Novelrank is gone | Hacker News Reader

Novelrank is gone

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53 pointsilamont16 comments

From their site:

On August 21st, Amazon decided that after 9 years, without warning, NovelRank violated their Terms of Use. On August 31st they followed up all appeals by closing the final domain: Amazon.com, effectively killing NovelRank.

Please export any data you want to keep as soon as possible.

If any publisher or other entity is interested in purchasing the valuable NovelRank domain please email me a reasonable offer: mlurig@novelrank.com.

I was NovelRank's biggest fan. I made it for authors like me; who barely sold any books, but it still felt good to know that someone found your writing valuable. It grew to be valuable to so many others. I'm sorry this has happened and I have to now focus on my new wife (married for the 1st time Aug 3rd) and what my future can be now that my income is gone.

Regretfully, Mario Lurig Founder, Developer, Advocate: NovelRank.com

I read that too. One mystery: How did he make income off it?

A combination of donations, affiliate links, and enterprise subscriptions.

>How much does NovelRank cost?[0]

>It's completely free! The site is supported by author donations, Amazon bounties, and affiliate income when book purchases occur from Amazon click-throughs on NovelRank.

>NovelRank also introduced NovelRank Enterprise Edition and the BuyBox Research Tool, which offers a private sales rank and price tracker for any product on any Amazon domain.[1]

[0] https://www.novelrank.com/faq

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/novelrank

Could the offering the subscription service be the cause of what Amazon claimed as a violation of their ToS? It doesn't really lead traffic straight to Amazon website, rather it feels like a resale/repackaging of Amazon's data.

Building a business around another platform can be extremely profitable, but has great risk attached to it as well. We have seen this time and time again. Be it changes to Twitter's API or changes to Instagram's API, it happens time and time again. The only way to stay safe from this is to build your business around an open source system, like Wordpress. However, I do think that there should be at least some protection against moves like these - depending on context of course.

If a company sees you bottling their moat, of course they’re going to come after you. I think this particular thing could have been symbiotic, and maybe valuable enough to be a reasonable acquisition target by Amazon, but it’s hard to thread that needle as a 3rd party tool, especially when many of them are adversarial because of lack of official API support, or the general difficulty of running a business based entirely off another business’s data.

From reading the comments, it seems a novel sales tracking system, Novel Rank [0], which depended entirely on Amazon sales rank data, has had their access denied, essentially shuttering the business.

[0] https://www.novelrank.com/

Anyone else missing context? The link opens to what seems like a Kindle related forum on mobile.

EDIT: Links to the forum post when I use "Request desktop site".

Yeah, feels like I don't know enough about how Novelrank worked to begin with to understand why it's somehow completely dependent on Amazon and cannot operate otherwise.

"NovelRank is the best free resource for authors to track the sales rank of their print and ebooks on Amazon with charting, sales estimates, RSS feeds and more."

I'm kinda surprised Amazon doesn't offer that as a dashboard to authors/publishers.

Maybe they plan to, and killing the competition is the first step.

They lost their source of revenue. But they can get the data easily by scraping or paying for a 3rd party API like the keepa API.

Plenty of other sales estimation tools, viral launch’s market intelligence, jungle scout, etc

Some of the stuff mentioned in the linked thread certainly smacks of monopolistic behavior. Given how much Trump hates Bezos, there might be a very real opportunity to get a govt. investigation of Amazon's anticompetetive tactics.

It's about time that data owned by big corporations be put in the public domain.

Non-creative data can't be copyrighted. However, Amazon can have whatever terms they like for their affiliate, bounty, and data APIs.

> Amazon can have whatever terms they like for their affiliate, bounty, and data APIs.

Not if the law said they couldn't.

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