Amazon 2025 Year-in-Review for Book Publishers
Amazon introduced a wide range of changes in 2025 that directly impacted book publishers. From shifts in advertising data and reporting, to evolving retail events, category restructuring, and changes to how books are discovered and purchased, the year brought meaningful updates across Amazon’s ecosystem.
This Amazon 2025 Year-in-Review highlights the most consequential developments publishers needed to understand, react to, and plan around throughout the year.
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What follows is a chronological record of those updates, organized for easy reference.
January 2, 2025
Conversion path reporting is launched, allowing advertisers to see how multiple Amazon Ads touchpoints contribute to book sales.
January 9, 2025
Amazon launches Amazon Retail Ad Service, expanding Amazon Ads inventory to off-Amazon websites through a new retail media network.
February 4, 2025
Amazon restructures religious book categories, removing “Christian Books & Bibles” from the browsing hierarchy and consolidating all subcategories directly under “Religion & Spirituality.” This change was later reversed.
March 19, 2025
Amazon announces its Big Spring Sale, running March 25–31, continuing its expansion of seasonal retail events impacting book discounting.
March 28, 2025
The autosuggest search experience expands to display book covers and allows shoppers to click directly into their preferred format from the search dropdown.
April 24, 2025
Amazon launches a 6-day Book Sale with no advance notice, requiring publishers to react the same day the event begins.
June 17, 2025
Amazon announces that Prime Day 2025 will run for four days (July 8–11), marking the first time the event has been extended beyond two days.
July 2025
Vine reviews become available prior to a book’s publication date, allowing early review collection before launch.
July 2025
Amazon withdraws from Google Shopping Ads, impacting referral traffic from Google and reducing competition within Google Shopping ad auctions.
September 14, 2025
Amazon Marketing Cloud data becomes available directly within the Amazon Ads interface, expanding advanced reporting and audience insights for advertisers.
September 17, 2025
Amazon introduces profit analytics within Amazon Ads, giving advertisers clearer visibility into profitability beyond revenue and ROAS.
September 2025
Amazon Ads partners with Netflix through its DSP, enabling programmatic access to Netflix inventory within Amazon’s advertising ecosystem.
October 7–8, 2025
Prime Big Deal Days returns as a two-day event, continuing Amazon’s fall promotional calendar.
October 2025
Amazon experiences its largest reported outage to date, disrupting bestseller rankings and Amazon Ads reporting for three days.
November 2025
Amazon runs Black Friday Week, extending promotional activity around Thanksgiving shopping.
December 1, 2025
On Cyber Monday, Shopify experienced a significant outage affecting many publisher-owned ecommerce sites, forcing planned direct-to-consumer book sales to shift to Amazon during one of the largest ecommerce days of the year.
December 17, 2025
Amazon announces that beginning January 20, 2026, Kindle eBooks without DRM will be available for readers to download as ePub and PDF files.