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E-books of numbered novels - why so many missing from Amazon?

Kinggodzillak

Captain
Captain
Back in March 2011 I bought a Kindle, which seems to have spent most of the last three years gathering dust in a desk drawer. Now I'm determined both to get some use out of the thing, and to catch up on my Trek reading which I'm way behind on.

One of the first things I did when I originally got my Kindle was to draw up a list of all the numbered TOS/TNG/DS9 novels, to see which were available on Amazon.co.uk and how much they all cost. Somehow that list survived and I found myself consulting it the other day, after noticing that a few of the prices had dropped since 2011.

But the other thing I noticed was that huge chunks of the TOS & TNG numbered novels ranges are no longer available as Kindle e-books here in the UK.

In March 2011, the list of missing TOS novels looked like this:

31) Battlestations!
84) Assignment:Eternity.

But as of April 2014, it looks like this;

2) The Entropy Effect
3) The Klingon Gambit
15) Corona
19) The Tears of the Singers
22) Shadow Lord
24) Killing Time
25) Dwellers in the Crucible
26) Pawns and Symbols
27) Mindshadow
28) Crisis on Centaurus
29) Dreadnought!
30) Demons
31) Battlestations!
32) Chain of Attack
37) Bloodthirst
38) The IDIC Epidemic
39) Time for Yesterday
40) Timetrap
41) The Three-Minute Universe
42) Memory Prime
51) Enemy Unseen
52) Home is the Hunter
53) Ghost Walker
54) A Flag Full of Stars
55) Renegade
56) Legacy
57) The Rift
58) Faces of Fire
59) The Disinherited
60) Ice Trap
61) Sanctuary
62) Death Count
63) Shell Game
64) The Starship Trap
65) Windows on a Lost World
66) From the Depths
67) The Great Starship Race
75) First Frontier
84) Assignment:Eternity

Memory Prime is still *technically* available as part of the Worlds in Collision book from the Signature Edition range (where it forms a double bill with Prime Directive). You just can't get it on its own. Also, I still have access to The Disinherited in my Amazon account, since I bought it in May 2011.

TNG is similarly affected. In March 2011 the list of missing TNG novels amounted to;

28) Here There Be Dragons
58) Gemworld 1
59) Gemworld 2

But now...

4) Survivors
10) A Rock and a Hard Place
13) The Eyes of the Beholders
14) Exiles
15) Fortune's Light
16) Contamination
17) Boogeymen
18) Q-In-Law
19) Perchance to Dream
20) Spartacus
21) Chains of Command
22) Imbalance
23) War Drums
24) Nightshade
25) Grounded
26) The Romulan Prize
27) Guises of the Mind
28) Here There Be Dragons
35) The Romulan Stratagem

As with The Disinherited, I still have access to the file for The Romulan Stratagem, which was one of the first e-books I bought.

Surprisingly, all the DS9 numbered novels are still available.

That's a lot of stuff to get taken down, isn't it? I wondered if it might only be certain authors whose works were unavailable, but that doesn't explain it. And why so many long consecutive chunks of the ranges? I can understand gaps scattered randomly around the range - but 17 in a row?

Popped over to Amazon.com and they all seem to be missing there too, although both Amazon.com & co.uk have plenty of German versions of many of the missing books. 'Our goal is to make every title available for Kindle.' say Amazon, so how come so many of them which were available once have disappeared? :confused:
 
I think you're being blocked from seeing some of these in the UK when you go on Amazon.com. A few of the titles you mentioned I own on Kindle and they still show as available for purchase for Kindle when I check from in the US. (I didn't have time to test all of them. Entropy Effect, Klingon Gambit and Assignment: Eternity are all available for Kindle when I look, though Entropy Effect is improbably $10. Romulan Stratagem is available.)

It's possible the Gemworld books, which I bought in 2011, were not available because of the error in which you can't distinguish which book is which unless you have cover view on. (Both books display as GEMWORLD and until an update last year, both books had the same copyright page, calling them GEMWORLD Part 1)
 
Living in the U.S., I can't tell you why those titles aren't available to you. I can verify that most, if not every single title you listed, is available as an ebook in general and on the Kindle specifically from U.S. sites.

I'm very sorry your selection isn't better.

- Byron
 
I managed to find The Romulan Stratagem on Amazon UK, under its little-known alternate title of 'Rumulan Stratagem'. :)
 
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