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Comment by kevinconroy | Hacker News Reader

Attention all CEOs/high level folks: This is the exact reason why you need to regularly answer questions in your customer service queue and monitor responses (at least some of the time). Yes, sometimes things like this happen, but if you have first hand experience helping your customers resolve problems, you're much less likely to end up with an email chain trending on HN/reddit/etc.

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How would monitoring responses help here? Amazon's response was entirely correct. From their short, plain English document describing the rules ( https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2TOZW0S... ):

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Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content

Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content, however we may choose to not sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books.

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The author's submission does not qualify, based on the information he says he provided to Amazon.

edit: note specifically that in his response to Amazon, he does not say that he is the copyright owner of the book. His response gives the impression that any publishing rights he has come from the free license that book is under.

What's the probability that Bezos would have answered this email and not some other email?

It's a matter of policy. If the higher ups at a company regularly service customer requests, and there is a consistent problem affecting a number of users, they can effect a change of policy. It won't necessarily help this particular person this particular time, but it may help both them and everyone else with the problem if it changes policy.

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