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.

[pushing-robot]

Agreed. Not that long ago I was reading (on Slashdot) about the scourge of 'authors' that do nothing but spam the Kindle store with content they trawl from the web, and how Amazon desperately needed to crack down. Damned if you do...

Re:Not unreasonable.

[fm6]

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.

Good lord, have you seen some of the crap in the Kindle store? Lots of poorly written stuff that badly needs an editor. And there are titles carefully chosen to make people buy them by mistake.

This is not about content quality. They just don't want people selling content that they can get for free elsewhere — bad customer relations.

(Or is it? Back in 2006, I co-wrote a book for Sun Microsystems. I was well-paid for this work, and I wasn't expecting royalties, but for some strange reason I got them, showing that the book sold reasonably well, despite being available online before the book came out.)

Now, Amazon has every right to do this. But that's just the problem: the Kindle platform is another walled garden. Just as I don't like Steve Jobs telling me I can't have lame iPhone apps, I don't like Jeff Bezos telling me I can't buy lame books. The fact that the app or book is lame is besides the point. The central control is the problem.

If I ever become a sufficiently popular author so that people want to by ebooks written by me (unlikely, alas) I will make sure they're available in portable formats, such as EPub/Adobe. I won't try to prevent them from being available in Kindle format, but I won't stand for an exclusive release,.

Unless, of course, the Kindle starts supporting open formats.

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.

Re:Not unreasonable.

[shutdown -p now]

Whatever one's feelings on DRM, the fact is that 99% of all ebooks in English available for purchase are DRM protected.

FTFY. Luckily for me, for my native language I have a fully legit online store where all books are DRM-free, and are provided in a dozen formats for all imaginable book readers (they even package them up as J2ME midlets for feature phones), including Mobi. What more, they even have a special version of their website that you get redirected to if you open it in Kindle web browser.

Then there's the EPub format with Adobe DRM, which is supported by every popular ebook reader except Kindle.

And iBooks. Which is probably the second most popular reader after Kindle right now.

Then again, it doesn't really matter for someone who reads Slashdot, since Kindle DRM has been circumvented a long time ago, and there are single-click tools to handle it now (IIRC there was one integrated with Calibre, even).

Good - Trying to block spam

[ZombieBraintrust]

There is all kinds of spam in these bookstores. People go out and grab open licenced content and then package it as an ebook and try to sell it for $0.99 You wind up with 20 ebooks for The Tale of Two Cities listed in catagories like romance or science fiction. Makes the new release section a joke. On B&N there was once a problem where a publisher was selling machine generated books sourced from wikipedia.

Re:Good - Trying to block spam

[ZombieBraintrust]

They allowed it at first. But spammers ruined it. Amazon is perfectly happy hosting one copy of Arch Linux Handbook. They simply don't want to host 25 versions of it. So they require that you prove you are the only one permitted to publish the book. They don't want each contributor to the book selling their own version on Amazon. They also don't want spammers who have nothing to do with the book selling it on Amazon. They also had issues where spammers would add Advertisements into the book. You might get past chapter one and then find an add for a penny stock. They had search engine optimization firms putting links into public domain books to effect search results. Lots of returns and angry phone calls later we have this policy.

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

[icebike]

Exactly. He at most, packaged the wiki, no doubt cleaning some things up a bit along the way.

B&N has a similar self-publish program called Pubit.
When it was first introduced it was flooded with ebooks that were merely a couple paragraphs of wrapper around public domain books. I saw one such pubit book that still has the Project Gutenberg trailers attached.

B&N, and I suspect Amazon, has since modified the TOS to require that the "authors" at least hold the copyright to the vast majority of the submitted work.

The GFDL does allow him to do what he did. But Amazon doesn't have to be a party to this sort of thing.

They told him exactly why they rejected it:

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.

Exclusive publishing rights. Just like B&N, they want their program to be something more than simple wrappers around public domain content.
That's their choice. He has other alternatives for distribution, and has decided to GIVE it away.

Re:He's not even the author

[adolf]

B&N, and I suspect Amazon, has since modified the TOS to require that the "authors" at least hold the copyright to the vast majority of the submitted work.

The GFDL does allow him to do what he did. But Amazon doesn't have to be a party to this sort of thing.

