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Amazon charging for Project Gutenberg books – It’s legal, but not ethical says PG’s Greg Newby
November 30, 2010 | 11:04 am
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By Paul Biba
The Washington Post has a story on this today.
Gutenberg contributor Linda M. 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.
“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. She added that “their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them.”
In follow-up messages, Everhart pointed to such other instances of Kindle cloning as Eldred Nathaniel Woodcock’s “Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper” (free on Gutenberg, 99 cents on Amazon), John R. Lockard’s “Bee Hunting” ($3.69 as a Kindle edition) and Martin Hunter’s “Canadian Wilds” ($3.16 from Amazon). These titles appear to be sold with Amazon’s standard digital-rights-management restrictions, a limit absent from Gutenberg downloads. [links omitted]
The story goes on to say that this is actually permitted under the Gutenberg license. Amazon said that the books were uploaded by a third party and a representative said “I’ve sent your note to the appropriate team internally”.
This is something you have to very careful about on Amazon. Most sites don’t charge for PG books, but you can easily get suckered by Amazon if you don’t know what you are doing. On the other hand, since third parties can directly submit books for sale I can’t imagine how Amazon could police something like this. The only way to do it would be to provide a direct link to PG, otherwise the manpower required to look at every “classic” submitted for sale would be staggering.
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Comments:
Linda M. Everhart seems to have misunderstood what “Public Domain” means.
Caveat Emptor. There are enormous numbers of public domain texts on Amazon and other ebook sites, nearly all are just reformatted Project Gutenberg Texts. Some are quite well done, some are appalling.
Completely agree with Paul and honestly, I´d rather buy a re-formatted public domain title for a few bucks than stick with a PG version that has hundred of bracketed page numbers and is (sometimes) badly formatted. If I want to read, I want to have a reading experience, and if a third-party publisher provides this with offering a revised public domain title, I have no problems with that.
Fashionable as it is in some circles to blame Amazon for the problems of the world, they’re not the ones repackaging PG works and selling them, nor is Amazon the only store where third parties are selling (often poorly) repackaged PG scans.
There were two statements in the original article by Rob Pegoraro that I found of interest:
“You may have been paying for books you could legally download for free–in nearly identical editions–elsewhere.”
It seems to me that if a text has been reformatted, tidied and better numbered then I would not consider that ‘near identical’ and well worth a dollar.
“These titles appear to be sold with Amazon’s standard digital-rights-management restrictions”
This is what I think is the most upsetting for the average reader. What right to Amazon have to apply their digital rights limitations to this download.
Howard, Amazon is leaving the DRM thing completely to the publisher, if he says “DRM” Amazon goes this way, if he says “No-DRM” Amazon goes the other. Either way Amazon has absolutely nothing to do with this. And thanks for making the same point than me before. I think PG is really awesome, but there ARE a lot of improvements possible and these are really worth a few bucks.
“Amazon is leaving the DRM thing completely to the publisher, if he says “DRM” Amazon goes this way, if he says “No-DRM” Amazon goes the other.”
In this case yes it’s a choice when using DTP, but Amazon does require the use of DRM from the big publishers apparently.
———————————————————-
If folks want nicely formatted versions of PG texts be sure to check out the library at Mobile Read. Lots of great stuff there that folks have put hours of work into fixing up nicely.
No, Amazon doesn’t require DRM from the big publishers, the big publisher require DRM from Amazon. Same end result, different justification.
Originally, Amazon set up their ebook pipeline to accomomodate the BPHs and ended up with a system where DRM-free was hard to achieve. This was fully documented round these parts. Since, they’ve rearranged their systems to be as DRM-agnostic as they are (generally) content agnostic. This, too, has been fully documented round these parts.
Equally well documented is that Amazon does *not* fully vet or try to censor what publishers big and small offer up for sale. This leads to regular tempest in a teapot “scandals” like this one.
Amazon’s choices are really limitted they could pull and Apple and set up an (expensive and ultimately arbitrary) board to pick and choose what they allow to be sold in their store and be villified for it, or they can continue their (mostly) hands-off policy and be vilified for it.
The latter option does have the virtue of generating more revenue and incur lower operating costs.
(In other words: it’s all about the money cause they’re not going to please everybody either way.)
Having painstakingly re-formatted a novel before–indeed several times by now–I can say with absolutely certainly that it is NOT unreasonable for Amazon to charge for such services rendered on a public domain book, IF indeed they’ve done a good job in said efforts. Even if one does a quick ‘nuclear’ edit via WordPad you still have to go through each page line by line and polish it up, erase errors… not to mention striping page numbers, footers or enlarging chapter headers, and then change the font from the still-classic-yet-ubiquitous TNR to something slightly more eye-appealing, like Dante.
Even ‘traditional’ publishing houses do this all the time by re-publishing a classic book in the PD in a newly-designed cover. I have a Modern Library edition of Pride & Prejudice residing on my bookshelves as well as a Norton Critical Edition, an Oxford University Press edition and Simon & Schuster version.
