UK Amazon E-books On Vacation

On Tuesday of this week, I noticed that all of my e-books had vanished from Amazon UK. Since I have a UK Associates account through which I sell e-books, I e-mailed them to ask if it was a glitch. The following is heart from their answer:

"For a period of time, e-Books will not be available on Amazon.co.uk. We are sorry for an(y) inconvenience this may cause. We encourage customers looking for e-Books to visit Mobipocket.com (www.mobipocket.com), an Amazon.com company, offering tens of thousands of titles for immediate purchase."

I never sold a lot of e-books on Amazon UK, in fact, it seemed that one sale a week was enough to keep a title hanging around the top 100 there. I can understand that with such a low volume, it just didn't justify a tab in their site navigation (the tab is gone), much less customer support for problems with downloads, DRM, etc. However, their answer seems to be saying that they haven't abandoned e-books permanently, more like a vacation. E-books are gone from the other international Amazon's that carried them as well.

The funny thing is that my e-books aren't available through mobipocket, which was purchased by Amazon a few months ago. Neither were any of the other e-books I checked, whether they were distributed by Lightning Source or not. Since it was a vanishingly small part of my business I'm not worried, I just hope it's not catching on this side of the pond:-)