Amazon Blocks Arch Linux Handbook Author From Releasing Kindle Version 242
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.
Good - Trying to block spam (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not unreasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Not unreasonable. (Score:2, Interesting)
You are shitting me right? It was published legally in Canada.
Next, you're going to tell me the publishers of Romeo and Juliet are all illegal.
Oh, wait, you mean all the laws are supposed to be compliant to US laws. That is why you guys are so worried about the UN taking over right?
Re:Not unreasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
They've a right to ensure that people enjoy using their site, and their site would be less enjoyable if I had to wade through a bunch of content that is otherwise very easy to find on the rest of the web.
Good lord, have you seen some of the crap in the Kindle store? Lots of poorly written stuff that badly needs an editor. And there are titles carefully chosen to make people buy them by mistake.
This is not about content quality. They just don't want people selling content that they can get for free elsewhere — bad customer relations.
(Or is it? Back in 2006, I co-wrote a book [amazon.com] for Sun Microsystems. I was well-paid for this work, and I wasn't expecting royalties, but for some strange reason I got them, showing that the book sold reasonably well, despite being available online [oracle.com] before the book came out.)
Now, Amazon has every right to do this. But that's just the problem: the Kindle platform is another walled garden. Just as I don't like Steve Jobs telling me I can't have lame iPhone apps [juggleware.com], I don't like Jeff Bezos telling me I can't buy lame books. The fact that the app or book is lame is besides the point. The central control is the problem.
If I ever become a sufficiently popular author so that people want to by ebooks written by me (unlikely, alas) I will make sure they're available in portable formats, such as EPub/Adobe. I won't try to prevent them from being available in Kindle format, but I won't stand for an exclusive release,.
Unless, of course, the Kindle starts supporting open formats.
Too Many Hephaestus/Content Scrapped Listings (Score:5, Interesting)
Good! Amazon has recently suffered from a severe problem in that companies like Hephaestus Press [lawrenceperson.com] and Webster’s Digital Services [lawrenceperson.com] have created "books" out of scraping public domain content like Wikipedia and slapping them between two covers (or digital equivalent thereof) and putting deceptive titles on them. For example, Hephaestus published the book Novels By Jerry Pournelle, including: The Legacy Of Heorot, The Mote In God’s Eye, The Gripping Hand, Footfall, Inferno (novel), Fallen Angels Starswarm, which looks like an omnibus edition, but which is actually scrapped Wikipedia content.
Sounds like they're finally cracking down on this practice, which is a good thing.
DRM is the problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some comments on the linked-to site question whether it's even allowable for Amazon to make the content available as a DRM encumbered Kindle eBook, because of this clause in the GFDL:
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.
Re:He's not even the author (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder, then: Should Shakespeare's work be allowed in the Kindle store? Nobody holds exclusive publishing rights, and it's freely available on the web [gutenberg.org].
Re:He's not even the author (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This particular case has a lot of features that will make people sympathize more with Amazon and less with the author. But there are many other cases where the facts are different. As an example, I'm the author of some math and physics books [lightandmatter.com] that are licensed under CC-BY-SA, free in LaTeX, PDF, and HTML formats, and also available in print. I'm essentially the sole author, although I do have material in the books such as photos from wikimedia commons. I basically operate on a nonprofit basis, but I do have significant webhosting expenses. (The PDF files are a lot of megabytes, and a lot of people download them, so I can't use el cheapo webhosts.) I don't mind making a few bucks here and there to offset those expenses. I looked into selling my books on amazon for, say, $0.99, in kindle format. Well, one thing I immediately learned is that ebook formats and readers don't have good enough support for math to do a good job on books with a lot of math in them. But anyway, there were also two showstoppers: (1) amazon requires exclusivity, and (2) this: "You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book." So for a book that is free in any format, amazon is not an option. OK, you don't have to cue the world's smallest violin. It's not a huge tragedy for me that I can't sell on amazon. But slashdotters might find that the facts of my situation evoke a different feeling in their fuzzy little free-information-loving hearts than the facts of the one in TFA.
Yes, it's also true that in a free-enterprise system, we don't expect to be able to tell a company that they have any moral or legal duty to sell a product that they don't want to sell. However, it's worth bearing in mind that amazon is very close to being a monopolist in the ebook business. If someone held a monopoly on paper, we probably would be a little concerned if they started refusing to sell various broad categories of books.
Re:Not unreasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever one's feelings on DRM, the fact is that 99% of all ebooks in English available for purchase are DRM protected.
