oh my goodness, where have you been, al?  this sure ain't news.

and newby wonders if it's "ethical".  spare me the deliberations.

here's the thing:  project gutenberg could have set itself up as
a publisher with amazon, and sold its e-books for whatever it
wants to charge, but project gutenberg decided not to do that.

you could've also dictated that every page of every one of the books
was available under amazon's "look inside this book" functionality.
but again, you decided not to go that route.

was that a good decision?  heck no, it was a _stupid_ decision...

but that's the decision that project gutenberg made.

so live with it, and live with the consequences...

and tell your contributors that _they_ need to live with it too...

heck, jim even came here _begging_ you to make things better...
he even did the work for you, and mounted the solution himself.

but his efforts were ignored.

you might wanna read this recent article from time magazine:
>   http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html

the takeaway sentence is this:
>   It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.

of course, _free_and_easy_ tops everything.  but you opted out of that.

and now you want to whine.

-bowerbird