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Amazon bouncing pd ebooks from the Kindle Store

Do you recall that big story last week about Amazon charging for public domain ebooks? Did you nootice how much publicity it got? Well, apparently Amazon noticed, and according to Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, Amazon has started bouncing pd ebooks from the Kindle Store. He got this email from Amazon:

We’re implementing a new policy that addresses the customer experience problem caused by multiple, undifferentiated copies of public domain titles in our Kindle catalog.

Our vision is to have high-quality editions of every public domain title in the world available on Kindle, including a free edition of each, and to avoid the confusion that is caused by having a large number of undifferentiated (or barely differentiated) versions of each.

To protect the customer experience we have decided to stop accepting and selling duplicate, undifferentiated versions of public domain titles where there is a free edition already available for sale.  As a result, we are removing the following title(s) for sale on our web site:

Charles Dickens Tale Of Two Cities (The Works Of Charles Dickens) by Dickens, Charles, Digital Item ID: 847429

Don’t take this as a criticism of Morris; he’s been following this issue for a while and only submitted that ebook as a experiment. He’s not trying to profit off pd ebooks; he just wanted to see what would happen.

I’m hoping that if we draw enough attention to the fact that Amazon is pruning the Kindle Store, we might see other stores follow suit.

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Comments


RickK December 6, 2010 um 10:31 pm

And it’s just a coincidence that "Tale of Two Cities" is a new Oprah book???

Nate the great December 6, 2010 um 11:49 pm

Good catch!


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[…] some might applaud this move, I can recall that had reportedly pulled junk ebooks before. Back in December 2010, Amazon made a lot of noise about pulling public domain titles from the Kindle Store. I reported at […]


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