Google and Amazon are not interested in this kind of good will. As far as I can tell, from having talked with them about with a lot more personal contact than most, they would just as soon be the ones to "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs," so gold will be all that much rarer and they can charge that much more. I've spent hours talking with them and could not even manage to get 1 penny per book for us. They have no intention of supporting us in any manner at all as per every one of these conversations. Of course, lightning COULD strike. . . . On Sat, 5 Dec 2009, Jon Richfield wrote:
Someone (BB?) said something about asking the likes of Kindle and GBks for a morsel on account for all the work that PG has put in so far. Someone else said that he did not need the odd dollar. MH MIGHT argue (or not, I am not putting words into his mouth) that getting paid would go against the principles of PG.
Well, yesss... but the freeness of our products was intended for people to whom this sort of thing matters. If Googlebooks and Amazon could subsidise PG to the tune of a couple of hundred K / year, they could win much goodwill and transform the PG infrastructure. They would, at trivial cost, increase their resources of independently produced material. I realise that they want their own formats, but the main problem in book digitisation is not conversion of format, but capturing of edited material. It would be worth it for them. And if one of the companies accepted, and the other refused, the political implications would be most uncomfortable.
Just thinking.
Maybe I'd better stick to thinking about calenders... (had to say that before someone else did... ;-) )
Jon _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d