Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books | Hacker News Reader

Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books

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26 pointsjteo21 comments

To be more specific, third parties submit public domain works for distribution as Kindle books. Some people put a $0.00 price, other people specify a non-zero price. Amazon puts it all on there.

A given public-domain text may be represented on the kindle store many times over, submitted by different parties, with different formatting, at different prices.

As a kindle owner, I don't so much mind that there are Gutenberg-sourced public domain texts on there for sale: Maybe a $.99 one is formatted better than the others.

What I mind is that the kindle store is spammed full of such stuff.

The example that bugs me most is the person who took the ten years of Samuel Pepys' diaries, split them up into 120 ebooks each containing one month's worth of diary entries, and put them on the store.

I don't recall if they were charging for them or not, but I was browsing the "history" section of the store, and hit a seemingly never-ending span of one-month Pepys Diaries. Many screens full. On a slow kindle display.

A general problem of app stores. What is needed is better discovery methods and filters.

Are there any start ups working on this problem? It seems like a ripe niche. Perhaps not so much for iPhone (since you need root), but Android certainly.

There are some for Androids that try to recommend stuff based on the apps your friends have installed. There is also an YC company I think, unfortunately I forgot the name.

This is really no different from a publisher taking public domain works, putting a cover on it, and charging $12 for the paperback. There's a slight value-add for which Amazon is charging a slight price. I personally don't see the problem.

The consumer, who could roam the web and find free Mobi versions from Feedbooks.com or Gutenberg.org, decides to pay a few bucks for the app store convenience. That's their choice.

Only somebody who does not know what public domain means would get uppity about this.

I'm not saying i disapprove, but just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

This is similar to those people who charge $25 to download Firefox. Is it legal? Yes. Is it ethical? That's more dubious.

Formatting an ebook for the Kindle is not something automatic. This is real work. If someone does this for me and then charges me 99 cent for "Pride and Prejudice", I have nothing against it.

Except Project Gutenberg has already put its books in MOBI format, which is supported by the Kindle.

Also, did you read the article:

"They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold,"

That does not exactly sound like strenuous editing and curation.

Unless you download them from Amazon they will not sync across devices. But, I see you're point, they are already formatted.

Are they properly formatted for the Kindle, though? In the Gutenberg-derived version of Moby Dick that I read, they capitalized words italicized in the original, and replaced £ with L. Aesthetically displeasing, to say the least. I'd pay a dollar to avoid the bad results of storing masters in a lossy format (which Gutenberg's masters seem to be, although I'm not sure about this), but I rather doubt that this can be had for just a dollar.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation may get uppity too if the publishers don't surrender 20% of their profits [1]:

  1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
  access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
  that

  - You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
       the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
       you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
       owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
       has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
       Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
       must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
       prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
       returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
       sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
       address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
       the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenber...

Edit: By the way, as the very existence of this license demonstrates, the digitization carried out by PG of public-domain works does not result in public-domain texts.

The license applies only if you use the PG trademark(for stuff in the public domain):

'A Project Gutenberg ebook is made out of two parts: the public domain book and the non public domain Project Gutenberg trademark and license. If you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg from the ebook, you are left with a public domain ebook. You can do anything you want with that. '

My apologies for the confusion, then. It's also in the fine print (1.E.2.)... I feel like deleting my entry to avoid the noise. What to do? Downvote away, folks!

Edit: As an aside, PG could copyright their digitization of public-domain works, right?

Not without making significant changes to the content, no.

What they need is a licensing clause that requires anyone which uses one of these Project Gutenberg formatted ebooks as a base must display a link to the free version.

That way someone can decide if they wish to pay the price for the value add that amazon is providing (presumably convenience) or just go with the free copy.

Without this kind of attribution, many would believe they are either paying for amazons work to format the book or even the book itself (not sure they acknowledge when a work is out of copyright?)

I have paid one or two dollars on the Kindle store for books I could have downloaded for free because when you buy a book from Amazon, they keep an archive of it on their servers, including reading position, bookmarks, and annotations, and they synchronize this information across all of your registered devices. The convenience of this feature, along with better formatting, has sometimes been worth the money.

I have done the process of downloading and copying to the Kindle for some works that were either not available in the store. Although it's not difficult, it's not as easy as the Kindle store. This is another case of sometimes easy beats free.

Perhaps I am anachronistic, but I much prefer real books to e-books. While I may download books from Gutenberg from time to time, if I really want to read something, I buy the hard copy.

One of the greatest things about the Internet, for me at least, is the easy availability of books. While Amazon is an obvious source, I prefer abebooks.com, as you can usually get a used book there for a fraction of the Amazon price.

Thus one can acquire more books; and if there is any money left over, one might purchase some food.

I downloaded a free Gutenberg version of a Robert Benchley book to my iPhone, but was ill-formatted, particularly around illustrations, and hard to read. So I got the same title from Amazon. The formatting problems were fixed and the book was quite readable. They added some value in that case.

They should have some trap streets[1] if they want control over what people do with their books.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

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