Jim, Amazon says it will not offer undifferentiated editions of books in the public domain which they already offer for free. You have to do something to the public domain book to make it better than the free one. Add original art, an introduction, etc. I wish they'd actually enforce this policy. There is a lot of public domain stuff on the Kindle Store that is actually formatted worse than the PG version. There is other stuff that doesn't really qualify as a book, like the "Hephaestus Books" stuff that is just bundled Wikipedia articles. (You don't find that out until you've paid for the book, of course). Books submitted to Kindle are "in review" for hours. It would be nice if they did some actual reviewing, and reject stuff that was not up to some minimum standard. Just say "this isn't good enough to sell to our customers." My four public domain titles together have earned me a little under ten dollars since July. I don't think these quick and dirty publishers are doing much better than that. I have to wonder why they do it. I'd probably lose it myself if a book got posted to Amazon right out of DP. My own submission "Ancient Manners" was in DP for almost a year before I decided to just do the work myself. I have submitted three Raymond Chandler novels and two Robert C. Benchley books to DP Canada and they are taking months to work their way through the queue. James Simmons On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
James>...some reprobate who seems to make a quick and dirty version of everything released by PG before Amazon makes their free version....
I always try to take a deep breath and keep repeating to myself (when I make a book for PG) as if a personal mantra:
This is not my book, it was written by another long ago.
This is not PG's book, it was written by another long ago.
This book is no longer under copyright, it is risen to the public domain. Now, finally, the public owns it, which is as it should be, and the public, jointly and individually, can do with it as they like, for better or for worse.
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Now, having said that, I personally lose it when some reprobate takes a book off of DP before its even posted to PG -- especially when there seems (at least in my paranoid mind) to be a correlation between how long it's taking for a book to make it out of DP, and the fact that that reprobate is already making money off that book on Amazon.
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