Amazon Blocks Arch Linux Handbook Author From Releasing Kindle Version

An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard the horror stories of Amazon swindling the user out of their content on the Kindle, but this time they've managed to do it preemptively: by blocking the GFDL licensed Arch Linux Handbook from the Kindle Store." Reasons include: "We’ve reviewed the information you provided and have decided to block these books from being sold in the Kindle Store. The books closely match content that is freely available on the web and we are not confident that you hold exclusive publishing rights. This type of content can create a poor customer experience, and is not accepted. As a result, we have blocked the books listed below from being sold in the Kindle Store." The workaround: he uploaded a mobi copy to the Arch website.

Comments

What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

This summary is confusing! Who is 'he'? When did this happen and who exactly is involved?

Not unreasonable.

[Dyinobal]

TBH I don't think Amazon is being that unreasonable. They've a right to ensure that people enjoy using their site, and their site would be less enjoyable if I had to wade through a bunch of content that is otherwise very easy to find on the rest of the web. Such as his website.

That isn't to say his book doesn't have some original content, but it likely doesn't have a lot of it when it comes down to it and when you start being super inclusive you can really flood the market place with a lot of low quality products.

Does this suck for him? Yes I'm sure it does, but there are plenty of sites out there dedicated to proving hosting to free books.

Re:Not unreasonable.

[milkmage]

legally published in Canada means what to electronic distribution in the US (seriously). ... and Romeo and Juliet is in the Public Domain, 1984 - not. (http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/j-r-r-tolkien-george-orwell-removed-from-public-domain_b45725)

and it's not "you guys".. just one fucked up judge (maybe a couple more we don't know about) in Texas thought the UN was going to invade - we're really really sorry about that.

Arch Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, Arch Linux, the operating system where people brag about their superiority even though it comes down to copy/pasting commands from a wiki without understanding what the hell they even do. Who woulda thunk that the first published book is just a copy/paste of other people's work?

He's not even the author

[recoiledsnake]

Summary incorrectly states that he's the author. He only did some editing, the content was written by the community.

Re:He's not even the author

[stephanruby]

I think we all got scammed here on Slashdot. I'm willing to bet this Dusty Phillips is the one who originally submitted the story anonymously to Slashdot. Here is why I'd think that.

Summary incorrectly states that he's the author. He only did some editing, the content was written by the community.

Correction: For the paperback version, he did not do **any** editing whatsoever.

Here is the only customer review for his book in paperback version.

What I was hoping for in this book was a little better laid out and explained version of the tutorial from Arch's website. What I received is a verbatim printed version of the website in a pocket sized soft cover book. I wanted a printed version that I could follow along with, and had considered just printing the website in the first place. At least for $11 the book might have cost less than it would have to print out all those pages on my own. Ink is expensive! My biggest complain is that it really is word for word from the website. For example, the VERY FIRST PAGE has an underlined hyper-link to go for more info. Go ahead, try and click it... I dare you

You can actually confirm this by going to his book and 'click[ing] to look inside'. The book is horribly edited. The table of content is misaligned. It's just a very poor print out of the wiki site with blue links all over the place.

Furthermore, he's listed on Amazon for the paperback version of the book as its sole author, which is a listing he has complete control over. And no, I'm not talking about the cover of the book, or inside the book, I'm talking about the way he listed himself in the Amazon index, which is the part almost everyone sees even if most never take a close look at anything else. And yes, even if he didn't want to list Aaron Griffin and Judd Vinet as the main authors/original copyright holders of this work on Amazon, it is indeed possible to list himself as an (editor) only, for instance just like these guys did with the Richard Feynmans' letters.

Re:He's not even the author

[Daemonik]

(1) amazon requires exclusivity

Before people get their knickers in a twist about this, it doesn't mean exclusivity ie. Amazon must be the only source for this book, it means exclusivity ie. YOU, the author/publisher must be the only source for the book. They don't want to deal with legal tussles over who owns what and how much of the cut they should get.

Nothing to see here.

(2) this: "You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book." So for a book that is free in any format, amazon is not an option.

Let me fix this for you "For a book that is free in any format YOU MAY NOT ALSO SELL IT FOR PROFIT ON AMAZON.

But slashdotters might find that the facts of my situation evoke a different feeling in their fuzzy little free-information-loving hearts than the facts of the one in TFA.

Not really dude. Because when someone buys your book for $0.99 on Amazon and then writes a big huge blog about how Amazon scammed them because they just found out the books were free from another website, you're not the one who's on the hook there, Amazon is. You're not the one who has to do damage control, call out the lawyers and the publicity spin-doctors, because your $0.99 book is effecting their entire business.

Frankly there is nothing stopping you from publishing the book in MOBI & EPUB formats (what do you have against Nook?) and setting up a pay what you like website. So no, no violins for you.

However, it's worth bearing in mind that amazon is very close to being a monopolist in the ebook business. If someone held a monopoly on paper, we probably would be a little concerned if they started refusing to sell various broad categories of books.

Weird, I could have sworn there were iPods/iPads/iPhones/Nooks/Sony Ereaders/A billion Android devices out there, and that there were about a gazillion web shopping cart systems to setup a retail channel, from hosting your own to we'll do all the work for you setups. I was sure that MOBI & EPUB were published standards that anyone can create ebooks with with software like Calibre.

