B&N has been selling their own editions of public domain books for years. They include two Austens in the download of their new ebook software. But they offer other editions, too (including the indifferently OCRed Google Books versions).

‘The Girlebook Edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice’ would do it. Writers can be ‘Jane Austen and girlebooks’

But then when a user searched for the title ‘Pride and Prejudice’ alone, would the girlebooks edition show up?

Another thing this strategy (which is at least a couple weeks old, by the way) brings up is the forbidding prospect that Amazon might be considering grabbing all the public domain titles for themselves. I’ve seen nobody suggest such a thing so far, but in order to ‘clear up the confusion’ and ‘help all our Kindle users,’ Amazon might just repackage all the Project Gutenberg titles and sell them as ‘Authentic Authorized Amazon Editions’ — a sideswipe at google books editions, a variant on the Barnes & Noble self-published classics, and a way of locking up these titles for themselves.

Amazon might also copartner with various ‘authorities’ in the universities to publish ‘Amazon Scholarly Editions’ of these PG titles, all with introduction and notes by authorities in the relevant fields, and proofed and reproofed by these authorities. That would be part of the push by Amazon into the textbook markets.

And thanks for the kind words, Mags.

By the bye, Girlebooks does a fabulous job and I recommend them highly for public domain and other books.

Are you turning public domain ebooks into locked-down restricted use version whenever you acquire them through Amazon? If so this really does not seem in the spirit of public domain.

Rob Preece
Publisher

I recall more than a few folks being upset when they found people were selling public domain titles for the Kindle to begin with (“Morons” they screamed. “You can get them elsewhere for FREE”).

Just the other day there were commenters here blasting Google for releasing millions of titles in ePub (for FREE) that had not been formatted to the readers liking. There is just no pleasing some people.

I’ve tried a few times to find public domain titles on Amazon for my Kindle in the hope that someone may have taken a bit of time to correct some formatting issues for titles I could get straight from Gutenberg. I’d gladly pay a buck or two for a “clean” ebook.

The choices can be overwhelming – 100 versions of Huck Finn with prices ranging from zilch to 7 bucks (most with zero customer reviews). It is also difficult to try and determine how much effort the publisher put into cleaning up the offering or if they are just one of many folks throwing dozens of titles up in an effort to try and make a quick buck.

Right offhand I don’t have a clue what the best course of action is for Amazon. I doubt they have the resources to vet each and every ebook title they sell. I know from personal experience with a few titles from major publishers that I have bought that formatting and database errors/sloppiness occurs. To Amazon’s credit whenever I have notified them they are quick to work with the publisher to correct the mistake.

Of course they could just remain in a laissez faire mode and let the buyer beware and try to just rely on customer reviews. It is a damned if they do and damned if they don’t sort of thing methinks.