On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 08:09:47PM -0700, Andrew Sly wrote:
There are venues for authors to commercially market their works. PG hasn't been (and really shouldn't be) one of them.
Personally, this is the view I would tend to share.
Although I do understand Greg's message about PG having fairly broad goals. There have in the past been many one-off items that are a little outside of the normal things that PG offers.
However, here is another view that I just received via the catalog report address:
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2010 16:28:51 -0700 (PDT) To: catalog2010@pglaf.org Subject: Spam disguised as books
The publicity samples of Robert J. Sawyer's novels Wake and Watch have somehow been added to your catalog. If Project Gutenberg is now augmenting its finances in this way, there will obviously no longer be any need for me to donate. If not, please either put forth the entire books, or remove the spam.
-John Fluker
The response I sent: John: There is no financial interest that Project Gutenberg has in those books. If you look at them, you'll see they are of a topic complimentary to the Gutenberg mission. They were offered freely by the author. We have a small number of such extracts, and also a relatively small number of copyrighted works, scattered throughout the collection. The vast majority of the collection is, and will remain, public domain. All is freely available. In the Watch volume, you will see that the author was inspired by Project Gutenberg. This, we believe, motivated his offering these extracts to us. We have tried to make it clear in the metadata that these are extracts of copyrighted works, so that readers won't be surprised by what they get. I hope this explanation helps. Best regards, Greg Newby Dr. Gregory B. Newby Chief Executive and Director Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation http://gutenberg.org A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with EIN 64-6221541 gbnewby@pglaf.org