FTFY. Luckily for me, for my native language I have a fully legit online store where all books are DRM-free, and are provided in a dozen formats for all imaginable book readers (they even package them up as J2ME midlets for feature phones), including Mobi. What more, they even have a special version of their website that you get redirected to if you open it in Kindle web browser.
Then there's the EPub format with Adobe DRM, which is supported by every popular ebook reader except Kindle.
And iBooks. Which is probably the second most popular reader after Kindle right now.
Then again, it doesn't really matter for someone who reads Slashdot, since Kindle DRM has been circumvented a long time ago, and there are single-click tools to handle it now (IIRC there was one integrated with Calibre, even).
Re:I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !! (Score:4, Interesting)
The people running Slashdot are trolls, examples of the worst characteristics of journalism that we see many times elsewhere but can't understand why such behavior exists on a site supposedly for geeks (who we've been conditioned to believe are smarter than everyone else). They know that a Linux vs multinational corporation story (no matter how baselesss and inaccurate it is) will pull the emotional strings of people who see the existence of Linux as a fight against the "man".
Why do you think those multiple "Linux desktop is dead" stories which were posted here in the last few weeks garnered so many comments? I find it interesting that ArsTechnica has not posted a SINGLE story regarding this supposedly controversial issue. Maybe because they already know the Linux desktop is dead and don't see the point in beating a dead horse, I dunno. But Slashdot is ripe with people believing that phantom possibility so it gets posted here. And people eat it all up. So the folks running this place keep posting such stories because we're all idiots. :)
Re:I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !! (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately ars has a bit of a scattershot of quality. Article on network security? Awesome stuff they wrote themselves. Article on particle physics, no problem they have a PhD in nuclear physics for that. Article on chemistry... they've got nothin'.
It's like they have the right idea, but not enough money (or a poor HR department) and just can't find the right people to cover a diverse range of topics.
Despite the writing quality of the summary here, I actually think this article is sort of relevant. Amazon (rightly) doesn't want to let you sell books that you can get for free on the same device. That's a good thing overall, and reflects and underlying shift in how we think of books. The market for references, how to guides, etc. all have to change to keep up with the internet, there's isn't much place for trying to print and sell something you can find more effectively with google.
Re:writing is actually fucking hard (Score:4, Interesting)
There are actually some forms of casual writing which are accepted academically, and which do not make use of what we would call proper capitalization. Similarly, curse words can be used effectively for emphasis and, at the University level, will not usually get you in trouble. :)
What amuses me most is the derision for degrees like Philosophy... here we have a degree where the focus is on logic and critical thinking, and where the ability to write effectively is not optional, and better still, a degree without any bad habits that will need to be unlearned in your first few years in the field, yet a very large number of people choose to mock it as essentially useless. I'm not saying that a Philosophy degree will set you up to practice medicine, but a good programmer doesn't necessarily have a degree in their language of choice: a good programmer is somebody who can think logically, adapt easily to change, and communicate clearly. The same applies for just about any field outside of medicine, law, hard science, and engineering (and a degree in Philosophy actually applies *very* well to Law). The irony of it all? Even though I'm using a *lot* more from the Philosophy component of my degree than anything else in my background, what actually got my foot in the door was the military experience, because they were the only ones who didn't balk at the idea of somebody with a degree in Philosophy/Linguistics with multiple secondary languages.
Re:I do not know why this appear on Slashdot !! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet they allow sales of works in the public domain such as Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, etc., which are freely available in electronic form on the Internet as well.
Yes, I've "bought" all of those books on Kindle. Of course, you failed to mention that they are available for $0.00. (Frankenstein [amazon.com], Alice in Wonderland [amazon.com]) To be fair, I would wager you can find non-free versions of these from others but Amazon must be exercising some control or there would thousands of versions of these public domain books in the store. The real issue is not the fact that it can be gotten for free elsewhere - the problem is that Dusty is not obviously the author or copyright owner of the material. Perhaps this case is perfectly innocent and there is no problem with him publishing the material under his name, but if Amazon cares about the quality of their marketplace, they ought to be careful about letting any random person scrape a community-created document from the internet and publish it as an ebook.
This thread actually brings up another point that I've wondered about recently. With the recent reports of ebook sells now outstripping printed books, I have to imagine that the huge number of free ebooks contribute significantly to these "sales" numbers. If I download a free book from Amazon, it is treated like a purchased item. Google does the same on their Play store. I've purchased about 40 Kindle books and spent less than $10.00 because most were free. I would love to see the ebook vs printed book numbers if you exclude all the free ebooks.