Washington Post: “Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books”

Washington Post: “Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books”

Stop the presses!  Publishers charge for books!

I’m sorry…I may be a bit under the influence of super-snark artist Mark Twain…who I am now nicknaming “Snarky Mark”.   There is a letter in his recently published autobiography where he rips somebody apart who edited an introduction he had written.  One sample:

“The next sentence—after your doctoring of it—has no meaning. The one succeeding it—after your doctoring of it—refers to nothing, wanders around in space, has no meaning and no reason for existing, and is by a shade or two more demented and twaddlesome than anything hitherto ground out of your strange and interesting editorial-mill.”
–Mark Twain
The Autobiography of Mark Twain 

Okay, wait…I think that got it out of my system.  That’s the value of the classics, right…to attune us to our higher selves?  😉

Let’s talk, then, in a civilized tone about the following article:

Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books

This article appeared in The Washington Post’s Faster Forward column by Rob Pegoraro.

It’s since been picked up by other sources…and the outrage which seems to always lurk below our feet (rather like the sand sharks that threatened Adam West on Mars in The Invisible Enemy episode of The Outer Limits) has reared its ravenous head, ready to tear apart whatever rises into its vision at the slightest provocation. 

Ahem.

Sorry.

Hm…let me first present what happens.

Project Gutenberg is an amazingly valuable public service effort founded by Michael Hart in 1971.  It has been digitizing public domain works (those that are not under copyright protection) and making them available to the public for free.  Digitizing a work does not create a new copyright.  As Project Gutenberg makes clear, it can not control the use of that work. 

In the licensing section, they say it explictly, as this short excerpt shows:

“A Project Gutenberg ebook is made out of two parts: the public domain book and the non public domain Project Gutenberg trademark and license. If you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg from the ebook, you are left with a public domain ebook. You can do anything you want with that.”
Project Gutenberg License

“…anything you want with that.”

That includes, of course, making an edition of the book and selling it.

Publishers do just that.  It is completely legal for a publisher to take public domain material, publish it, and charge for it. 

That happens all the time.  When I managed a brick and mortar bookstore, we sold a lot of public domain material: Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, and so on.  Some of it had new material, like notes, which garners its own copyright.  Some of it didn’t.

There is nothing controversial about that.  It is a non-controversy…um, a “nontroversy”.  😉

In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to walk into a non-specialized bookstore and not find public domain material for sale.

So, publishers take the public domain material on Project Gutenberg, and charge for their editions. 

Amazon carries those titles.  You can buy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Pride and Prejudice.

For someone who is familiar with publishing or bookstores, there is nothing shocking about that.

That’s why I don’t understand why this is a story at all, and certainly not why it got picked up beyond the initial publication.

Pegoraro chose to include the quotation, “the worst offender” about Amazon.

There is no offence here, and Amazon is particularly not an offender in this case, in my opinion.

First, they allow you to sort by price, low to high.  Find a book at a price that seems too high?  Amazon will let you find other, cheaper (even free) editions.

Amazon has over 15,000 free public domain books in the Kindle store.  Those show up in the searches.

Amazon also directs you to free collections on the web…including Project Gutenberg.  The link to that is in the navigation on their main Kindle e-book page…not exactly hidden.

That’s right…Amazon tells people how to get free editions of books that are for sale on the site.

You can see that on this page:

Free eBook Collections

Amazon helps people find the free editions.

Another element of the story is a volunteer who appeared shocked to find a book for sale in the Kindle store that volunteer had reportedly prepared and donated to Project Gutenberg.

Apparently, that volunteer wasn’t aware of the Project Gutenberg license…and the fact that Project Gutenberg does not get a new copyright for digitizing a book…and neither does the person who digitized it.

If a publisher sold a book under copyright in the Kindle store without the rightsholder’s permission, that would be an infringement.  That’s not what is happening here, though.  The material is not protected by copyright.

That volunteer put considerable work into the digitization.  I’ve digitized books public domain books for a non-profit, and that’s a similar situation.  I admire the selfless work of those volunteers.  However, I know that people can take those digitized works that I’ve done and sell them.  Copyright exists for a limited time.  When that term expires, the book belongs to the public.

Is it wrong to charge people for something they can get for free?  If so, there are several bottled water companies that are doing something unethical.  😉

“But wait,” you say, “it’s convenient to have those bottles of water.”

Yes.  It’s convenient to be able to download a book from the Kindle store, too.

It is not the same to get a book from Project Gutenberg as it is to get one from the Kindle store.  I’ve written about the Kindle Service in a previous post.  Amazon backs up your purchases and your notes, for example.  That’s an argument to download a book from the Kindle store rather than from Project Gutenberg.  I like having easy access to my notes online.

In fact, I’ve read a free version from http://www.feedbooks.com and downloaded the same free version from Amazon.  Why?  Well, the FeedBooks version (which undoubtedly came from Project Gutenberg first) was better formatted.  It had an interactive table of contents, for one thing…but the punctuation was also (ironically) read better by the Kindle’s text-to-speech.  Why did I bother getting the Kindle version?  For that annotation back-up.  It makes it much easier to pull quotations out of it.

So, there is no controversy here.  Amazon carries books from publishers who charge for public domain material…which may have been made available to the public by Project Gutenberg.

Amazon even directs people to those free books, and lets them sort to find them…two things it wouldn’t need to do.  It could exclude free books from the sort, for example (although it would probably have to explain that).

However, I guess that isn’t as sexy a story. 

I did comment on the Washington Post article.  I don’t do that very often, and I try not to challenge people in their own homes, so to speak.  I think the author’s intent may very well have been for the public good.  My intuition is that the volunteer who was quoted honestly believes that the work that was digitized should be available to all people free at all times in all situations.

What do you think?  Is Amazon being deceptive?  Should digitizing a book be counted as a derivative work and generate a new copyright?  Do you feel ripped off if you pay for something you can get free somewhere else?  Feel free to let me know.

Want to contribute to Project Gutenberg?  You can do that here:

Project Gutenberg Needs Your Donation

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.