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Comment by burgerbrain | Hacker News Reader

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

This is similar to those people who charge $25 to download Firefox. Is it legal? Yes. Is it ethical? That's more dubious.

Formatting an ebook for the Kindle is not something automatic. This is real work. If someone does this for me and then charges me 99 cent for "Pride and Prejudice", I have nothing against it.

Except Project Gutenberg has already put its books in MOBI format, which is supported by the Kindle.

Also, did you read the article:

"They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold,"

That does not exactly sound like strenuous editing and curation.

Unless you download them from Amazon they will not sync across devices. But, I see you're point, they are already formatted.

Are they properly formatted for the Kindle, though? In the Gutenberg-derived version of Moby Dick that I read, they capitalized words italicized in the original, and replaced £ with L. Aesthetically displeasing, to say the least. I'd pay a dollar to avoid the bad results of storing masters in a lossy format (which Gutenberg's masters seem to be, although I'm not sure about this), but I rather doubt that this can be had for just a dollar.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation may get uppity too if the publishers don't surrender 20% of their profits [1]:

  1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
  access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
  that

  - You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
       the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
       you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
       owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
       has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
       Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
       must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
       prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
       returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
       sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
       address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
       the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenber...

Edit: By the way, as the very existence of this license demonstrates, the digitization carried out by PG of public-domain works does not result in public-domain texts.

The license applies only if you use the PG trademark(for stuff in the public domain):

'A Project Gutenberg ebook is made out of two parts: the public domain book and the non public domain Project Gutenberg trademark and license. If you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg from the ebook, you are left with a public domain ebook. You can do anything you want with that. '

My apologies for the confusion, then. It's also in the fine print (1.E.2.)... I feel like deleting my entry to avoid the noise. What to do? Downvote away, folks!

Edit: As an aside, PG could copyright their digitization of public-domain works, right?

Not without making significant changes to the content, no.

I'm not saying i disapprove, but just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

What they need is a licensing clause that requires anyone which uses one of these Project Gutenberg formatted ebooks as a base must display a link to the free version.

That way someone can decide if they wish to pay the price for the value add that amazon is providing (presumably convenience) or just go with the free copy.

Without this kind of attribution, many would believe they are either paying for amazons work to format the book or even the book itself (not sure they acknowledge when a work is out of copyright?)

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