Separately, I'm hearing a rumor or two that they (Amazon) have started asking indie authors to archive old or under-performing books. I don't understand the rationale, but it might fit with the idea of managing the merchandise for better margins.
I'm thinking of going wide, which means another learning curve.
I can see a book that has sold zero copies (seen in responses) being considered under-performing.
If they are selling copies of their ebooks, how many is too few to be worth keeping in stock? How much does disk space cost on the scale Amazon uses a month for books that have seen sales in the past and might continue to see sales in the future?
Would that simply mean such self-publishing authors of ebooks would move to blogs, Patreon, or similar sites and email a file link for their ebooks to download to moble or desk/laptop book readers?
Or shifting over to Google Books, unless Google institutes similar policy changes.
I did not get that ezines were being affected by this in the original post. Losing electronic magazines does sound like a siginificant blow to publishing at the short story level. This is just Amazon/Amazon Kindle, correct? With Google Books unaffected for the time being.
The smaller the server farm owner, the more disk space does cost per month, but it does tend to be trivial for text files. I can see electronic magazines needing to consider if they have enough subscriptions to justify server farm costs for maintaining back issues and access while putting new issues up.
