Theresa M. Moore Closes Amazon Account For 2nd Time

Oct. 31, 2012 - PRLog -- "I had sent an email to Jeff Bezos of Amazon detailing my dissatisfaction with KDP's failure to sell my ebooks and its dysfunctional reporting system, and that I would be closing my account. I did," Antellus CEO and author Theresa M. Moore said. "After that, I received a phone call from KDP's Executive Customer Relations manager, who asked what it would take to get me to republish. I said I would think about it."

The author opened a 2nd account with Amazon and reposted 2 books, one fiction and one nonfiction, to test what would happen. In the process, she discovered that KDP's terms of service had changed in September and the administrators of the KDP forums never made an announcement to that effect. The terms indicated that the supplier of content had no control over content and no recourse in case of a dispute; that in effect, no consideration at all was granted and KDP had exclusive right to accept or reject content based on its own criteria. Immediately following this, the nonfiction ebook was blocked by KDP, citing, "content freely available on the internet", which has been a constant source of irritation for all authors who have nonfiction books in print on the Amazon site, yet who cannot post the electronic versions. Since nonfiction is what a lot of ebook readers appear to crave, this posed a monumental and insurmountable barrier to the authors who were blocked and does a further disservice to Amazon customers.


Subsequent to that event, KDP reopened her initial account and allowed her to repost her books. A short story was later blocked by KDP citing that a "third party" who turned out to be an ebook pirate claimed the copyright for the story, which was written and published by Moore in 2008. Since then the pirate has been reported to the FBI for fraud and blackmail. "I do not like to be threatened," Moore added. "When someone pushes me, I push back. I am not a floormat to be insulted and abused."

Moore added, "Not only that, they still owe me $20.00 from the account for which I will not be paid. According to their service agreement, anyone closing their account forfeits all royalties which were already earned. As KDP failed to report royalties or earnings in an efficient and timely fashion in the first place, I was forced to sacrifice hard won sales in order to free myself from Amazon's draconian and often illegal treatment of authors' content and intellectual properties. This recent event only reinforced my initial conclusions that Amazon had no intention of honoring any part of the agreement on my side. As for what the top level managers have to say, I'll reserve my comments to myself as they might not be in the politest of terms."

Moore has forwarded the contents of the emails sent to her along with the name and email address of the content thief to the FBI, and washed her hands of any further dealings with Amazon.com.