Amazon Delaying Public Domain Submissions On Kindle

John B. Hare writes "Many publishers of public domain content on the Kindle are being turned away for reasons that Amazon declines to clarify. In the past two weeks any publisher posting a public domain book (or a book that appears to be a such) has received the message 'Your book is currently under review by the Kindle Operations team as we are trying to improve the Kindle customer experience. Please check back in 5 business days to see if your book was published to the store.' Amazon claims that this is a quality control issue, apparently believing that readers can't figure out on their own that a five-page Kindle book for $9.99 is a rip-off, or that yet another Kindle edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' is pointless. This was supposed to be the point of user feedback and the Kindle return policy: users can quickly decide what the best choice is, and if they don't like it, back out without any harm done." Read on for details of this reader's interaction with Amazon on the subject of public domain Kindle submissions.

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 [e-mail] 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.

And?

[dieman]

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.

Re:And?

[fractalVisionz]

No, the PD books on Amazon are free. However, there have been an ever increasing amount of duplicates submitted by 3rd parties that have a price tag. They are just trying to remove the duplicates that have the price tag to provide a better user experience.

Please see Pride and Prejudice [amazon.com] kindle store search. The first PD copy that comes up is free, the rest charge. That is not a good user experience as the free one is just as good as the rest (or should be).

I completely agree with this policy, as it makes it easier for me, a user, to determine what book I should get. I don't think they should limit the different editions of books, but seriously, how many public domain books have multiple editions, like super deluxe edition with forward by Abraham Lincoln himself. Not many.

Re:1984?

[Nadaka]

wrong. Someone who had rights to 1984 uploaded it and started selling it. However, those rights didn't cross all international borders.

Re:IP industry would rather you didn't know PD exi

[alva_edison]

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).

Why would anyone even want to use a Kindle?

[macbeth66]

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.

Re:And?

[langelgjm]

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.

Why, exactly? You are aware that with free software like Calibre, you can convert EPUB to something the Kindle can natively read, like MOBI, right? It's very easy. It can even be scripted with the Linux version of calibre (well, I guess all versions, but easiest on Linux). Or, if you have a Kindle DX, you can download the PDF version from Google.

Re:What are you fighting for?

[MisterSquid]

Your reply seems a little harsh and your points made me think of a valid objection to the "elimination of duplicates," which is what to do about variant editions. In the history of publishing, many texts have been published as a single volume only to be changed at a later time. Sometimes the changes are corrections to the text such as spelling corrections. However, in some cases the revisions are much more substantive. Charles Dickensâ(TM) Great Expecations has two endings. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying had significant changes from its first publication.

Sometimes "duplicates" are not really "duplicates" and the existence of these various versions can have notable effects on interpretation, reception, and cultural history.