Well according to Tom Doherty, head of Tor, they are required by Amazon to use it. Unless he’s lying to one of his authors which I doubt.
I’ve heard the same from some of the small pubs that sell there books DRM free elsewhere publishers that they have to allow Amazon to apply DRM. Apparently it has to do with the way they’re told to upload their books (through Mobipocket, not through DTP). It’s been one of the things keeping Baen stuff out of the Kindle store supposedly (although I’ve heard that may be changing).
If you think Project Gutenberg works are lower forms of eBooks, you haven’t used their services lately. And if you think the Amazon stolen versions are somehow better than the free PG books, you’re just wrong.
PG eBooks are carefully proofed, nicely formatted with illustrations, linked chapters, etc., and several formats (including Kindle) are all offered for free, along with the plain text version.
The example given, Fox Trapping, was actually taken by two different harvesters, one taking the text version without images (producing a very bad eBook), and the other taking the formatted version with the images (producing the very same eBook). Both versions are offered for sale on Amazon.
The book “Deadfalls and Snares”, I also formated, proofed and produced, along with 86 illustrations, is being sold on Amazon for $3.69, fully formatted and illustrated. VolumesOfValue is listed as the publisher. It was posted on Amazon on the same day Gutenberg released it. There was no polishing, just download from Gutenberg and upload to Amazon. Someone actually bought it and commented on the great illustrations, (thank you).
These examples only tell part of the story. Nearly every book that Project Gutenberg publishes is harvested. You can watch the “Recently Added” page on Gutenberg, and see the same books magically appear for sale at Amazon, within the next two days, (and sometimes in less than 24 hours).
I can also point out Gutenberg works being sold on Amazon that list no other publisher than Amazon Digital Services. So if only third parties are doing this, some of them must be anonymous.
I was aware that this practice was probably legal, and wasn’t too concerned about it until I tried contacting Amazon. They refused to give me the contact email for the Digital Services, and kept redirecting me to their PR department, which would not reply.
I tried getting answers on the Kindle forum, and got attacked by some guy who go so angry about it, he must have been one of the harvesters. Apparently not many people were aware of this practice, so I took it to the press.
I’ve noticed that many people who have commented on Pegoraro’s article, don’t seem to think this “harvesting and selling” of work done by volunteers at a non-profit website is wrong or unethical.
I disagree. Maybe I’m just old fashioned. And maybe you’d feel differently if it was your work being lifted.
Anyway, it’s always good when the truth is told. Thanks to Mr. Pegoraro, now you know.
Linda,
The amount of work involved is indeed huge. I’ve been very impressed with some PG eBooks, and the quality appears to be improving. If Amazon produced a poorer copy from the same material and charged for it, then shame on them… but in reality all we can do is shake a finger at them and not buy their Public Domain eBook editions. I’ve circulate an email among my various contact lists to ‘try Project Gutenberg first’ and link back to this article.
Regards,
MG
Amazon Digital Services is a generic catch all for most of the self pubbed stuff on there, it doesn’t mean Amazon was involved other than as a place to list the book.
As a volunteer reader for PG, I am impressed with the levels of proof-reading that go into preparing a digital image scan for text. There are 3 levels of proofreading to check for misspellings, typos, word-wrap and punctuation errors. Then there are 2 levels of formatting that set up the paragraph indentions, italics, etc., followed by the final pagination editor. It is a completely voluntary operation (don’t know about the guys at the top) and not a corporation as such, I don’t believe. There may be some minor conversion glitches from conversion software, but the final text output from PG will be as close to flawless as possible.
Some books enter Project Gutenberg (PG) as solo projects. Linda does solo projects. Most of the books are prepared by Distributed Proofreaders (DP); those are the ones with three rounds of proofreading and two of formatting. I work at DP.
I hate the ripoff artists too. They are cheating people; making customers pay for substandard versions of books that they could get for FREE.
Problem could be solved if all the versions of public domain books were clearly marked, by resellers such as Amazon, with a PD logo, and advice to check online for other versions of the text, which might be available for free. IF customers want to pay for PD books that have been tweaked in certain ways, that’s their choice. But it should be clear that they have a choice: free but perhaps not in the exact format they want, OR, non-free but tweaked.
There should also be some way of checking the reputation of the tweaker as a whole. Does a good job? Rip-off?
Oh, and about those page numbers in brackets? Those are essential to scholars, if they’re to cite passages from the book. They can cite the original publication and then give a page number. I believe that there are ways to remove the page numbers if you’re reading the XHTML version of the book. Unfortunately, some sites, such as Manybooks, use the much more limited ASCII versions of PG texts as a basis for transformation into different formats.
I’m a literary agent and I’d like to expose a different aspect of the same problem. What’s going on here isn’t Amazon as publisher at all, which several people have commented on without acknowledging the fundamental difference. This online system is created so anyone can publish a book and it is operating relatively unsupervised by Amazon so that PIRACY IS QUITE COMMON! Remember the Orwell story a while back where someone else was selling the book and Amazon removed it from people’s Kindles without warning?
