Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Delaying Public Domain Submissions On Kindle
I own and run one of the primary contributors of new public domain e-texts on the web: sacred-texts.com. I am (was?) in the process of converting all of the 2,000+ e-books at sacred-texts into Kindle editions. I use a homebrew preflight Kindle filter to construct the Kindle binary from my master files, which we have invested nearly a million dollars into creating. We spend thousands a month in-house doing legal clearance, scanning, OCRing, and proofing, often by domain experts. So we are hardly a fly-by-night operation. In fact, many of the PD texts floating around on the Internet and on the Kindle were originally done at sacred-texts at great investment of labor and time. Our Kindle return rate is close to zero.
I just received the following email from Amazon:
Dear Publisher,
We're working on a policy and procedure change to fix a customer experience problem caused by multiple copies of public domain titles being uploaded by a multitude of publishers. For an example of this problem, do a search on "Pride and Prejudice" in the Kindle Store. The current situation is very confusing for customers as it makes it difficult to decide which 'Pride and Prejudice' to choose. As a result, at this time we are not accepting additional public domain titles through DTP, including the following:
The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ
Traces of a Hidden Tradition in Masonry and Medieval Mysticism
The History of the Knights Templar by Nicolas Notovitch
...
If you believe that we have wrongly identified this title as a public domain title, and you are the copyright holder or are authorized to sell it by the copyright holder, then please reply to title-submission@amazon.com with appropriate documentation of your e-book rights.
Thank you, Amazon.com
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."
By banning new public domain books from the Kindle, they are making an implicit decision as to which books people should read. You can argue that "you can get these texts anywhere," but by excluding high-quality Kindle books from the nascent Kindle marketplace, Amazon is implicitly deciding what is a valid part of our culture and what isn't. This trend does not bode well for the future of e-books.
This move is probably related to the whole 1984 incident, which was caused by someone uploading and selling content that they didn't possess the rights to. The whole episode was a huge embarrassment for Amazon, and I can certainly see why they're being more diligent in this area.
The article would be more interesting - if it were an actual article rather than a rant about how Amazon won't grant them unlimited access to Amazon's customers. (Which is their right dammit! They've spent a million dollars!)
1. Why don't you sell the books yourself?
2.One key point is that Amazon has applied this ban completely non-selectively.
This seems to me like a good thing. They've identified a problem, too many public domain titles that are dupes (Slashdot had a dupe problem too). They are apparently working on a solution.
Now if, in a few months, they are still blocking all public domain book, then there's a problem.
Best Slashdot Co
Otherwise, people might start asking questions like "If copyright used to expire, why doesn't it now? Are effectively infinite copyright terms really in the public interest?"
Business has the right and responsibility to run itself and to take care of their customers. Anyone who wants to whine about the refusal of the 88th copy of "Pride and Prejudice" simply wants to whine and see their name in lights. Whatever happened to common sense?
Actually they're really making a decision on which books they wish to deliver on their service, paid or unpaid. Honestly I can get behind Amazon on this as the appropriate policy to have in this situation is broad-based denial to avoid exactly what they're stating; multiple copies of public domain works, whose redundancy will create a negative user experience, and to which the public (not an individual) holds the copyright. And in this situation, if the work isn't being provided for free (as a public domain work), the potential for abuse is extraordinary. I would chide Amazon for not providing a dispute process based on the quality of the supplied work, or an alternate pricing scheme for businesses such as the OP's, but I do not fault them for this policy in general.
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
Amazon is implicitly deciding what is a valid part of our culture and what isn't. This trend does not bode well for the future of e-books.
No shit? It looks more like they're deciding to limit copies of a book to one in their store. The implications of that are probably more like "... deciding what they think is in their own best interest as a profit seeking company."
I like how you took the high road here and argue your point on a moral level. You know, when it's obvious your beef with Amazon is over the income it's costing you. Normally "yro" means a bunch of annoying BS to me, but masquerading as someone that generally think the decision by a company to limit the books to one copy (not even prevent you from reading it, but eliminate the dupes!) that can be read on a device I've never even seen anyone use is going to somehow have even a slight impact on society takes the cake.
Whale
Have you tried contacting Amazon about this to clarify that you're not simply a "fly-by-night" publisher? Or was your first reaction to start posting this around the net to illustrate how Amazon is treating you unfairly. I can understand their position, especially considering the issues that they've had to deal with in the recent past. It wouldn't surprise me that they're throwing out the blanket "ban", but that they're also more than willing to work with the larger publishers as soon as they step forward. So I suggest doing just that -- step forward and clearly explain yourself and your position to Amazon directly instead of whining to the web.
