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Morris Rosenthal, the man who posted a helpful list of free classics on the Kindle store last month to help readers bypass unnecessary fees, just announced that Amazon pulled his test version of a Dickens classic and told him that they were cracking down on duplicate public domain titles.

Here’s part of Amazon’s email to Rosenthal:

“Our vision is to have high-quality editions of every public domain title in the world available on Kindle, including a free edition of each, and to avoid the confusion that is caused by having a large number of undifferentiated (or barely differentiated) versions of each.

“To protect the customer experience we have decided to stop accepting and selling duplicate, undifferentiated versions of public domain titles where there is a free edition already available for sale.”

Rosenthal received the email because he’d self-published a copy of “A Tale of Two Cities” to test just how easy it is to make money off of public domain titles. He writes that he was selling 4 or 5 a day at 99 cents each before Amazon removed the copy from the store.

This is great news, but don’t expect it to improve every search. Two randomly selected titles, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The Three Musketeers”, still return multiple listings of non-free versions of these public domain books.

There appear to be two criteria that must be met. First, Amazon has to have published the public domain ebook on the Kindle store. Second, the for-profit public domain version from some other publisher has to be published after Amazon’s edition.

Hopefully Amazon will eventually make this policy retroactive and begin to clean up the store’s virtual shelves. Until then, at least it’s taking baby steps toward making the shopping experience better for select public domain titles.

“The Kindle Public Domain Publishing Model” [Self Publishing 2.0]

(Photo: Phillie Casablanca)

Via Chris Walter’s Booksprung blog

4 COMMENTS

  1. From experience, I’m skeptical that Amazon is serious about applying quality control to their Kindle books.

    Take a book I know well. Across Asia on a Bicycle (1894) is in the public domain, so there are several print version on Amazon. Most interested buyers would probably say that mine is the best because I spent several months researching that first-around-the-world trip, so I could add notes, extra maps, and additional chapters from the authors that were published elsewhere. (High-quality, enhanced public domain texts at low prices is one of my specialities.) At an Amazon price of $11.01, I also have the best price. The sales justify that claim. Search for the title on Amazon by “Bestselling” and my edition is at the top of the list.

    But search using any other “Sort by” and my bestselling edition doesn’t appear at all. In fact, the default sort of “Relevance” puts at the top of the list a badly OCRed edition devoid of any of the marvelous pictures or maps in the original. It’s 98 pages long, while mine is 168 pages. It sells for $20, almost twice the price of mine. Customers aren’t being fooled. The $20 edition has no ranking, which means that after almost 3 months on Amazon, it hasn’t sold a single copy.

    Several years ago, when a similar title was being slighted this way, I talked to one of Amazon’s lawyers. They have special software, she explained, that makes the most profitable books more visible to potential customers. That software is still active. Out for the evening two days ago, I met one of their former interns. She warned me to never trust an Amazon search, to use Google. She’s right. On Google, my edition is the top result.

    Yes, it it’s a foolish policy to hide an edition that people want to buy simply because it’s inexpensive and it’s even more foolish to try force them to buy a book so poorly done and overpriced that no one buys it. Amazon’s only excuse is ignorance. I doubt there are any human beings in the process. It’s a software robot at least seven years old that’s making these gosh-awful decisions.

    That’s is why I’m skeptical that Amazon actually cares about having “high-quality editions of every public domain title in the world available on Kindle.” They’re clearly not displaying that sort of interest in print editions. Profit, or a very foolish illusion about profit, controls what site visitors see. Why should they become concerned about their Kindle editions? Even the modest amount of money they make on my edition is more than they’ll make on any paid Kindle edition, much less the free ones. What they’re like to do is turn some depraved software robot loose, whacking away one edition and leaving another.

    And the results are likely to be awful. Keep in mind that for that book I mentioned, downrating that other publisher for low quality is a no-brainer. General Books LLC is actually quite open about their lack of quality control. Go to the FAQ at their website and you’ll discover that, if pages stick together when a book is robotically scanned, those pages will be missing in their edition. Equally bad, their automated OCR is never proofread and the resulting text is so bad done that they warn in that FAQ that readers are likely to find “an annoying number of typos.”

    http://generalbooksclub.com/faqs.cfm

    Is “General Books LLC” so tiny that its contempt for quality has escaped Amazon’s notice? Hardly, A publisher search by name comes up with just shy of 500,000 Amazon hits and judging by the first few search pages, every one of those titles has a Kindle and a print edition.