I represent an author whose novel was copied by someone and uploaded with different title and author name (as well as a cover stolen from another book) and sold through Amazon as an original product. It took quite a lot of effort to get Amazon to remove the Buy button from the page let alone to take the book down entirely. Even knowing the book was fraudulent, Amazon would not cooperate with the author in providing his details so that he could be prosecuted.
This will probably come out wrong, but … so what? Its weird seeing Ms. Everhart’s implication that she has some proprietary interest in the book and the line from the Teleread commentary “The story goes on to say that this is actually permitted under the Gutenberg license.”
The text is in the public domain. Anyone can take it and sell it, print it, redistribute it however they like. That’s what public domain means. Kinda funny actually given the Greg Bear kerfuffle. I can almost envision someone who did the work on one of Poul Anderson’s stories that has entered the public domain complaining its in turn being sold on Amazon.
And while I am not a fan of people who do this, I have to disagree with @zora that these folks are ripoff artists. $4 is not very much, and you are forgetting the opportunity costs of going out and determining if the book is free elsewhere as well as figuring out how to get it on the Kindle as opposed to just searching in Amazon and buying the damn thing for $4.
There have been numerous PD books available on Fictionwise for years that I assume are largely repackaging of PG material, and make sense for the same reason.
Contributors like Linda should upload the book to Kindle and the other formats before it goes up on PG and send all the profit to PG which could use the funds.
I don’t want to live in a world where everything is legislated for or against. Sometimes things are fair and sometimes unfair. But we can all make choices. My local newsagent sells a magazine I love for €8.75. The big newsagent in town about 3 miles away sells it for €6.75. It’s annoying. But that’s life. I am free to buy from wither. That’s the free market. Amazon, or the people who are actually doing the deed, are being a bit opportunistic and it is annoying. But it should not be illegal. The works are public domain. No one is being forced to buy. Caveat emptor and all.
If much of the mission of PG is to preserve these titles and make them available far and wide, then having them for sale on Amazon supports that cause by providing the titles to people who have chosen Amazon as their book supplier. I have a Kindle and I’d much rather pay a dollar or two in purchasing a title through Amazon than to go to the trouble of downloading the .mobi file from PG and moving it over. Downloading from the Kindle store gets me reading sooner rather than later. Yes, I’m serious: saving two minutes of my time is worth something to me. Now, if PG were putting its files up through the DTP program directly, I’d choose theirs over anyone else’s, but they won’t provide me that option. So I choose what works for me.
Linda,
I did my own take on this yesterday, and mine is in between yours and the others’.
The PG license states that they don’t claim any right to prevent anyone using the PG edition as a basis and modifying it — others can do anything they like as long as they don’t charge for it.
BUT, if others do charge for it, then PG -insists- that references to PG be removed as they don’t want anything to do with that. Once the references to PG are removed it’s pure public domain text, even though put together with a focus on accuracy and readability after the arduous work of converting scanned images to almost typo-free text and then converting to HTML etc.
However, it should be no surprise then that people may build on that Proj Gutenberg copy — but they aren’t even allowed, if charging anything, to reference or credit Project Gutenberg for the BASIC work that had been done . I don’t see why not. It’s clear that it’s not PG who’s charging for the modified version but they get credit for the earlier work done.
Some do need to charge for their own added labor (where that is done — I realize some uploaders add nothing to PG’s work and I hope they get nothing in return), even though PG volunteers don’t charge for all that work.
“Some do need to charge for their own added labor”
Actually, Amazon DTP won’t let an item be sold for less than 99 cents unless the publisher makes special arrangements with Amazon’s sales team. I tried to release something I’d written for free, but couldn’t get anywhere with the people who are able to make that possible. I think they only deal with more substantial publishers.
So, regardless of the amount of labor involved, your average individual using DTP wouldn’t be able to offer a title for free even if they wanted to.
Now, PG being a substantial publisher with a large number of titles, probably could succeed in negotiating that sort of deal with Amazon, whereas individuals simply can’t. If PG would prefer to see their titles shared for free, it’s up to them to work that out.
As a long term Project Gutenberg volunteer, I understand that the works I submit to Project Gutenberg are public domain, and that Amazon, or one of the many people using the Amazon system are fully in their right to resell PG books. You won’t hear me complaining about that.
There are two problems however.
First, the very same books are available directly from Project Gutenberg for free, and in formats supported by most eBook readers as well. People wanting those books do very well to search for the title plus ebook. A search for “Alice in Wonderland ebook” will directly lead to Project Gutenberg’s download page.
Second, I often spend considerable effort to make the ebook version nicer in HTML. Even then, I don’t believe in “sweat-of-brow” copyright, and consider my formatting part of the Public Domain ebook. Unfortunately, many of those versions offered at Amazon have horrible formatting: it is just a cheap, script based reformatting without any post-conversion verification. Now, I normally include my name somewhere in the credit line for my formatting effort, and often still find it that same credit line for in the cheap rip-off with horrible formatting — and I am thus personally discredited by that behavior. Unfortunately, doing something about this is unfeasible.