How the company that made books easier to sell became the company publishers are afraid to lose
In 2022, the Independent Book Publishers Association started hearing a troubling story on repeat. Established publishers—not fly-by-night operators, but companies with books that had been selling on Amazon for years—were logging into their Kindle Direct Publishing accounts and finding them suspended or terminated. One publisher said Amazon had accused them of copyright infringement over a book they insisted they had every right to publish. Another reported the exact same thing happening to them.
Overnight, the door closed. And in some cases, publishers couldn’t get a straight answer to the question that mattered most: What exactly did we do wrong?
That’s the uncomfortable reality of modern publishing. Amazon is simultaneously one of the greatest things that ever happened to books—and one of the greatest risks facing the people who publish them. For a publisher, Amazon can be indispensable. That’s precisely the problem.
A single company, an outsized share of the market
Amazon doesn’t publish its market share, and there’s no definitive figure for the percentage of all books it sells in the U.S. But the evidence available paints a clear picture: Amazon accounts for more than half of all book purchases in the country, according to industry reporting, and its share of ebook sales is even larger—recent estimates put it somewhere around 70 to 80 percent.
That alone would be a remarkable position for one retailer to hold. But Amazon isn’t just a retailer. Kindle Direct Publishing lets authors and publishers put ebooks, paperbacks and hardcovers directly onto Amazon without a traditional distributor, giving them direct access—as Amazon puts it—to its enormous global customer base.
That combination is what sets Amazon apart from anything publishing has dealt with before. It’s the bookstore, the publishing platform, the ebook store, the print-on-demand operation and the recommendation engine, all at once. Increasingly, it’s also the gatekeeper standing between a publisher and its readers. If you want to sell books today, Amazon is hard to avoid. If you want to publish them, it’s even harder.
How we got here
Publishing didn’t always work this way. For most of its history, publishers depended on bookstores—but bookstores depended on publishers too, and there were plenty of them to choose from: Barnes & Noble, independents, wholesalers, libraries, catalogs, specialty shops, and eventually a scattering of online retailers.
Then Amazon showed up, and for a while it was just one more place to buy a book. That didn’t last. Amazon built an online store with an inventory no physical shop could match, since it didn't need millions of square feet of retail space to keep millions of titles in stock. Then came Prime. Then Kindle. Then KDP, print-on-demand, and the algorithms that decide what readers see first. Each innovation made Amazon more useful to readers, and each one made it a little harder for publishers to live without.
There’s a reason authors love KDP: it tore down the old barriers to publication. No printing press, no need to order 2,000 copies and hope they sell, no warehouse to maintain. Upload a book, and it's available almost immediately to readers anywhere in the world. It helped dismantle the old publishing gatekeepers, and that really was revolutionary.
It was also enormously profitable for Amazon because the company didn’t just hand publishers the tools to publish. It also owns the marketplace where those books get sold. Picture a shopping mall where you rent a storefront, but the landlord also controls the search engine shoppers use to find you, decides how prominently your products show up, processes every transaction, and can ultimately decide whether your store stays open. That’s a lot closer to how the relationship actually works.
When the platform becomes the problem
Publishers have learned that Amazon doesn’t need to formally ban a book to hurt its sales. It can quietly change how a title appears, alter its discoverability, revoke its advertising eligibility, delay its availability, remove it outright, suspend the account behind it, or, in the most serious cases, end the publishing relationship entirely.
Amazon’s own KDP policies acknowledge as much: the company can reject or remove content that violates its guidelines, using a mix of machine learning, automation, and human reviewers, with an appeals process for authors and publishers who want to push back. Amazon’s defense of this system is straightforward, and not unreasonable on its face: at the scale KDP operates, with hundreds of thousands of new titles uploaded every year, some amount of automated enforcement is unavoidable. Fraud, copyright theft, counterfeit listings, and fake reviews are real problems, and the company argues that a heavy-handed, largely automated system is what keeps the platform usable for everyone else. From Amazon’s point of view, this isn't overreach—it’s basic content moderation at a scale no human team could manage alone.
The problem isn’t that Amazon has rules, or even that it enforces them with algorithms. It’s what happens when the company enforcing them becomes so important that a single mistake—an automated flag, a false match, a wrongful accusation—can threaten an entire publishing business, with no guarantee that the appeals process will catch the error before the damage is done.
Picture spending twenty years building a publishing company—acquiring titles, paying editors and designers, negotiating rights, commissioning translations, building an audience—with Amazon as one of your most important sales channels. Then one morning, an email arrives. Your account is suspended. A title has been blocked. Your catalog has vanished. The email cites a violation of Amazon’s terms, but doesn’t say which book, which passage, which piece of metadata, or which complaint triggered it. Sometimes the reason is obvious. Sometimes it isn’t, and that ambiguity is frightening precisely because the stakes are so high. Amazon’s own rules state that uploading material without the necessary rights can lead to a book's removal, damage to the account, or lost royalties, and if a KDP account is closed for good, Amazon says access to it disappears entirely, along with the books, the sales reports, and the tax documents. For a small publisher, that isn’t an inconvenience. It can be an existential event.
