cares. They don't. Come back when you're making them billions and then they'll lend you an ear. You have to understand that this is a company which will ban a legitimate third party seller for NOT gaming their system like the crooks do: the systems they've built flag people like that automatically. Go on SellerCentral and read the complaints for more insight. to be clear, this isn't some "AI" or "machine learning:" it's procedural logic.
An aside because I hate it when people assume things are about machine learning or ai, please forgive me:
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@acallos said in Why do you think that Amazon is removing digital titles from their platform?:
Your mistake is assuming Amazon cares. They don't. Come back when you're making them billions and then they'll lend you an ear.
They probably don't care about small time publisher's business, but the way they're doing this is probably going to result in some issues with one thing it seems like all big businesses are measuring everything on these days, metrics. It's not so much a problem if the issue is just where the images are positioned and this new format fixes all the problems, but if this turns into a shell game where the new listings get banned and JNC and other publishers just make some minor cosmetic tweak and keep relisting, it's going to start impacting some percentile measured metric. Now I don't know how amazon handles their metrics, but if it's anything like where I work where some of these are used to give performance bonuses and the like, when there's an unanticipated downward trend on something, upper management suddenly has a keen interest in your department.
Would it result in changes? Well, I'm actually guessing probably not. Based on how lazy amazon is being on this, I think it's more likely they'd just ban JNC's account for violating their terms of service multiple times.
Could there be some form of machine learning in play? Sure, I personally don't think so because that would be a stupid waste of resources (like seriously, it's not like they're aggregating millions of data points to look for certain patterns here), it's far more likely that they have a simple process that operates something like ban = number of complaints >= X where each "reason" you can fill out on the complaint page is given a different weight. In theory there should be a human review element to prevent page bombing or other sorts of abuse, but it's equally believable that the people running the KDP department don't really care either way and just press "Accept All" at the end of the day before they go home.
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@Rahul-Balaggan said in Why do you think that Amazon is removing digital titles from their platform?:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxqkx5/book-publishers-warn-congress-amazon-is-too-powerful
I disagreed with the attacks on Amazon by the major publishers a few years ago, but back then Amazon had less power and ebooks were less established as a market. It was the major publishers trying to do things like block Amazon from offering sale prices on ebooks, and the publishers forming a cartel with Apple to fix prices.
Now Amazon has much more monopoly power, which is legal, but they are increasingly abusing it which is not. Hopefully the voters will make the right choice and we'll have stronger antitrust enforcement in 2021.
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@Rahul-Balaggan This makes me wonder. From the discussion here on how significant the percentage of JNC revenue from Amazon was, I get the impression that it was caused by people not venturing outside of Amazon when it comes to buying books online. Why does it seem that there are no dominant general e-marketplace platform in the USA? It's interesting to me compared to the ubiquity of something like Aliexpress in China or Shopee and Lazada in many Asian countries. Where they're not taking percentages off product prices but generate revenue through other means (for example acting as an escrow service), and people don't feel they're buying off the platforms, but through the mostly small-scale sellers.
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I believe that Amazon did a huge push into e-book territory, and Because people have started using amazon for every other aspect of their lives (and that amazon start off mainly selling books) they just naturally stick to amazon.
Kindle is such a giant in the e-book industry that a lot of times when people think electronic books they immediately think kindle.
Very similar to how people don’t normally say “search it online”, they say “google it”.
If something major would happen, like multiple big publishers coming together and starting their own platform, that might actually move amazon (even though selling e-books is like pocket change to them now).
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@Rahul-Balaggan I believe Powell’s Books already had some major struggles with amazon in the past, so it’s only natural, that they want to end this relationship, it’s nothing really new.
By the way, it would be nice, if there is a listing of light novels and manga removed partially, or completely from amazon. Until now, I’m only hearing about bits and pieces and in most cases, if I look on the german amazon, physical copies are still there. On this note I also need to say, that I’m mostly interested in which series also get their physical copies removed.
