The Kafkaesque Blindness of Amazon’s Content Review Team
A report on my second battle with this bureaucracy
Another day, another battle with the bureaucracy at Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.
Elsewhere on Medium, in “The Curse of Bureaucratic Myopia at Kindle Direct Publishing,” I reported on the catch-22 that KDP’s automations perpetrated in temporarily preventing my anthology of philosophical articles, Religion’s Travesty of God, from being self-published. The content review team observed that the chapters are freely available on the internet (namely, as articles on Medium), so I would have to prove that I hold the copyright.
I explained to them by email that I collect these articles which I post on Medium and I self-publish them as paperback and eBook anthologies because some of my readers prefer to read the articles in those convenient formats. I also pointed out that I’ve already published several such anthologies on KDP, so those had evidently passed the review process. KDP and I went back and forth by email and even over the phone, and to cut to the chase, KDP blocked the book and prevented it from being published.
Then I realized I could write a Medium article about that ordeal, quoting liberally from that very email exchange to prove that the person posting those articles on Medium…