Why not just have all the public domain books downloadable for free? Then it doesn't matter what the quality of the version you downloaded is. Just download another one. It doesn't make sense for anybody to be profiting from selling public domain books unless they're selling hard copy editions that take time and money to create, which doesn't apply here where it's just a 20 KB digital copy.
Or just make it clear to the buyer that the book is in the public domain and may be obtained for free elsewhere so they don't get ripped off thinking that the $10 they're spending is somehow going to the dead author's pocket.
No existe.
Didn't Amazon get in hot water by allowing someone to offer up "1984" and "Animal Farm" claiming they were public domain works, then yanking them back when it turned out the third party who submitted them was (I'll give them the benefit of doubt) in error as to the status of that work in the US? Didn't everyone get their unmentionables in a big old snarled bunch about that? I think I can still hear faint echoes of the screams.
Result: Amazon has to make damned sure every claim of public domain work is accurate by the laws of the country in which the work is sold. So if someone submits "1984" as a public domain work again, they'll have to stop it before it gets published. If they make another mistake, they're either gonna get boned with sand instead of vaseline by the copyright holder or have to break their promise never to delete the works again and suffer another PR nightmare.
If Amazon is to be held responsible in the eyes of the public for any mistakes their publishing partners might happen to make, then they have an obligation to their stakeholders to audit the holy living crap out of everything, which means even if FSM Himself came down with the 10 Rules of Noodly Appendagement claiming them to be public domain, Amazon would have to do a due diligence check.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I disagree, since the Kindle has a large quantity of free and PD books available.
But I think the larger point that Amazon has is correct - that having multiple versions of the same book, each of varying quality, is not a good thing.
Take the case of freecddb vs CDDB (just from a technical standpoint, forget politics or the nasty stuff that CDDB did). When I rip a CD and use freecddb, I'll get varying answers. A 2-CD set often has different artist or album names between the two CDs. Misspellings are common. But CDDB has the CD listed only once, and the information is almost always correct (of course, I still use freecddb most of the time, then mutter, make corrections, and send them up for verification).
Some of the free ebooks I've downloaded for my Kindle are of okay quality (I've found a number of formatting or misspelling issues) compared to non-PD books I purchased from Amazon.
The answer, unfortunately, is that Amazon has to have only a few copies of a book on its site that is of good to great quality, but allow you to download ebooks from other sites (I note that sacred-texts.com didn't have an ebook version of the KJV Bible, for instance, otherwise I may have downloaded it).
Brick and mortar stores have something called "shelf space". Having 80 different copies of Pride and Prejudice in a real store wouldn't make any sense. This is simply Amazon doing the same thing, but online. Just because they have unlimited digital shelf space, doesn't mean they HAVE to carry your book. The user experience comes first, and if I walked into a brick and mortar store and was met with 80 different publishings of Pride and Prejudice, I wouldn't be so happy either. So quit bitching, Amazon is entirely within its rights.
Let me get this straight, amazon sells PD books while Sony has free PD books powered by google and epub support. Yikes. Happy I didn't get a kindle now.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
That reminds me -- when's the last time a copyrighted work passed into the public domain? I'm 28 years old; has that ever happened in my lifetime? A brief discussion with some of my lawyer friends a couple of weeks ago concluded that it probably hadn't.
I've loved Amazon in most ways (excepting mainly their patents) for many years now. However since their introduction of the Kindle, my opinion of them has steadily declined. I think the Kindle was perhaps Amazon's shark-jumping.
One can always transfer them to the device for free via a cable. The limitation seems to be on what shows up in the Kindle store.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I cannot find it.
I would welcome less noise on an eBook store, and if this honestly is quality control, that's a good thing.
A delay may also be necessary to ensure something actually is public domain.
I just don't see the conspiracy here that I would like to see. It's certainly in Amazon's interest to provide any literature that their competitors might.
....if I could have the Talmud, that's available on sacred-texts.com, on my device!
Most of the stuff on my Kindle is public domain, stuff I have downloaded from legit free text sites. Yeah, they are not in the "Kindle format," and that's a drag... for about 20 seconds, and then I remember how much I paid for the free text, versus how much I pay for a Kindle Version of anything, and then I am happy again.
quit whining, amazon runs a business that makes money, maybe you can respect that.