I wonder, then: Should Shakespeare's work be allowed in the Kindle store? Nobody holds exclusive publishing rights, and it's freely available on the web.

Re:He's not even the author

[bcrowell]

Exclusive publishing rights. Just like B&N, they want their program to be something more than simple wrappers around public domain content.
That's their choice. He has other alternatives for distribution, and has decided to GIVE it away.

This particular case has a lot of features that will make people sympathize more with Amazon and less with the author. But there are many other cases where the facts are different. As an example, I'm the author of some math and physics books that are licensed under CC-BY-SA, free in LaTeX, PDF, and HTML formats, and also available in print. I'm essentially the sole author, although I do have material in the books such as photos from wikimedia commons. I basically operate on a nonprofit basis, but I do have significant webhosting expenses. (The PDF files are a lot of megabytes, and a lot of people download them, so I can't use el cheapo webhosts.) I don't mind making a few bucks here and there to offset those expenses. I looked into selling my books on amazon for, say, $0.99, in kindle format. Well, one thing I immediately learned is that ebook formats and readers don't have good enough support for math to do a good job on books with a lot of math in them. But anyway, there were also two showstoppers: (1) amazon requires exclusivity, and (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. OK, you don't have to cue the world's smallest violin. It's not a huge tragedy for me that I can't sell 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.

Yes, it's also true that in a free-enterprise system, we don't expect to be able to tell a company that they have any moral or legal duty to sell a product that they don't want to sell. 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.

Re:He's not even the author

[shutdown -p now]

They actually document this in KDP FAQ as well, so he should have known in advance:

Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content

Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content, however we may choose to not sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books.

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.

Fixed that link for you

[tezbobobo]

Book download link was broken - here's the correct url: http://archlinux.ca/arch_linux_handbook_3.mobi

Too Many Hephaestus/Content Scrapped Listings

[Nova Express]

Good! Amazon has recently suffered from a severe problem in that companies like Hephaestus Press and Webster’s Digital Services have created "books" out of scraping public domain content like Wikipedia and slapping them between two covers (or digital equivalent thereof) and putting deceptive titles on them. For example, Hephaestus published the book Novels By Jerry Pournelle, including: The Legacy Of Heorot, The Mote In God’s Eye, The Gripping Hand, Footfall, Inferno (novel), Fallen Angels Starswarm, which looks like an omnibus edition, but which is actually scrapped Wikipedia content.

Sounds like they're finally cracking down on this practice, which is a good thing.

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.

DRM is the problem?

[hawguy]

Some comments on the linked-to site question whether it's even allowable for Amazon to make the content available as a DRM encumbered Kindle eBook, because of this clause in the GFDL:

You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.

Not it being freely available, but *licensing*?

[WolphFang]

Yes, I am sure it is *not* the fact that his content was free elsewhere, but more likely the weak association with the rights of the work. I have two books published in KF8 format, (http://goo.gl/DkR4T) and (http://goo.gl/r6oDN), both also available as free non-KF8 epub/pdf downloads, and Amazon sent me a query as to the RIGHTS as (using some automated system I presume) they detected that the content was available elsewhere for free. I responded appropriately, as the primary copyright holder, and my material has remained published accordingly. And for those worried about GPL, etc, content, as the author, you can specify NO DRM!

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 !!

[ridgecritter]

Agree with your point. I've been spending more time at Ars lately, less here. Overall quality @ /. (stories and posts) is on a downtrend, IMHO.

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

[Sir_Sri]

Unfortunately ars has a bit of a scattershot of quality. Article on network security? Awesome stuff they wrote themselves. Article on particle physics, no problem they have a PhD in nuclear physics for that. Article on chemistry... they've got nothin'.

It's like they have the right idea, but not enough money (or a poor HR department) and just can't find the right people to cover a diverse range of topics.

Despite the writing quality of the summary here, I actually think this article is sort of relevant. Amazon (rightly) doesn't want to let you sell books that you can get for free on the same device. That's a good thing overall, and reflects and underlying shift in how we think of books. The market for references, how to guides, etc. all have to change to keep up with the internet, there's isn't much place for trying to print and sell something you can find more effectively with google.

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'.