Greg M. Johnson wrote:
2) I also took time to examine an ebook I'd downloaded **months ago* called, "Tales of the Fish Patrol". Knowing Chinese people and being a fan of the sea, I was really into the book by the end of Chapter One. Then I was hit with:
____________ End of this sample Kindle book. Enjoyed the sample Buy now or See details for this book in the Kindle Store ____________
The violations of taste of this project hit me like a brick. If Amazon were to have charged me $0.10 for the cost of bandwidth, I would not have blinked. But to take a public domain book, and set it up as something you're supposed to pay to see the second half, and not making it exhaustively clear to the downloader what you are getting, is major uncool. After you've got through the teaser, they provide a link telling you they want $0.85 for the full version. [...]
So, the "true" ebook has an *ASIN:* B000JQV2WU. The $0.85 target you're supposed to buy has an *ASIN:* B002N0V0XG and is by * Publisher:* Bunny Books, Ink. (August 26, 2009)
Any insights here?
For free as in speech versions of Fish Patrol see PG #911 and #28693. Lots of people have tried and are trying to cash in on the work of PG volunteers and the ignorance of people: One popular business model is to rip PG editions and offer them on Amazon as paper or electronic edition for a substantial fee. Some of these `publishers´ go to the effort of reformatting the PG edition, others do not. Another popular business model is to build a search engine front around the PG and other collections and then charge $8.95 a year for access to what is free elsewhere. Ironically the PG license requires republishers to remove all references to PG if they don't want to pay a fee. Thus the PG license helps with keeping people ignorant of PG. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org