Good news and bad news from crowd-funding book service Unglue.it. The good news is that its first ‘unglued’ book, Ruth H. Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa, is almost ready for release. The bad news is that they’ve had to suspend further campaigns because Amazon has reportedly told the site it will no longer process their payments.
Amazon has been processing Unglue.it payments since the site launched earlier this year. The site initially considered going with Paypal before deciding to go with Amazon. The latter provides payment processing for a growing number of websites, including other crowd-funding services such as Kickstarter. But now that Amazon has decided to no longer work with Unglue.it, the site is forced to void all pending transactions for its campaigns. Oral Literature in Africa is not affected because it was already funded and paid for.
Unglue.it promises to find a new payment processing system as soon as possible, and the site looks set to get up and running again soon. But the incident is a reminder that while the internet seems to offer a huge range of services and opportunities, many of them are supported by a very small core group of payment processing companies who enjoy considerable power.
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