Few days ago we'd featured a very interesting eBooks website: Unglue.it that aims at revolutionizing the digital books industry. A website where authors can publish their books for free under Creative Commons license. These authors create a campaign where they announce the amount of money required to be raised in order to publish (unglue) their eBook for free. Those who support that book/author can participate in crowdfunding it.

Unfortunately Unglue.it has been put in a tricky situation when Amazon decided to no longer provide their payment services. This has led to suspension of all ongoing campaigns on Unglue.it.



Eric Hellman, founder of Unglue.it received an indication from Amazon couple of weeks ago that they will be reviewing Unglue's business model, on Wednesday a senior account manager at Amazon informed Unglue that the concept of crowdfunding in general raises 'regulatory' issues and 'contractual obligations'.

Hellman told Library Journal that as per his conversation with Amazon's senior account manager Amazon has decided not support any business model that runs on the concept of 'crowdfunding' with the exception of Kickstarter.


Unglue was forced to void all pending authorizations for campaigns on their website, thankfully a recently "unglued" eBook Oral Literature of Africa remains unaffected. It was a campaign that raised $7,743 from 259 supporters. The eBook is now available under Creative Common Licence for anybody to read and share.


Here's what Hellman wrote in Unglue's official blog:

"Amazon Payments has informed us that they will no longer process pledge payments for Unglue.it, forcing us to suspend all active ungluing campaigns. According to a Senior Account Manager at Amazon, Amazon has decided against “boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts at this time”. Amazon has been providing payment services for Unglue.it, as it does for the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter."

When PaidContent.com shared this news on their site, they received a response from Amazons' spokesperson stating that:

"We support a wide variety of businesses, but we have regulatory obligations as a licensed money services business for how we operate. Unfortunately, Unglue.it’s model is not the same as some other crowdfunding services and at this time does not allow us to meet those obligations."

There could have been many more eBooks 'unglued', but before that Unglue will have to overcome this road bump. They've sent their application to PayPal who are in the process of reviewing it. We sincerely hope Unglue.it is able to come out of this situation and concentrate on doing what they do best, "unglue as many books as they can".

"With your continuing support, we will survive these difficulties to unglue many, many books. Maybe someday, billions of people will read unglued books and will look back with amazement on the span of years when Amazon dominated the world of ebooks." writes Hellman.