The Demise of #Amazon Connect

Quite a bit of chatter in the writing and publishing worlds about the demise of Amazon Connect. From my post to pod_publishing:

My more optimistic view on the demise of AmazonConnect is that everything about Amazon’s bookstore is a giant data mining experiment. If they remove a feature, or make it less prominent, it is because, over the whole store, it is not paying its way.

Now, this is from their point of view, not ours — so a feature could increase sales (good for us) but be extremely expensive (bad for them) and therefore be killed (bad for us).

The feature could also be good for some authors (maybe even including those of us who liked blogging to the detail pages) but not for most, and therefore be killed (bad for us).

On the whole, though, I think this is a place to apply the Copernican principle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle

The most likely situation is that we do not occupy a privileged position in the universe, and that, in fact, Amazon Connect was not doing us much good, and has been replaced by a service, Author Central, that Amazon’s data shows to be more cost-effective on the whole.

This same chain of logic is why I always use SITB for my books. If a feature persists on Amazon over the long period, it is almost certain that their data shows that it drives sales over the whole store.