The Mystery of the Disappearing Books

A sign and symptom of a very troubled world.

Dear Subscribers,

Some of you have written to tell me that, less than three weeks after Hollow Tree Press published my father's classic Three Investigators novels on Amazon, the books mysteriously disappeared from the site. Readers from Canada, Australia, the United States, Great Britain, and even Germany have contacted me in frustration and disappointment because when they went looking for the 60th anniversary editions, they couldn't find them.

They couldn't find them because on Thursday, July 4th, Steven's and my KDP account was taken down, in its entirety, by Amazon. With the account removed, both the e-book and the paperback editions of my father's novels vanished from every Amazon website worldwide.

As I reported to you in my June 11th post entitled "Robert Arthur Novels," before Steven and I hit the button on publishing the Hollow Tree Press editions of my father's books, we had no idea that Amazon's KDP division is widely understood to be the most inefficient, maddening, frustrating, illogical, non-responsive, and Kafkaesque company on the face of the earth.

As I also said in that post, this seems to be the result of KDP's business model, in which the so-called "Content Review Division" is actually an AI operation answerable to no one - not even the hopelessly ineffectual employees in its own "Customer Support Division" - and to which writers are never able to communicate more than once with the same human being in any division.

In my June 11th post I told you a bit about what went on at Amazon in the three weeks leading up to the eventual publication of Dad’s books, but I didn't tell you that the reason why seven of the e-books were held up from getting approved for almost a month was because Amazon's AI had "discovered," early on, that The Secret of Terror Castle was (supposedly) in the public domain.

As I eventually figured out, the reason the AI had drawn its false conclusion was because - for over two years - Amazon itself had been selling a pirated e-book edition of The Secret of Terror Castle on its American website. Presumably the person who had pirated this e-book had published it under Amazon's "public domain" option.

And guess what? Although Amazon has now stopped the sale of this pirated e-book, the page that describes it and lists it for sale is still up. In fact, (although I haven't actually done this myself) I'm betting that if you went looking for an e-book edition of The Secret of Terror Castle right now, although you'd be unable to find a sales page for the Hollow Tree Press edition, you'd be taken directly to the sales page of the pirated one – at least as long as you searched for it using Google.

However, although all that was bad enough, what has been going on recently has been even worse. Since Amazon is probably the biggest monopoly in human history, to be in the grip of its arbitrary machinations gives one a very good sense of what it must have been like to be a serf in the Middle Ages.

That’s not an exaggeration. And since what’s been happening at Amazon is merely an indice of what’s been happening right across the western world, my recent experience has brought home to me once again - though in a new way - that western civilization is clearly balanced on a knife edge.

It is moving with incredible rapidity toward a dystopian society intent on exerting total control, and corporations like Amazon are working hand-in-glove with both governments and other companies to render ordinary human beings powerless to effect real-world outcomes.

The one good thing that has happened as a result of recent events is that they’ve hardened my resolve to do whatever it takes to get the new Three Investigators series into the hands of a generation that desperately needs it. Jupiter, Pete and Bob are poised to once again help young people develop self-reliance and curiosity and determination, as well as a honed capacity to see that all is not always as it seems.

In any case, whatever happens with Amazon in the near future, I’m happy to be able to report that the ten e-books are now available again, on the Barnes and Noble website, and that the paperbacks should be available in about a week. Although it was time-consuming to set up an account, and get the books loaded, the process of publishing the books through Barnes and Noble was totally straightforward. Their site isn’t as fancy as Amazon’s, but it’s an online version of an old-fashioned bookstore.

On Barnes and Noble, Dad’s ten books have been linked as a series, so if you follow the link below, you should find all ten of the e-books (which are called ‘Nook’ books at Barnes and Noble), with Terror Castle at the top of the list, and as soon as Steven and I have received our author’s proof paperbacks and signed off on them, the paperbacks will join the e-books on the same series page.

As for Amazon, my previous experience with its tergervisations and circumlocutions and equivocations suggests that at the end of a very disorienting swim in a sea of the nebulous, we will finally hit dry ground again.

In the meantime, Steven and I will be working hard on preparing for the launch of the new series. Even though we've lost a few weeks of work time dealing with this black swan event, with any luck we'll still be able to move forward this fall - though almost certainly a month later than we had originally hoped to. Right now, I'm working hard on the dust jackets for the new novels with a very good artist.

With thanks for all the good wishes,

Elizabeth Arthur

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Classic+Three+Investigators%22?Ntk=P_Series_Title&Ns=P_Series_Number&Ntx=mode+matchall