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.

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

[croddy]

That reminds me -- when's the last time a copyrighted work passed into the public domain? I'm 28 years old; has that ever happened in my lifetime? A brief discussion with some of my lawyer friends a couple of weeks ago concluded that it probably hadn't.

Jumping the Shark

[jhouserizer]

I've loved Amazon in most ways (excepting mainly their patents) for many years now. However since their introduction of the Kindle, my opinion of them has steadily declined. I think the Kindle was perhaps Amazon's shark-jumping.

Re:1984?

[mh1997]

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.

It's about time. I own a Kindle 2 and hate searching thru the garbage before I find the correct title.

Where's the Outrage?

[dmomo]

I cannot find it.

I would welcome less noise on an eBook store, and if this honestly is quality control, that's a good thing.

A delay may also be necessary to ensure something actually is public domain.

I just don't see the conspiracy here that I would like to see. It's certainly in Amazon's interest to provide any literature that their competitors might.

Re:1984?

[sqlrob]

Public domain still isn't the same the world over. See 1984.

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

[Sloppy]

BTW, another take on the same idea: PD compicates DRM. It is imperative that Amazon makes sure that none of their technical measures and other barriers to interoperability, never get applied to PD works. And even if they don't apply the DRM itself, they still might necessarily do things that inhibit access to PD stuff.

Why does this matter? Because DMCA does not prohibit bypassing DRM. Saying that it does, is an over-generalization. It only prohibits circumventing DRM on copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. You can legally bypass DRM on PD works. You can legally distribute and traffic in DRM-defeating tools, provided you can show that it's primarily intended and marketed for accessing PD stuff. And Amazon and the Kindle are big enough names, that just publishing one book is enough to generate a tools market for people who want to read that book.

One might think it's simple enough, to just not set the evil bit for PD works. And as far as the bottommost DRM layer itself, it probably is. But no DRM system lives in isolation. If any user is ever allowed to access any file on a Kindle, that justifies users and developers to peel back 99% of the Kindle's shittiness.

I think this basic idea -- situations where DRM is legally attackable (either by PD or by copyright holders authorizing it) -- is the one flaw in DMCA that can lead to the eventual legal (not just technical) defeat of many DRM systems.

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

[maxwells_deamon]

Almost anything that is uploaded to the Kindle store that was based on a public domain work is no longer entirely public domain.

The amount of work you need to do to convert the source work properly to the Kindle is not trivial. Yes people can OCR direct to a file and upload that but the quality is not much better than a google translation in many cases.

Go to a mainstream bookstore and pick up a copy of one of Mark Twain's books and look at the copyright notice.