Spoiler note: for those who haven't read it (your loss) it's about how a vanity publishing company has the idea of making its fortune by printing mystical conspiracy theory books. Unfortunately the mystical conspiracy nuts decide that the publishers know the secret answer to everything, and hunt them down to extract the secret. I guess that Dan Brown depends on his readership not having read it and finding out what Eco thinks of the sort of people who like that stuff.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
BTW, another take on the same idea: PD compicates DRM. It is imperative that Amazon makes sure that none of their technical measures and other barriers to interoperability, never get applied to PD works. And even if they don't apply the DRM itself, they still might necessarily do things that inhibit access to PD stuff.
Why does this matter? Because DMCA does not prohibit bypassing DRM. Saying that it does, is an over-generalization. It only prohibits circumventing DRM on copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. You can legally bypass DRM on PD works. You can legally distribute and traffic in DRM-defeating tools, provided you can show that it's primarily intended and marketed for accessing PD stuff. And Amazon and the Kindle are big enough names, that just publishing one book is enough to generate a tools market for people who want to read that book.
One might think it's simple enough, to just not set the evil bit for PD works. And as far as the bottommost DRM layer itself, it probably is. But no DRM system lives in isolation. If any user is ever allowed to access any file on a Kindle, that justifies users and developers to peel back 99% of the Kindle's shittiness.
I think this basic idea -- situations where DRM is legally attackable (either by PD or by copyright holders authorizing it) -- is the one flaw in DMCA that can lead to the eventual legal (not just technical) defeat of many DRM systems.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
<sarcasm>
Personalty I think Amazon carries way too many books in the Fiction section already. To make things worse, every time I search for Science, Physics, Medical text books there they are, making it that much harder to find what I am really looking for. Allowing 'anybody with a web browser' to create the index search keywords for the book database is a big mistake. What we need is the ability to use the reverse, suppression keywords, so I can avoid all those books on the life of Zeus, and Aphrodite when I am not looking for them. "Thor" on the other hand is another matter altogether. I read that one every night!
<sarcasm>
The fact that other 'publishers' are using the versions of the work that his company produced is unfortunately the nature of "freely available", and how a certain subset of the population tries to capitalize on it.
Kindle users are suckers. Nuff said.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Not that long ago actually
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
There was a three year period between 1995 and 1997 where some works passed into the public domain due to copyright expiration (falling under the 75 year term of the Copyright Act of 1976), prior to that it was 1975 (under the 28 or 56 year terms of the Copyright Act of 1909). The next time something might fall out is in 2018 (under the 95 year term of the Copyright Act of 1998).
He effected a bored affect.
Or you can just pick up a REAL book, read it, smell it, lend it to friends, and have it for life. Heck, you may be able to get it used and sell it if you hate it. How about that? No DRM, no rights taken away, and not screwing over the publishers.
The Kindle platform is based on a proprietary distribution model that has no interest in selling books that don't have rights associated with it. You should be putting your focus else where on Models that don't restrict choice. Especially since your works are public domain.
It is obvious that they don't want another incident like before. Thanks to the totally fucked up and corrupt copyright system the US has, Amazon could sell a book that is 50+ years old and then get sued. These days, one can never be sure if something is truly in the public domain.
Note that I am not standing up for, nor am I a supporter of Amazon.
In the United States, 1998 was the last time anything entered the public domain. If there are no more extensions, items will start entering the public domain again in 2019.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Peter Pan (in the US)
Almost anything that is uploaded to the Kindle store that was based on a public domain work is no longer entirely public domain.
The amount of work you need to do to convert the source work properly to the Kindle is not trivial. Yes people can OCR direct to a file and upload that but the quality is not much better than a google translation in many cases.
Go to a mainstream bookstore and pick up a copy of one of Mark Twain's books and look at the copyright notice.
"By banning new public domain books from the Kindle, they are making an implicit decision as to which books people should read. You can argue that "you can get these texts anywhere," but by excluding high-quality Kindle books from the nascent Kindle marketplace, Amazon is implicitly deciding what is a valid part of our culture and what isn't. This trend does not bode well for the future of e-books."
Wow! Who died and made this book selling company the sole gatekeeper to all human knowledge?
I agree that this post is a little strange, in that (a) there's nothing stopping them from offering Kindle editions on their own website, or (2) offering them in other etext formats (there's certainly more than there need to be now).
I can also see how Amazon would be cautious after their 1984 debacle.
