Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Just Made This Giant Move, And No One Is Talking About It

One of the glories of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) services like direct publishing is the openness and the relative lack of censorship.  When a budding author writes a book and gets it self-published on Amazon.com and other services, virtually everything is fair game in terms of gere, content and even language.

But apparently, don’t be too concise now, or you’ll be booted!

A person who has done some self-publishing through Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) reported on an author’s forum site that she has recently received a letter from Kindle Direct Publishing of Amazon.com saying that the company will soon be removing Kindle e-books that are less than 2,500 in length, citing “we remove titles from sale that may create a poor customer experience.

Content that is less than 2,500 words is often disappointing to our customers and does not provide an enjoyable reading experience.” The letter goes on to give the author five days to fix the affected e-book (in other words “fluff it up” with more content to exceed the 2,500-word threshold) and other books by the author that don’t meet the content threshold before Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) removes the content from its sales platform.

After the post was made in the forum, there were several comments from other authors, such as “When did they make THAT decision? A lot of erotica will be affected.”

Another poster wrote, “I do kind of like that they are trying to put more emphasis on quality standards. That can only be good for all of us who strive to put out quality material.”

And then there is this about Amazon.com: “Ah, first they take the porn out of the search results, now they’re going after the shorts.”

There are some e-books on Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) that are collections or poems or essays that may fall under that threshold. What do you think? Should a word count be a criterion for a “poor customer experience”? Is this a form of censorship?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

DISCLOSURE: None