    If Amazon really is intent on cleaning up their public domain titles, and if they really want to rid their system of badly done edition, why are they picking on small players such as Morris Rosenthal and his single test edition of a Dickens classic? If they really care about the quality of public domain texts on the Kindle, in a matter of minutes their programmers could yank 489,543 of General Books, LLC’s admittedly shoddy editions from their database.

    I might add, that Amazon’s unpredictable behavior is hurting the quality of the ebooks you can buy. Last week, I looked into creating a Kindle edition of my already enhanced print edition of Across Asia on a Bicycle. I managed to locate a series of obscure newspaper articles that the two bikers had written about their travel through Europe and their long stay in Athens. No one else has published that material, and no automated scanner is likely to touch it. Some of those articles have type so tiny and blurred they are difficult to read even with human eyes.

    But should I bother to create an expanded Kindle edition called Across Europe and Asia on a Bicycle? I don’t know. Given how badly Amazon is treating the print edition and how arbitrarily they’re likely to apply these “high-quality” standards to public domain texts for the Kindle, it does not look like it would be worth the risk. And since Amazon/Kindle is about 70% of the US ebook market, it’s unlikely that I could make up my Amazon loss elsewhere. I could strain my eyes for days creating a Kindle edition only to have it blocked, yanked, or downgraded in search results by some mindless software robot. I don’t need that kind of hassle.

    –Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

  2. @Michael:

    Your problem is one of the three things I recently said needs more attention from authors and publishers in the coming year: the new gatekeepers–merchants like Amazon and search engines like Google–do not have an incentive to filter out low-quality results if those results are more profitable.

    If I were head of one of the big publishing houses, or maybe the Authors Guild, I’d be trying to enlist a coalition of industry players to fund an exhaustive book search engine, then I’d market the hell out of it until it became known to consumers as the Google for Books. It would point shoppers to the best prices, or to the retailers authors preferred or had special partnerships with, or to local bookstores, or to related works; and a core part of its mission would be to filter out spam publishing.

    But I don’t know that publishers or unions/guilds are capable of getting something like that off the ground, and I worry that a grassroots approach wouldn’t have the resources or traction to break through to mass awareness.

  3. Chris noted: “If I were head of one of the big publishing houses, or maybe the Authors Guild, I’d be trying to enlist a coalition of industry players to fund an exhaustive book search engine,…”

    A good idea, but I fear the major publishing houses are so locked into competing with one another, they won’t be able to cooperate even if the feds would free them the threat of anti-trust action.

    At one time, I hoped would have the major book wholesalers (i.e. Ingram) would create a web presence that’d offer one neutral search engine for all titles, print and digital. Once customers found the book they wanted there, they’d go to web pages managed by the publisher to order, with that wholesaler taking care of order fulfillment. It’d bypass Amazon and be a much healthier system than Amazon because the business model would look in both directions. They’d need to please publishers to get them to open a storefront, and they’d need to please the public to get sales.

    Amazon’s model is flawed because in its mind publishers are the enemy, setting the wholesale price they offer Amazon too high (meaning the same as that offered to others), making it hard for Amazon to undercut online competitors. Amazon thinks it has grown so big, publishers must bend to its will, but I’m no sure that is true. Amazon has been forced to backtrack on their threats several times. And like Microsoft in the 1990s, they’re making a lot of enemies. In the long run, that can lead to disaster.

    And by the way, I tried to get Google’s top lawyer (via his blog) to do something along these lines while Google was still talking about what became the now-disastrous Google Books Settlement. Google had the money and skills to become the neutral gatekeeper for book searching, making their profit on ads like they do with ordinary searches. Instead they decided to get into the book business. As a result, they’re likely to become just another player with an axe to grind.

    Finally, don’t forget another factor. From Amazon’s perspective, pushing pricey but badly done Kindle and POD books seems to be a winning strategy. They get the larger markup, while unhappy customers blame the publisher for the shoddy workmanship. That’s why I stressed in my posting above that Amazon’s biased-for-their-profit search display wasn’t making them any money. The overpriced alternative they had to my Across Asia on a Bicycle hasn’t sold a single copy in almost three months. If anything, when people don’t find my edition on Amazon, or at least one that doesn’t look like a decent deal, they go the B&N. I still get the sale, but Amazon doesn’t.

    Or they turn to Google. The Amazon programming intern I talked with told me that if people really wanted to search for a book, they’d be better off using Google than Amazon. When she said that, a light went on in my head. I’d been wondering why people still managed to find and buy enough copies of my edition to make it Amazon’s bestseller despite all Amazon’s efforts to hide it. My customers, I realized, weren’t looking on Amazon. They were coming into Amazon through Google, where my edition is the top search hit. That’s because that top hit is for the book’s listing on Amazon.

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