However, I'm struck a little by the reactions here on Slashdot. Amazon *is* being hypocritical in their practices compared to their online sales of physical books, and I find it hard to believe that Amazon would improve their case that they are not liable for copyright infringement by taking an active role in screening texts.
As for the first thing, do a search for Shakespeare on the paper section of Amazon. See all those Shakespeare texts? Those are all public domain, and that hasn't kept (1) people from producing value-added unique versions through typography, page design, commentary, etc., and (2) Amazon selling multiple versions of the same Shakespeare works.
The converse of all of this is that I recognize that there all sorts of scams on the physical-goods sections of Amazon where people are selling public domain works for full price without doing any restoration work. So why isn't Amazon being diligent there?
The claim that "we need to make only one version available" rings really hollow to me, and does seem Big Brother-ish. If there were some consistent push across all of Amazon to identify what seem to be scams, I might take them seriously. But releasing a new edition of a publicly available work isn't necessarily a scam, and there are all sorts of scams elsewhere on Amazon that don't get "policed" in this way.
Frankly, I find it insulting that Amazon is deciding that I'm too unintelligent to choose for myself what I want and don't want, and their efforts seem so selective that I am reluctant to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I am skeptical that they are well-meaning but inept in what they're doing. In the end, this *does* seem to me to be an effort to push the agenda of traditional big publishers at the expense of Amazon customers. Maybe if I saw this concern about PD "scams" being taken more seriously throughout Amazon I would take Amazon seriously.
There are alternatives to the Kindle. Why would anyone use a device where someone else, without your permission or prior knowledge can remove things. Screw that.
If only there were a way to review and rate book purchases so the buyers could decide between different versions. (Amazon search for Alice in Wonderland sorted by Ratings: 811 results)
They're doing it for all of the "self publish" submissions. The reason is that people were uploading copyrighted works that they didn't have rights to, and trying to sell them through Amazon. Because Amazon is financially benefiting from the sale, they are also liable for any copyright infringement. The policy change to require a review process is to cover their butts.
IMO, it's a good thing and should have been done from the beginning. What they were originally doing, letting anyone put items up for sale on their store with no oversight, was a really bad idea.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Simply do not use the kindle, other ebook readers are more public domain friendly, especially since you can get epubs from google and project gutenberg.
well, that's certainly more recent than i thought. but it's preeeettty pathetic that the 20 years since then have seen not a single work enter the public domain.
In order for Night of the Living Dead to pass into public domain, it had to be copyrighted properly in the first place. It was not, thus it was always public domain.
Almost anything that is uploaded to the Kindle store that was based on a public domain work is no longer entirely public domain.
That may be, but the GP says that it potentially only takes a single DRM'd PD work to establish a legal use for DRM circumvention. If that's so, then "almost" isn't good enough for someone in the DRM business. If your goal is to execute this kind of legal hack, your first step would be to create and upload a work which you explicitly place into the public domain. That would seem to address your points.
Gutenburg + mobi converter = PD on kindle.. ( and lots are already in the proper format )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Almost anything that is uploaded to the Kindle store that was based on a public domain work is no longer entirely public domain.
No. It remains in the public domain. Parent poster would be right, and trying to apply a copyright to expired material is a form of copyfraud. Others have tried to re-copyright stuff. A mere digital translation does not a copyright make either (i.e. it's not a creative work, it's algorythmic).
I suppose there is that whole dubious "End User License Agreement" that Amazon has gooed up the Kindle with. But I guess that's why it's called the "Kindle Swindle." The only reason to own a Kindle is if you want to join the class action suit that will eventually follow with this continued nonsense that Amazon seems apt at creating.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
this just demonstrates your ignorance as to what the kindle is...
Yes people can OCR direct to a file and upload that but the quality is not much better than a google translation in many cases.
Huh? OCR is a direct conversion of printed letters and has nothing to do with translation. And having done some OCR myself I can confidently say that printed texts are absolutely no challenge whatsoever, even with the bundled software that came with my scanner over 10 years ago.
Go to a mainstream bookstore and pick up a copy of one of Mark Twain's books and look at the copyright notice.
Irrelevant. A publisher can print whatever they want. Whether their claim is valid is another matter.
Can you create Kindle files and put them on your web site? Is it possible for a Kindle user to grab a file and just copy it to their device?
If so then being kicked out of the Amazon store sucks but it isn't a mortal blow. Someone who googles for "Jesus H. Christ on a Kindle!" will get to your site sooner or later.
