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?

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: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...

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

[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.

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.

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'.