Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning and welcome back to another edition of Friday Inspiration!
This week, I have one singular article I want to discuss, but then I have a brief update for y’all at the end.
So make sure to stick around until then :)
Amazon reforms ebook policies in response to union concerns
I published this article a little while ago on the Spatium Stories blog.
The synopsis was that a social media trend was able to exploit a feature in Amazon and hurt tons and tons of authors.
Essentially, Amazon allowed you to return an ebook no matter how long you had had it. So the trend was, people would buy an ebook, read it, and then return it!
The awful part of this whole thing was that when they returned it, the author owed Amazon money.
The horrid part is that the amount the author’s owed Amazon was greater than the amount they were originally paid!
Well, in light of those events, Amazon decided to amend its ebook policy.
And when I say in light of those events, I mean it also took 2 author’s unions to gather over 78,000 signatures on a petition to get Amazon to do anything at all.
Here is their solution: if you have read 10% of the book, you are no longer allowed to return it.
I did not hear anything at all about how if someone returns it, the author can potentially owe Amazon more than they were paid.
I guess Amazon doesn’t care about that part.
All in all, I guess it’s a small victory that Amazon did anything. This whole initiative is actually in development now and should roll out by year’s end.
But in reality, it’s ridiculous it took this much effort and arguments to get Amazon to do anything.
I feel like I have an obligation to quickly take this time to plug Spatium Stories and other NFT Book platforms where this kind of behavior just doesn’t exist ;)
Quick Update
Ok, so really quick life update for all of you!
I don’t know if you’ve heard but Taylor and I are about to go to France!
Next week :D
I have a client workshop I’m doing Tuesday/Wednesday, so we figured this was the perfect opportunity to go to France and only have to pay for 1 of us, haha!
All that to say, I won’t have any writing published for the next 2 weeks. I don’t have any prepped to go before we leave for France. And I won’t have time while we’re there to write for the following week.
But I will be back shortly after that!
Thanks for all the support! I’ll be sure to write a lengthy post on our time in France :)