Update: Device Limits on DTP/Indie Authors on Kindle

On Thursday, I broke the news that Amazon had instituted a new 5-device limit on all books published thru their DTP system (essentially all independent authors). This limit hit every DTP book, regardless of the original publishing date and came as surprising news to many authors. Several of them asked Amazon what was going on, since this provided roughly 17% less value from an DTP published book versus one from a major publishing house and since the authors had not asked for the change (most, in fact, considered themselves to be the "publisher," being self-published, and not Amazon, which it turns out is the case).

It seems that Amazon's DTP support didn't know anything about the change (they asked the authors to provide ASIN's, so they could research the issue -- but this affected every DTP ASIN in the store). The employee assigned the "dtpadmin" login on the forum (if it's one employee, it's one with a fake registration date, from 1969, so is probably a shared login by an group of employees) later posted this note, at 1:41PM (presumably PDT):

Hello,

We have identified an error in our system. We are fixing the problem to remove the device limit for DTP titles. We apologize for this error.

Thanks!

Sounds a lot like the response following the recent uproar when all LGBT titles disappeared from the Amazon search engines and sales ranks. Hopefully this was just an "error," but as of midnight tonight (EDT), no corrections have been made to the actual book listings.