Okazjonalnie o książkach

I came to Booklikes having decided to leave Goodreads when they sold out (in both senses of the term) to Amazon. Personally I find Amazon a necessary evil, their market dominance is such that without some kind of presence on their site, authors and small publishers risk being excluded from a major 'shop window' for their work.

Unfortunately their apparent desire to dominate the market place is not healthy and whilst I personally think they provide generally a good service to their customers they are not particularly a great supporter of the producers of the work and are notoriously difficult to deal with, with a degree of arrogance that borders on the absurd.

I have a new book out, 'The Gathering' and it is available in paperback and on all e-book readers including Amazon's Kindle.

The original artwork for the cover submitted to the ISBN registrar who feed ISBN data to all the trade databases including Amazon, changed prior to launch and is the same for the e-book and the paperback.

Whilst the ISBN registrar has replaced that artwork image and fed it through to all the trade companies who have adjusted their records accordingly, Amazon alone have decided that they will not change the original artwork for the paperback book - so they now use two different cover designs, the Kindle version, which is correct and the Paperback version which is wrong.

Despite 3 requests to change the artwork on the paperback book to that which is correct and held in all other databases, they refuse to do so (and have taken the trouble to refuse 3 times!)

This kind of arrogance is exactly why many of us fear a continuing growing dominance in the marketplace which needs to be curbed.

Oh - and by the way, if any of you buy the book you will of course get the correct cover, not the one that Amazon think it should be - so you might like to send a note to them telling them so - clearly they may be more interested in the views of the customer than the author or copyright owner!