I stopped using Amazon back in 2011, when I realised they are not doing any good. Never regretted that step. I know they do all those things and worse, but it is best to concentrate on doing your own things in your own way, and don't let them waste your mood.

I've been thinking about ways to unobtrusively let readers know a book comes from Project Gutenberg, but in the end, that is pretty hard and fairly easy to remove. The only thing I now do is write "for Project Gutenberg" in the credit line, hoping they will remove my name with that credit line at the same time.

Jeroen Hellingman 

On 26 Jul 2023 02:12, James Simmons <nicestep@gmail.com> wrote:
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. 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=relevancerank&text=Alfred+Powell+Morgan&ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1

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  I followed their rules and unpublished a lot of books that had taken me MANY hours to prepare.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