James,

I agree that what Amazon is doing is entirely legal. It just rubs me the wrong way.

Create Space and KDP always allowed their service to be used for public domain titles in the past. Apparently they still do, but only if you can't download the text of the book from the internet. The actual policy isn't clear.

I mostly resent the people I had to deal with on this. They have the authority to lock your account, but that's it. They can't explain the policy or make exceptions to it. All they can do is send you links to documents that don't explain anything or send boilerplate telling you what you have to do to get your account unlocked. So the hours I spent making these titles was lost and there isn't a damned thing I can do about it.

Selling PG books that have been reworked a bit is legal, but I spent time on the donations getting the cover images as close as possible to what the original book had and I don't like seeing them replaced with the crappy cover images they have been given.

I don't think Amazon is making much money doing this, but I have to wonder what this is leading up to. I remember reading that Amazon wanted to have a contract with publishers saying that if the publisher chose to stop publishing a title that Amazon could make it available as print on demand. I don't know what happened with that.

James Simmons


On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 1:59 PM James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
I guess I don't understand the nature of this "complaint."

I think it is quite clear that books that are "out of copyright" are "fair game" for all people to use -- including in ways that we volunteers at PG would rather they do not do.  Even if someone -- "us" or "them" -- has done some "massaging" of that book -- it is still "out of copyright."

For me personally, I find it troublesome that Amazon takes books that are "out of copyright" and republishes them under their encryption technology, meaning -- perhaps -- I am not a lawyer -- that it is now illegal under USA law for someone to take that "free" book and decrypt it to regain totally "free" access.  

I guess I am also troubled that Amazon is making it harder and harder to get unencrypted mobi or epub works onto their devices "on the same basis" as e-books we buy from Amazon.

But mere "typesetting" whether it is formatting the book "nicely" for paperback printing, or for display on an e-book device, has never been subject to copyright or any other protection. 

What PG has always said is: "OK, if you do any of these things then please take our name back off of the copy of this work which you are massaging and selling in your own manner." 

But otherwise, what are you complaining about?  What Amazon is doing is "fair game" -- and you should expect no better!  In turn many publishers complain that PG and PG volunteers are using "their" books -- once those books are out of copyright.  But, once a book is out of copyright it is not "their" book either -- rather it is "ours" -- the entirety of human society -- in turn for having respected and paid-for access to that copyright book over the entirely of its currently insanely long "in-copyright" period!

James Adcock