Amazon yanks author 'Connect' blogs and some customer reviews

On Saturday Amazon.com deleted the Amazon Connect blogs that authors use to post commentary on the product pages of their books, and the company posted a cryptic message that the program was undergoing "changes."

UPDATE: I've been informed that Amazon notified some publishers via e-mail last week that Connect would be upgraded and restored by Wednesday.

On author profile pages like mine, the Amazon connect posts currently don't appear at all. Before the weekend, the most recent blog posts had appeared at the top of the profile page. On the author profiles, there's no explanation for the deleted blog posts. However, after navigating to the URL for a Connect blog, the the following message appears:

Amazon's blogs are temporarily unavailable. We're making big changes, so please try again later.

Amazon Connect has been highly popular with authors, many of whom use the program to appeal directly to their audience from Amazon's product page.

It's possible that Amazon is clarifying the rules for acceptable content for Connect posts. For example, many authors have been posting lengthy, unlicensed quotations from book reviews published elsewhere. Amazon requires such reviews to be abbreviated to 20 words or less to fit its interpretation of the "Fair Use" exemption under copyright law.

Also, within the past week, some authors have also reported that customer reviews have been deleted from their book pages, although it's unclear whether the deletions are simply a technical glitch or part of Amazon's revamping of the Connect program. In some cases, authors suspect that Amazon has begun deleting reviews for books which contain wording deemed "inappropriate."