Amazon drops Ingram Lightning Source Ebooks for Mobipocket

I first wrote about the Amazon acquisition of the French ebook company Mobipocket last August, in the context of the DRM (Digital Rights Management) wars. Ebooks sold on Amazon by way of Lightning Source have been adding around $500 a month to my bottom line for the last couple years. Just a month after the Mobipocket acquisition, all of my ebooks disappeared from the Amazon UK site with no announcement being made by any of the parties involved. My associate links were left sending customers to a placeholder page on Amazon that declared:

"For a period of time, e-Books will not be available on Amazon.co.uk. We are sorry for an(y) inconvenience this may cause. We encourage customers looking for e-Books to visit Mobipocket.com (www.mobipocket.com), an Amazon.com company, offering tens of thousands of titles for immediate purchase."

Now, if I was a smart guy, I would have seen the writing on the wall then and signed up with Mobipocket. Just a couple weeks ago I noticed a flood of Mobipocket titles (and fake titles from some nasty folk who were using the Mobipocket catalog to promote questionable websites) appear on Amazon. Again, I failed to put two and two together and realize that it was the beginning of the end for LSI ebooks on Amazon.

After my ebooks began disappearing from Amazon last week and I made a post on the subject, I received some e-mail feedback from readers about similar problems, and finally, the official news from Lightning Source, the bottom line of which:

"Amazon.com has decided to discontinue its use of Ingram's e-Book delivery services effective mid-July for new e-Book sales and the end of August for prior e-Book sales."

OK, so I'll look into signing up with Mobipocket if their economic model and DRM solution make sense for me, but I'm getting a little tired of these surprises:-) I just hope that the next surprise isn't Amazon discontinuing Lightning Source print-on-demand books in favor of their own Booksurge.