Amazon downplaying free books? More evidence

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By David Rothman

Check out Slashdot and Open Access News. Amazon’s new move against the public domain is one more reason for Obama to have a coherent information policy and propose a TeleRead-style national digital library system.

Whether the country, er, company, is Amazon or Google, the driving force is profit—not quite the same as from serving the world’s information and cultural needs.

From a Slashdot poster: “One key point is that Amazon has applied this ban completely non-selectively. Established publishers such as myself and others who have never had any quality control issues whatsoever, and give good value for the price, have all been tarred with the broad brush of ‘Public Domain Publisher—do not post.’ …”

Related: Kindle Store cutting out free ebooks: Kindle Nation thinks so, Paul Biba’s post, as well as Steve Windwalker’s Kindle Nation article. Also see Paul’s update and a related comment.

Update, 11:02: Headline tweaked, replacing “public domain” with “free.”

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