

Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books - jteo
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/amazon_charges_kindle_users_fo.html

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jonhendry
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.

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

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jokermatt999
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.

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Tichy
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.

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rtperson
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.

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

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mooism2
This is similar to those people who charge $25 to download Firefox. Is it
legal? Yes. Is it ethical? That's more dubious.

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lulin
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.

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martey
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.

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

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cicero
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.

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gallerytungsten
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.

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warmfuzzykitten
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.

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Dove
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>