If the ONLY way you can get books on your Kindle is through Amazon, then, well, I'm glad I never got one. Even the "F You, We're Sony" reader lets you put your own text on the device.
> And the publisher who put "1984" and "Animal Farm" on Amazon's marketplace claimed they WERE Public Domain. Except they turned out to be wrong.
They ARE public domain. Just in Australia, not the USA.
Sure, and buy a copy on XP or Vista, Photoshop, etc. You're absolutely entitled, by common-law and explicitly through copyright statute, to use the work.
But the EULA says otherwise.
So yeah, those Mark Twain books can say whatever they want but if they're primarily a reformatting of a now-copyright expired work they aren't actually under copyright.
If I had my way lies like that would result in a direct forfeiture of the rights claimed and any related rights. That might end up public-domaining a few operating systems, etc and a few companies going bankrupt, but if they're pushing fake contracts with illegal tactics, wouldn't we all be better off without them?
I just looked for "Pride and Prejudice" at Amazon. It really is chaos. There are 12293 versions in paperback, 4047 in hardcover and 198 for the Kindle.
So, they think the Kindle is the problem?
I personally truly appreciate Amazon's efforts to trim the garbage from their store. I find that the user reviews are often incomplete or self-serving.
Go to a mainstream bookstore and pick up a copy of one of Mark Twain's books and look at the copyright notice.
I don't think they would be claiming copyright just for the scanning and proofreading. More likely they have added a few pages of introduction over which they can claim copyright. As far as I know it would be fraudulent for them to claim copyright over somebody else's text otherwise.
More to the point, they don't (and can't) claim copyright to the text of "Tom Sawyer", but they can and are claiming copyright to that particular print version (ie. the aspects of the presentation (bound/electronic volume) beyond the words of the title book itself. So while the words are not under copyright, the rest of the total of the "presentation" is, and include the entirety of the other aspects such as fonts used, pagination, cover art/design, page/chapter art/design, prefacing commentary, etc. effective from the first publication of that edition.
So, I can take and a hundred copies of Tom Sawyer and hand them out to anyone I wanted, I can't print out/sell/give copies of a specific copyrighted edition. Even though 98% of the book, that core text is identical, that other 2% which extends beyond the words on the page that IS covered under copyright.
A similar example is in music. Mozart's Requiem is long public domain. However an orchestral performance of Requiem has a separate copyright. So while recording A may have entered into the public domain, recording B is still under copyright protection even though both recordings are of the same piece of music, and may sound nearly indistinguishable from each other to someone who may not know/listen for the nuances of particular performances/orchestras/etc.
You can certainly take and publish/perform your own versions of Tom Sawyer/Mozart's Requiem, but you can't take and reproduce/redistribute a duplicate of the edition/performance by Bantam Books/Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Bezos' oft stated grand vision with the Kindle is to make every book ever published available for Kindle readers. Right now they have about 350,000 titles (30,000 of which are various versions of "Pride and Prejudice" j/k ;-)
350,000 titles is obviously a far cry from the vision. Even if you throw in the poorly formatted Gutenberg collection into the mix, that only represents a small fraction of every book ever published. Clearly it doesn't make any sense for Amazon to exclude public domain titles, because that would mean they have written off (no pun intended) every book published before 1923. That certainly would not serve their Kindle readership well -- the same readership that have shelled out $300+ for a Kindle. In fact, there are complaints on the Amazon forums about a lot of books not being available for the Kindle. This is just one of many threads: http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_search_res_ti?_encoding=UTF8&cdMsgNo=1&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx1CHJ1YPUUMKOQ&cdMsgID=MxPIP3LYY8GT4D#MxPIP3LYY8GT4D [amazon.com]
So why did Amazon institute such a draconian policy? It doesn't help them because it limits their library. It doesn't help their customers because it cuts off every book published before 1923 and goes against the vision stated by Bezos himself. My guess is that this was a short-sited policy implemented at a low management level. Amazon is a large, bureaucratic organization and decisions are made that Bezos would not necessarily agree to. Look at the 1984 fiasco. It was clear Bezos was not involved in that policy decision and he acted quickly and decisively to rectify the situation.
My personal opinion is that this sledgehammer policy will be rescinded and a policy that is better thought through to deal with the quality issues will be drafted. Amazon wants to work with publishers in order to bring their vision for the Kindle to fruition. They certainly want to provide the books that their customers want. This current policy gets in the way of doing that.