On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 08:34:59PM +0200, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Warning: potential heresy ahead!
Seeing that many `independent' PG websites are trying to make money using our books and our catalog data, basically mixing search results from PG and Amazon Ads, eg.
http://www.abacci.com/books/ http://textual.net/access.gutenberg
why not do some fundraising thru Amazon ourselves?
Basically, we set up a page and tell our visitors:
If you ever feel the need to buy a book at Amazon don't go there directly but always thru the PG site. Thus Amazon will pass a small percentage of the revenue back to PG. This way you can donate to PG without spending anything and virtually without any trouble. Just delete your old Amazon bookmark and bookmark this page instead.
More details at:
While I'd like to add a few hundred words of disclaimer about how Amazon has stolen our works and the works of our authors (including copyrighted contemporary authors like Sam Vaknin), and about how they keep trying to "partner" with PG, but always drop off the edge of the earth after we do a bunch of work for them, and have never done *anything* for us, including what they've offered & promised, and about how putting ink on dead trees is completely passe, and about how I'm *still* boycotting them over the 1-click patent thing, and so should you, and about how they give eBooks a bad name by having completely disfunctional "within the book" pages on their site, and DRM'd versions of public domain content, and more ... I think it's OK to put them in some far-off corner of gutenberg.net (*not* on "links & affiliates", please, which should be for people we *like*) with this pass-through link. I'd like to do the same for O'Reilly & BN.com, if they have similar programs. I'd also like to make sure we get the $$$ from Amazon (and how much it will be), so we can have full disclosure to our buyers - um, I mean, readers - about what their actions do for us. Maybe someone else will want to pay us $200 per year or so to NOT put a link to Amazon (I'm guessing that's about the most we'd get from this). -- Greg