Why I Am Publishing My Books on Amazon? My Books Have Been Pirated on Amazon.

These Hard Copy Kalimba Magic Books are now available at Amazon.

Hi, I’m Mark Holdaway. I founded Kalimba Magic in 2005 and I immediately started writing Kalimba Books based on my Kalimba Tablature. I am particularly skilled at creating these Kalimba Books. Writing them has been a great joy in my life over the last 16 years, and it is an important component of my livelihood.

Kalimba Magic has the best information for playing kalimba. Many of my competitors agree – they have pirated my materials. Now, they are selling books on Amazon that use my copyrighted materials. Even though I have submitted the intellectual property forms with Amazon, they have yet to respond. That means others enrich themselves from my work, and through their inaction, Amazon is facilitating this theft. Frankly, it makes me ill.

And yet, the way to claim my own intellectual property is for me to sell my books on Amazon.

What Can You Do to Help?

Please buy my books on Amazon. To counter the piracy of my books and website information on Amazon, I have decided to print and sell my books on Amazon, directly challenging the pirated products. Currently, there are seven kalimba books that I have published on Amazon. Four are for the ubiquitous 17-Note Kalimba in C, and two are for Alto Kalimba, and one is for the 8-Note Kalimba.

And Please Leave Feedback. After you have sat with my book, I would love it if you wrote a review of the product on Amazon.

The Plan For Kalimba Magic Books

We are in the process of migrating most of the Kalimba Magic books and ebooks over to Amazon. At a rate of several per month, this will take more than a year to complete. We will keep you informed as new books become available.

The Amazon-printed books are less expensive, and the hard copy books will cost $12. As the books become available on Amazon, we will also drop the price to $12 at Kalimba Magic.

The Amazon books will not have a CD, and cannot have live links from each song to the sound recordings. Rather, each book will give a URL and a QR code that will direct your phone or computer to a web page with the sound recordings and other support information.

Song books that were previously only available as downloads will be available as printed books on Amazon.

What about upcoming Kindle versions? So far I haven’t found a satisfactory path to transform the book files into Kindle format. It seems to me the thing to do for these graphics-rich pages is to create books explicitly FOR the Kindle format. It is an area of R&D.

We will continue to sell the instructional download PDFs from Kalimba Magic. I like these better than the Kindle downloads. They have live links to assist you in listening to the songs. And they are formatted exactly as I wish them to be.

Not What I Wanted, But…

I never wanted to deal with Amazon. I thought Kalimba Magic could stand alone. I wanted to be writing new books, not transitioning my books into Amazon. But now, forced into working with Amazon to protect my intellectual property, I see that this will be a good thing for the Kalimba World:

Books will be available for less.

More of my instructional guides will be available as printed books, and they will still be available as instructional downloads.

The hard copy books will be available for free or inexpensive local shipping in all the places Amazon prints books: Japan, Australia, Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain… and the USA.

I suppose it is a brave new world moving forward. It was all along, and I’ve just now opened my eyes.

How to Read and Write Kalimba Tablature

Why is Kalimba Tablature Better Than Numbers-Based?

Free Blank Tablature for Various Kalimbas – Updated and Expanded