>so now i'm perplexed, jim.  why don't _you_
>just offer the files to the kindle community?

Not sure I understand the question, but I think I have already offered the files to the Kindle community.  See freekindlebooks.org – A site I created a couple years ago when PG said it wasn’t interested in supporting the ebook community.  Now PG decided it DOES want to offer EPUB and MOBI file format support.  So then I say, OK now that you are offering EPUB and MOBI file format support, why not go the last 1% of the way and do what is necessary to *really* make it useful to the ebook community?  But when I ask that question, I get beaten up.  Which I don’t understand.  Its not that I am just being impossible.  It’s that I really don’t understand WHY PG WOULDN’T want to support the ebook community?  To me ebook readers are the obvious and natural way to be reading PG texts.  As opposed to what, printing them out on your teletype?  Or dragging around a laptop and tied to a WIFI connection so you can read in HTML format doesn’t seem like a particularly happy reading experience to me! And reading through the peephole of a cellphone makes as much sense to me as distributing PG texts one line at a time via fortune cookies.  If one is going thru the pain and trouble of making electronic texts, why not make them as pleasant and fun to read as a paperback novel?

heck, i'd even think you could charge a dollar
or two for these files, and release them as
kindle-books, available in the kindle store,
and make a few bucks to subsidize your work,
not to mention help out the whole kindle scene.

Don’t need the buck here and there actually, -- but you need only look at the amazon.com Kindle books section to see that 100s of other people are doing exactly what you suggest.  My counter-question would be if PG is doing 99% of the work already, why not put in the last 1% so that PG gets the credit for the good work and can put a link in there that says “hey if you like PG’s good work then how about making a small donation to PG [as opposed to donating to Amazon -- which takes the lion’s share of the fees from downloaded books from their website]  ??? Gosh, I work hard to try to get donations for PG and I just get told what an evil person I am! Again, all I want is free electronic books that are easy and pleasant to read – in honest to god practice not in theory!