Amazon Payments has informed us that they will no longer process pledge payments for Unglue.it, forcing us to suspend all active ungluing campaigns. According to a Senior Account Manager at Amazon, Amazon has decided against “boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts at this time”. Amazon has been providing payment services for Unglue.it, as it does for the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Unglue.it offers a win-win solution to readers, who want to read and share their favorite books conveniently, and rights holders, who want to be rewarded for their work.

The Unglue.it website supports crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for specific, already-published books. When a campaign reaches the goal set by the rights holders, Unglue.it pays them to “unglue” their work. Supporters get a digital edition with a Creative Commons license as specified during the campaign. These licenses make the edition free and legal for everyone to read, copy, and redistribute, worldwide. Everybody benefits.

Amazon has required us to void all pending authorizations. However, this does not affect the Oral Literature in Africa Campaign, which was successful and has been fully funded. That ebook, being produced by Open Book Publishers, is almost ready for release. It will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license for you to enjoy, use, share, translate, remix.

We are already hard at work to implement a new payment method for Unglue.it, and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available. Until then, the best way for you to express your support is to register as an ungluer, urge your friends to register as ungluers, and let us know which books you want to unglue by making a wishlist. The more ungluers we have, the more rights holders will join us for our re-launch. We’re also looking forward to hearing from you here, on our Facebook page, or on Twitter with the hashtag #unglueit.

With your continuing support, we will survive these difficulties to unglue many, many books. Maybe someday, billions of people will read unglued books and will look back with amazement on the span of years when Amazon dominated the world of ebooks.