Pegoraro sees a simple solution: ' Search the Gutenberg site for a title you're interested in buying for your Kindle and download it from there if it's available. He doesn't mention what the terms were though, on Gutenberg's part. Newby has suggested to Amazon that it could directly offer Gutenberg titles as no-charge, DRM-free downloads - something Apple did in its iBooks store. See the article for Amazon's response so far. Newby added that although many other booksellers do this, Amazon is "the worst offender" because of the number of of suppliers for Amazon. Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation chief executive Greg Newby wrote in an email, "Is this legal? Yes. Some don't think so, but there are definite indications that too many Amazon digital-text-publishing uploaders do not consider proof reading important.īut, again, all this is permitted under the Gutenberg license. Pegoraro adds, "Apparently it's less work to convert that output to a Kindle Store download." Next comes converting that text file into an HTML version with linked images that can finally be uploaded to Gutenberg." )Įverhart describes the kind of work she and others do to make the free Project Gutenberg books available, which involves downloading a scan of the book's pages from the Internet Archive's collection, running it through optical-character-recognition software and then correcting mistakes and stripping out extraneous data "before formatting the text to Gutenberg's strict guidelines. She added that "their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them." 'Įverhart identified other "instances of Kindle cloning" and Pegoraro writes "These titles appear to be sold with Amazon's standard digital-rights-management restrictions, a limit absent from Gutenberg downloads." (However, most of the public domain books I have, for free, from Amazon, don't have DRM restrictions on how many Kindles can share the book. "They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold," wrote Everhart, a Blairstown, Mo., trapper. Everhart complained in an e-mail in late October that Amazon was selling a title she'd contributed to Gutenberg, Arthur Robert Harding's 1906 opus "Fox Trapping," for $4. Pegoraro expands on this: ' Gutenberg contributor Linda M. You'd think that the work that another organization spent converting image-based pages into proofed text to make them more easily readable on an e-reader should not just be taken for re-selling while the original organization is offering their work for free. They appear to be the exact Gutenberg files, save only for minor formatting adjustments and the removal of that volunteer-run site's license information. Pegoraro explains: ' The titles in question aren't just public-domain books that have long been freely available at such sites as Project Gutenberg. Even this would be legal, as, again, the basic text, once there are no Project title pages, is in the public domain. Public domain books make up the bulk of the 20,000+ free Kindle books that Amazon makes downloadable to Kindles at any time, but apparently some suppliers are uploading to the self-servicing publishing area of Amazon (for the 70% revenue offered self-publishers of Kindle-formatted books) copies of the Project's e-books that were essentially created earlier by them from scanned images. Note that it's considered okay to spiff up basic public domain books (which is why they're called that) and then sell them for the value of what you've done to make them comfortably readable on an e-reader and, we hope, typo-free. Washington Post Technology writer Rob Pegoraro reports a complaint that "Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books" - meaning that Amazon is allowing suppliers to sell, through Amazon's self-service publishing, versions of public domain books that are apparently derived from Project Gutenberg editions and nearly identical to them.
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