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I actually don’t think Amazon removing physical books from Amazon Australia is a censorship move.
It is my belief it is an anti-competitive financial decision to force Australians to purchase LN from book depository (owned by Amazon) at higher costs than through Amazon directly.
I would purchase my LN through the Amazon US distribution channel option on Amazon Australia which saved me from $5-10 per LN.
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@catstorm said in Books/Preorders missing from Amazon:
I actually don’t think Amazon removing physical books from Amazon Australia is a censorship move.
You might wanna maybe get a VPN and Google “Australia censoring anime” from anywhere other than Australia.
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Dude I'm well aware of this, but the removal of physical volumes isn't because of this.
All physical volumes are still available through book depository, and nearly all LN volumes are still available digitally through kindle.
If this was an attempt at censorship why would they ONLY remove physical purchases of ONLY the latest LN releases? They'd just remove everything, which they have done for No game no life and How not to summon a demon lord.
When things are censored it's obvious, this, I truly believe is just to stop Australians buying the cheaper option.
As you can see from the photo, they have just removed the ability to purchase physical volumes from all LNs released after the 1st of August 2020, every other volume of Reincarnated sword is still available for physical purchase.
Here is evidence of the price mark up. I managed to purchase this before they removed physical purchases from Amazon Australia.
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I wonder if some of the Australian physical release removals are to do with Covid shipping problems - that would also explain the higher prices If they’re more difficult to obtain. In the UK, I’ve noticed random changes with physical releases, and I got my pre-orders of volume 2 and 3 of Rose of Versailles within a week of each other. I know those were delayed, but I’m pretty sure in the US they came out more than a week apart.
Despite being owned by Amazon, maybe Book Depository gets them from a different distributor, or for whatever reason, they decided to prioritise getting them physical copies for now. Amazon’s not opposed to raising prices on their site after all.
I’m working on the assumption that most English-language manga is printed in the US and then imported to other countries, as that’s how it works in the UK.
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@catstorm said in Books/Preorders missing from Amazon:
Dude I'm well aware of this, but the removal of physical volumes isn't because of this.
All physical volumes are still available through book depository, and nearly all LN volumes are still available digitally through kindle.
If this was an attempt at censorship why would they ONLY remove physical purchases of ONLY the latest LN releases? They'd just remove everything, which they have done for No game no life and How not to summon a demon lord.
When things are censored it's obvious, this, I truly believe is just to stop Australians buying the cheaper option.Occam's Razor - if there are two competing theories, the simpler one is more likely to be the correct one. What real financial gain is there in forcing only Australians to buy more expensive physical books? Is it really worth the blowback from removing the books from the main Amazon storefront? Your theory feels far more convoluted than "this is just a continuation of getting other books banned."
The obvious answer to your "why" questions is that Amazon doesn't want to remove these titles at all but they're being legally pressured to. Australia has laws backing these bannings, right? Putting aside whether those laws are rational, if it's against the law, then Amazon is forced to take complaints seriously. As for why Amazon and not Book Depository, for the same reason why Kindle and not Apple or Google or Kobo: because Amazon is the biggest and most prominent storefront, so whoever is complaining will get the most "bang for their buck" when trying to make a political statement. Book Depository is still a separate company, so I would assume any complaints directed at Amazon don't affect their operations at all.
Whoever said nothing's impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
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Yeah but it’s literally every single physical LN on Amazon Australia released after August 1st.
All of those are still on kindle.
“You can’t purchase the physical version because we don’t want you reading this bad content, but oh here enjoy the digital version immediately for less money and no wait on postage.”
What kind of censorship is that, the cheaper more accessible version is allowed but the more expensive and time consuming isn’t.
No until the kindle versions also go down I’m not buying this as a censorship issue, I’d be more willing to buy it as a distribution issue but I doubt that is actually the case.
But your obviously welcome to disagree.
Australia gets a bad rap, and deservedly so, but you can’t honestly believe Australia is pressuring Amazon to ban all LNs in Australia no matter the content.