And if this is precarious for publishing companies with staff, lawyers, and years of institutional memory, it’s far worse for individual authors publishing on their own. A self-published author who runs into a KDP suspension has no legal department to draft an appeal, no PR team to make noise, and often no other income stream to fall back on while the dispute gets sorted out. For someone whose entire writing career runs through a single KDP account, a wrongful flag isn’t a business setback—it can mean losing access to every book they've ever published, overnight, with a support ticket as their only recourse. Publishers at least have some leverage, however thin. Many individual authors have none at all.
This is really a question of what kind of relationship publishers have with Amazon. A bookstore is a business you sell through; if it refuses to carry your book, you find another one. A platform is something your business comes to depend on, and if Amazon refuses to carry your book, your other options (Ingram, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, your own website, libraries, independent stores) rarely offer the same scale or buying behavior. Amazon knows this. It doesn’t need to threaten anyone; the structure of the market does that work on its own.
Extraordinary reach, extraordinary dependence
This is the bargain publishers have struck: Amazon gives them extraordinary reach, and in exchange, they give Amazon extraordinary dependence. It’s a remarkably efficient arrangement, until it isn’t, and the power imbalance becomes impossible to ignore.
This isn’t only a problem for small publishers, either. Even the biggest names in the industry have felt Amazon's leverage. The 2014 standoff between Amazon and Hachette is the most public example: as the two companies fought over commercial terms, Amazon delayed shipments and made some Hachette titles harder to buy. The message was unmistakable. Amazon didn’t need to stop selling Hachette’s books. It only needed to make selling them more difficult.
There’s a real irony here. Amazon’s greatest contribution to publishing may also be its greatest threat. It democratized access to readers, let independent authors bypass traditional publishers, made print-on-demand practical, and built a marketplace where a tiny publisher could sell a book right alongside Penguin Random House. Twenty years ago, a small publishing company might spend months chasing bookstore distribution; today, it can upload a title and reach millions of customers almost instantly. That’s genuine progress. But progress creates dependency, and once enough businesses depend on the same infrastructure, that infrastructure ends up holding enormous power over them.
It’s not that publishers are sitting still, either. Bookshop.org, which routes a share of every sale to independent bookstores, has grown specifically as an alternative for readers who want to avoid Amazon without giving up online convenience. Ingram continues to expand its distribution and print-on-demand services as an option that doesn’t run through a single retailer. More publishers are investing in direct-to-reader sales through their own websites, betting that owning the customer relationship is worth more than the extra reach Amazon provides. None of these alternatives comes close to matching Amazon’s scale, and that’s exactly the point; they're not yet a replacement, but a hedge. Their growth is itself evidence of how seriously the industry takes the risk of relying on one company for the majority of its sales.
And that’s the paradox at the center of all this: nobody in publishing seriously wants Amazon to disappear. Publishers complain about it, authors complain about it, bookstores complain about it, and then everyone checks their Amazon sales, because the customers, the infrastructure, and the money are all there. For most publishers, walking away isn’t a principled stand. It’s an act of economic self-harm. That’s exactly why the relationship is so hard to untangle: Amazon isn’t simply a company publishers dislike. It’s a company many of them cannot afford to live without.
The real danger isn’t the rules—it’s the concentration
Every marketplace needs rules, and that was never the issue. The real danger is concentration: when one company becomes so essential that losing access to it can threaten a publisher’s livelihood, the normal balance between buyer and seller starts to break down. A publisher can spend decades building a business, and Amazon can become central to it within a few years, leaving that business exposed to a single opaque, automated decision that puts everything at risk.
That’s an extraordinary amount of power to hand to any company, especially one whose primary responsibility isn’t to the publishing industry, to authors, or to publishers—it’s to Amazon. The uncomfortable truth of modern publishing isn’t that Amazon is the enemy. It’s that Amazon has become too important to be treated like an ordinary retailer. It’s the marketplace, the infrastructure, and—often—the gatekeeper, all at once. And when the gatekeeper can close the gate without a clear explanation, a publisher can spend decades building something only to discover it was never entirely theirs to control.
None of this means the situation is fixed in place. Regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere have shown growing interest in how much power large platforms hold over the sellers who depend on them, and publishing is unlikely to stay outside that conversation for long. Clearer appeals processes, faster human review of automated decisions, and real portability between platforms wouldn’t require Amazon to give up its size—just its ability to wield that size without accountability. Until something like that takes shape, the responsibility falls on publishers and authors to do what they can: diversify sales channels where possible, keep meticulous rights documentation, and treat every Amazon account as valuable but not permanent. It isn’t a solution. But in a market with one dominant gatekeeper, it may be the only leverage available.
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