Every year, countless books are being pirated directly from Amazon. Thieves are downloading Kindle books and scraping the formatting from the file, then publishing these stolen books on sites all over the internet, making profits from the misappropriated work of others. 

Authors work hard. Every book published represents hundreds of hours spent writing, and often thousands of dollars invested in editing, formatting, cover design, marketing and copyrighting. Writing is not a profitable business for most, it's something authors do because they love it, and because they want to share their stories with the world. Stealing their books only makes it more likely that an author will not be able to write anymore.

The problem of ebook piracy has grown so endemic to the publishing world that many authors are releasing books with the expectation that they are going to be stolen, because Amazon, the leading publisher of ebooks on the planet, is doing very little to protect authors or their work. They do not watermark Kindle books, which means there is no way of tracking what individuals are responsible for theft, and they offer authors zero recourse if it's discovered that their copyrighted work has been stolen. This needs to change.

We're asking Amazon for better protections for the ebooks being distributed through their sites. If they are going to make money on the work of thousands of passionate artists, they should at least uphold their end of the covenant. Give authors the tools they need to protect their work from copyright infringers.