If you've looked at Kindle books on Amazon you've no doubt seen PG titles
that some reprobate has repackaged and is selling as ebooks. It seems that
Amazon is doing that itself now.
See this page where titles I donated are being sold by Amazon.com Services
LLC
<https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Wireless-Telegraphy-Alfred-Powell-ebook/dp/B…>.
Not given away with the images missing like they used to do, but sold.
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=p_27%3AAlfred+Powell+Morgan&s=re…
I tried to leave comments explaining the situation to prospective customers
and those comments never showed up.
I found out about this because I have taken many of my PG donations and
created KDP printed books from them using LaTeX for typesetting and GIMP
for preparing cover images. These printed books ended up looking quite nice
and I don't think anyone who bought one ever complained about it. I told
them in the description what it was and even included the URL of the PG
title and explained that they could download the ebook version for free.
About a month ago Amazon told me that printing costs for print on demand
books were going up and I needed to re-price my books to get any royalty
for them at all. I spent several hours doing just that, and when I was
finished Amazon blocked two of my titles from being sold because Amazon
does not allow you to use KDP to publish titles that can be downloaded for
free.
These two titles were part of a twelve volume set of The Mahabharata, so
not selling these two and leaving the rest of my public domain print on
demand titles alone was not a good option. I complained. For my trouble I
got my whole account locked and had to promise to remove all my public
domain titles from sale to get it back. I have books I wrote myself on KDP
so I needed that account. I followed their rules and unpublished a lot of
books that had taken me MANY hours to prepare.
This was never anything other than a hobby that in a good year brought in
less than 200 dollars. Having said that, these were nice looking books and
I was proud to have them in people's homes. I published Hindu scriptures
and epics, pioneering aviation books, and radio and electronic books by
Alfred Powell Morgan, an author who loomed large in my childhood.
Apparently in other people's childhoods too, because they sold better than
any of the others.
I know Amazon is not doing anything illegal, but I needed to vent about
this.
Thank you for your time.
James Simmons
