Amazon charges Kindle users for free Project Gutenberg e-books

To be more specific, third parties submit public domain works for distribution as Kindle books. Some people put a $0.00 price, other people specify a non-zero price. Amazon puts it all on there.<p>A given public-domain text may be represented on the kindle store many times over, submitted by different parties, with different formatting, at different prices.<p>As a kindle owner, I don't so much mind that there are Gutenberg-sourced public domain texts on there for sale: Maybe a $.99 one is formatted better than the others.<p>What I mind is that the kindle store is spammed full of such stuff.<p>The example that bugs me most is the person who took the ten years of Samuel Pepys' diaries, split them up into 120 ebooks each containing one month's worth of diary entries, and put them on the store.<p>I don't recall if they were charging for them or not, but I was browsing the "history" section of the store, and hit a seemingly never-ending span of one-month Pepys Diaries. Many screens full. On a slow kindle display.

This is really no different from a publisher taking public domain works, putting a cover on it, and charging $12 for the paperback. There's a slight value-add for which Amazon is charging a slight price. I personally don't see the problem.<p>The consumer, who could roam the web and find free Mobi versions from Feedbooks.com or Gutenberg.org, decides to pay a few bucks for the app store convenience. That's their choice.

Only somebody who does not know what public domain means would get uppity about this.

I have paid one or two dollars on the Kindle store for books I could have downloaded for free because when you buy a book from Amazon, they keep an archive of it on their servers, including reading position, bookmarks, and annotations, and they synchronize this information across all of your registered devices. The convenience of this feature, along with better formatting, has sometimes been worth the money.<p>I have done the process of downloading and copying to the Kindle for some works that were either not available in the store. Although it's not difficult, it's not as easy as the Kindle store. This is another case of sometimes easy beats free.

Perhaps I am anachronistic, but I much prefer real books to e-books. While I may download books from Gutenberg from time to time, if I really want to read something, I buy the hard copy.<p>One of the greatest things about the Internet, for me at least, is the easy availability of books. While Amazon is an obvious source, I prefer abebooks.com, as you can usually get a used book there for a fraction of the Amazon price.<p>Thus one can acquire more books; and if there is any money left over, one might purchase some food.

I downloaded a free Gutenberg version of a Robert Benchley book to my iPhone, but was ill-formatted, particularly around illustrations, and hard to read. So I got the same title from Amazon. The formatting problems were fixed and the book was quite readable. They added some value in that case.

They should have some trap streets[1] if they want control over what people do with their books.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street</a>