Dear Mr. Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Amazon Executive Team, Seller Forum Moderators

Thank you for taking the time to read our email regarding this delicate issue affecting us and many important Booksellers on the US Amazon Marketplace for over five years.

This issue is causing millions of dollars in losses to everyone involved and a lot of stress due to unfair copyright/trademark account suspensions.

We are currently selling millions per year on Amazon worldwide and it continues to be imminently ruined by this unfair issue.

We are book sellers, the most innocent and pure product in the world. We are not selling Chinese fake products.

We are offering books from Ingram’s catalog, which are authorized for listing and selling from the same book supplier Jeff started the company in the nineties.

The same catalog that Amazon uses to create the listings and sell books.

When a copyright or trademark complaint is filed on Amazon it could be related to many reasons, among them:

a) There are authors and publishers, generally new or independent ones, who are not aware that Amazon sellers are authorized by a distributor like Ingram for selling their books. Amazon itself lists these books too, being Ingram, Amazon’s first book supplier and still their supplier. We have screenshots as proof that Amazon is penalizing booksellers for books that Amazon itself is also listing.

b) An active legal dispute between the author and the publisher (royalties, etc) but not related to the bookseller .

c) A book publishing contract may have ended. The book is reprinted, and the author files a complaint on Amazon after seeing the old edition listed.

d) A wrong advice from Amazon support asking rights owners to open unfair complaints (see below)

e) Lots of other unfair reasons, we only explained a few.

Please see some actual case examples for some actual unfair copyright and trademark complaints we are experiencing right now.

Case 1 : Harper Colling complaint. They retracted the complaint two times. The Amazon system is still showing it. We have proof of Harper Collins collaborating and informing us they had retracted it, but again, still appearing, a bug on the Amazon system.

Case 2: Pokemon Coloring Books, the rights owner is not replying to us. We identified and have proof, that Amazon US , and Amazon UK, were selling the same books as booksellers like us , in good faith, as explained above (Ingram sends us the catalog files, we list them in good faith as their legal / catalog team has previously included in their catalog as authorized for reselling)

Case 3: A rights owner “Laura Ash….” (name masked) opened 6 copyright complaints for an unbelievable reason, being WRONGFULLY advised by the Amazon KDP team (proof attached) to open copyright complaints when her issue was related to her own books having incorrect metadata loaded by possibly Amazon or herself.

We have given a clear explanation of this “old” Amazon booksellers issue, which has not improved, after dozens of calls, exchanges, explanations on the phone, by email, with the catalog team, with emails sent to Jeff, to the executive theam, with dozens of account managers, even with a well known meeting between Ingram’s owner John Ingram and Amazon’s team in Seattle in 2020/2021 about the issue which I understand did not lead to a solution.

We want to comment that we started sending DMCA’s which as you know it is the last resource to use when a rights owner does not remove an unfair complaint.

Amazon fails to remove them on the time they say they will, which I understand is approximately 15 days.

We will be also sending an email to 20 Amazon Account managers who kindly helped us in the past, as well as to Andy’s and Jeff’s teams so that hopefully this year this unfair issue for booksellers may be resolved.

Please, dear fellow booksellers, don’t be afraid to post your experience with this issue here, so that we can have a solution offered for all of us.

The only way is to make a group statement so that Amazon understands this is a situation that needs action.

We are one of the pioneers in complaining about this issue since 2018, and have had more than 100 talks over the phone, calls with the Amazon catalog team (they called us) who said to us in 2022 they would be working in a “new appeal system solution “ for booksellers as they understood we are the middle men and caught in unfair situations.

Hopefully all this information we presented here will be useful so that Amazon becomes a fairer and safer marketplace for booksellers.

We are looking forward to having our account reinstated as soon as possible.

We had a call on the phone with Jennifer who kindly annotated each and every appeal we made for the complaints on our account and said she would be escalating the issue to Account Health Support.

I hope the moderators will do the same please.

With all our respects,

Cordially,