Amazon is not the only source for ebooks. They're the most well known, possibly, but they are not the only source. Take your hyperbole somewhere else.

More importantly

[betterunixthanunix]

Nothing stops someone from sideloading books onto their Kindle. Amazon does indeed have a right to decide what they will or will not sell in their own store, as long as Kindle users have other options -- which they have. I see little to take issue with here.

Re:More importantly

[icebike]

Well, you could take issue with the perfectly HORRIBLE job of conversion to mobi that he did.
Find the download a the end of his rant. Compare it to the on-line wiki that he sourced.

Pathetic.

Re:Who cares? Kindle Blows! IPHONE 5 HAS QUAD CORE

[R3d M3rcury]

True. But you still can't sit in the sunshine and read a book on it.

I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !!

[Taco Cowboy]

This is not an Amazon vs Linux case

It's a case of Amazon refusing to sell a "book" that was essentially written by a community, that can be gotten online for free (it's wiki stuffs).

And that "author" of that "book" happens to be a "packager", not an "author" in the truest sense.

I dunno what's going on with Slashdot lately.

Truly, I don't !! And I've been visiting Slashdot for a long-long-time !

Re:I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon has also been under a lot of pressure to clean up the mountains of garbage that gets bundled up from online resources and sold in their bookstore as actual books. People will try just about any shady thing to make $3.

I have no doubt that this particular reference is good enough to be called a book. And I imagine the guy had to do some work to prep it for Amazon. I am not, however, surprised by this.

Re:I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !!

[Gordonjcp]

Why do you think those multiple "Linux desktop is dead" stories which were posted here in the last few weeks garnered so many comments?

Page views, and hence ad impressions.

Re:I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !!

[NormalVisual]

Amazon (rightly) doesn't want to let you sell books that you can get for free on the same device.

Yet they allow sales of works in the public domain such as Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, etc., which are freely available in electronic form on the Internet as well. Granted, those titles won't become dated like a technical reference would, but it's still a bit inconsistent on Amazon's part.

Re:I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing the point.

A couple years back, after they first implemented print-on-demand books and kindle e-books, amazon got a flood of "authors" who would grab N pages from wikipedia that were loosely related, glue them together, and call them a "book", and sell them for cheap. People who bought this trash would complain, because you bought something thinking it was a book on topic X and instead got a bunch of wikipedia pages on X. There was no audience of people clamoring for parts of wikipedia to be in book form, there were just scammers trying to use it to trick you into buying something, while being able to claim "it's a book, it contains information on the topic the title said it was about, so you can't demand a refund from me!".

Amazon cracked down on this, and the policy is "quit being a wanker and claiming that a bunch of wiki pages is a book".

If you want to write a serious book with actual value-added content, amazon will publish it. If you want to take an actual book that is public-domain and sell it on the kindle, you can do that (though they're likely to say "no" if they already have people selling something identical, so you might want to do the value-add of at least writing an introduction or footnotes or something so you can meaningfully call it different). But if you want to write a wiki page, stick it on a wiki and give people a web link. If you want to scrape someone's wiki for content and call it a book, amazon is generally acting in the best interests of their customers when they say "whatever, we aren't going to sell that".

Amazon's business model is selling books to customers, and they have every right to say "if this category of book is going to piss off customers, we aren't going to sell it".

Rapidly Diminishing Returns

[ZombieBraintrust]

Not much value when there are hundreds of people creating compilations of public-domain works because they purchased a $.99 book titled "How to make a fortune selling books on Amazon! $$$". These bookstores just need to sign a deal with Project Guutenberg and integrate the free stuff into a free section of the store.

writing is actually fucking hard

[decora]

all through college you listen to the 'engineer' and 'computer' kids and professors shit all over the 'liberal arts morons' and 'worthless degrees like english'.

then you get in the real world and try to, you know, fucking write something. turns out those 'morons' in 'liberal arts' were actually doing something that is every bit as difficult as creating an OS kernel or a graph algorithm.

things like 'fact checking' and 'editing' evolved over centuries, centuries of the craft, yes, the fucking craft of this thing called 'writing', which is as technical and difficult as any other field of human endeavor, from metallurgy to blacksmithing to CPU architecture.

the difference nowdays is that writing is fucking debased and devalued by society due to various factors that have barely, if ever, been studied. then we wake up one day and wonder why the fuck we are so ignorant. because we threw the writers and editors in the garbage can, because, after all, the work they did was 'worthless'.

Re:writing is actually fucking hard

[AxeTheMax]

And obviously you did not get any of this 'liberal arts' education, since you could not be bothered to start sentences with capital letters, and use obscenities liberally and unnecessarily in your writing,

Re:writing is actually fucking hard

[serviscope_minor]

professors shit all over the 'liberal arts morons' and 'worthless degrees like english'.

There has been a strong anti university undercurrent on /. recently by people who haven't got the first clue about universities.

At my undergrad university, the engineering professors would frequently lament the poor standard of student writing in the examiners report. But they knew that the had too little time to teach it properly.

Any research professor knows that students almost universally suck at writing papers, and it's the job of the professor teach students how to write. The first few times this is usually very painful because you have to plough through a terribly written research paper multiple times and really give constructive criticism. otherwise the paper won't get published.

I have never, ever, met of professor in any discpline who considers things like good writing or English degrees worthless.