Taste & ethics with old e-books at Kindle
Using an Ipod Touch, I downloaded some public domain books from the Kindle application. I was officially charged a transaction fee of "$0.00" for each one. 1) The Kindle version of the book, "Tom Swift and his Submarine" appears to have been hit by the TXT-80 virus. The lines of text wrap around in an illegible fashion just as they do with the TXT-80 format ones from PG. Fascinatingly, I just downloaded the epub format directly from PG, and it looks great! 2) I also took time to examine an ebook I'd downloaded **months ago* called, "Tales of the Fish Patrol". Knowing Chinese people and being a fan of the sea, I was really into the book by the end of Chapter One. Then I was hit with: ____________ End of this sample Kindle book. Enjoyed the sample Buy now or See details for this book in the Kindle Store ____________ The violations of taste of this project hit me like a brick. If Amazon were to have charged me $0.10 for the cost of bandwidth, I would not have blinked. But to take a public domain book, and set it up as something you're supposed to pay to see the second half, and not making it exhaustively clear to the downloader what you are getting, is major uncool. After you've got through the teaser, they provide a link telling you they want $0.85 for the full version. BUT WAIT-- The free prelude to this ebook that I had on my Kindle, AFAICS, isn't on Amazon anymore! It doesn't show up in the first 25 listings. A new attempt to download "Tales of the Fish Patrol" has all the chapters. So, the system worked! Either the marketplace or the Amazon administrators appear to have taken action to make this work less prominent. So, the "true" ebook has an *ASIN:* B000JQV2WU. The $0.85 target you're supposed to buy has an *ASIN:* B002N0V0XG and is by * Publisher:* Bunny Books, Ink. (August 26, 2009) Any insights here? -- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com
Greg M. Johnson wrote:
2) I also took time to examine an ebook I'd downloaded **months ago* called, "Tales of the Fish Patrol". Knowing Chinese people and being a fan of the sea, I was really into the book by the end of Chapter One. Then I was hit with:
____________ End of this sample Kindle book. Enjoyed the sample Buy now or See details for this book in the Kindle Store ____________
The violations of taste of this project hit me like a brick. If Amazon were to have charged me $0.10 for the cost of bandwidth, I would not have blinked. But to take a public domain book, and set it up as something you're supposed to pay to see the second half, and not making it exhaustively clear to the downloader what you are getting, is major uncool. After you've got through the teaser, they provide a link telling you they want $0.85 for the full version. [...]
So, the "true" ebook has an *ASIN:* B000JQV2WU. The $0.85 target you're supposed to buy has an *ASIN:* B002N0V0XG and is by * Publisher:* Bunny Books, Ink. (August 26, 2009)
Any insights here?
For free as in speech versions of Fish Patrol see PG #911 and #28693. Lots of people have tried and are trying to cash in on the work of PG volunteers and the ignorance of people: One popular business model is to rip PG editions and offer them on Amazon as paper or electronic edition for a substantial fee. Some of these `publishers´ go to the effort of reformatting the PG edition, others do not. Another popular business model is to build a search engine front around the PG and other collections and then charge $8.95 a year for access to what is free elsewhere. Ironically the PG license requires republishers to remove all references to PG if they don't want to pay a fee. Thus the PG license helps with keeping people ignorant of PG. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
My take on all this is that somehow Amazon has got this idea that they can let people publish under the Amazon name without doing SOME kind of policing what kind of "books" people publish there. Obviously to me under this business model some people will figure that they can capitalize on the Amazon name in a negative way by ripping people off. So, my take on this is that right now Amazon has a failed business model for their publishing house. If you want your name to retain credibility you have to do some policing of your publishing efforts -- even PG has got the whitewashers "police force" -- ;-) ...but this in turn begs the question of what exactly people are publishing on Amazon using the PG name???
As for Amazon's business plan, they've always seemed to favor doing it the fastest possible way without much regard for anything else. "Quick and dirty" might not be the best descriptor, but it's there. On Wed, 27 Jan 2010, James Adcock wrote:
My take on all this is that somehow Amazon has got this idea that they can let people publish under the Amazon name without doing SOME kind of policing what kind of "books" people publish there. Obviously to me under this business model some people will figure that they can capitalize on the Amazon name in a negative way by ripping people off. So, my take on this is that right now Amazon has a failed business model for their publishing house. If you want your name to retain credibility you have to do some policing of your publishing efforts -- even PG has got the whitewashers "police force" -- ;-)
...but this in turn begs the question of what exactly people are publishing on Amazon using the PG name???
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participants (4)
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Greg M. Johnson -
James Adcock -
Marcello Perathoner -
Michael S. Hart