Well, you have to pay for all of those poor editors slaving away to bold chapter titles. They don't bold themselves you know.
-----
Can you download books straight from Gutenberg to a kindle?

Aren't these books that were uploaded to the Kindle marketplace without Amazon really doing anything? Isn't that like holding eBay accountable for users selling bootlegs or Craigslist for, basically, existing?

Not to be a dick, but... how is it not ethical when that's what the actual text of the Gutenberg license allows?

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:…

Public Domain Books

These books are in the public domain in the United States and everybody — including Project Gutenberg and you — may read and distribute them. If you don't live in the United States you'll have to check the laws of the country you live in before downloading and distributing our ebooks.

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.

If you want to use the name Project Gutenberg anywhere in the ebooks you distribute or on the distribution medium or in advertising you have to obey these rules:

* you may only distribute verbatim copies of the ebooks. No changes are allowed to the ebook contents. (Though reformatting the ebook to a different file format is considered okay).
* If you charge money for the copies you distribute, you have to pay royalties to Project Gutenberg.
* You must refund your clients for defective copies or if they don't agree with the Project Gutenberg license.

If you don't agree with any of the above mentioned restrictions, you may not use the Project Gutenberg trademark. You may still distribute the ebooks if you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg.

What are we outraged about here?

To be clear, this practice is NOT extraordinary. I can download a hundred different free versions of the entire Linux operating system right now, or I can be lazy and pay any number of sites for them to just ship me DVDs or CDs of installs. I have ten feet from me a bunch of OS disks I paid $30 bucks for once because I had no time to sit down and D/L and burn a bunch of install media. Lots of people put in lots of free work, and someone profited. But the licenses they willingly used allowed that, so, again... what are we outraged about? That's how these licenses and free information projects work.

The music and film industries constantly justify draconian copyright restrictions by asserting that "you can't compete with free." Amazon shows us that you can compete with free.

The Seattle Public Library does the same thing with eBooks in the public domain. You can only check them out for a limited time.

No surprise here. It's like when Starfucks' owner Howard Schultz arbitrarily decided to make a public street-end park part of his property: he planted shrubbery, landscaped the area and posted a sign, "Private Property -- Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted!"

Don't buy stolen items from Amazon.

Tons of publishers take public domain work, print it up and bind it, then sell it. Nothing new.

@1: Yeah. It says right in the WP article and links here:

http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2009/04/…

@8 Calling this stolen property is like calling the air you breath stolen if I exhaled it first. Complete nonsense. It sounds like Gutenberg is unhappy with the terms of their own license that they themselves wrote.

People have been buying and selling books that are in the public domain for a long ass time. Or did you think Mary Shelley's estate was getting money every time someone bought a copy of Frankenstein? Ethically, how is paying for a dead tree version of that book different from buying it on the Kindle?

Well Amazon does recoup its 3g connection costs through book sales, so...this isn't terribly remarkable. And it's trivially easy to get them from Gutenberg directly and transfer for free via USB, so at worst this is a tax on stupidity. Meh.

@3 - Selling it for a profit still seems unethical. Making money off of someone else's contribution when you yourself have contributed nothing is unseemly, though legal.
This is different than publishers selling paper copies because there is a significant cost and effort to type-setting, printing, inventory, etc.
@11 - I don't think this is an official position from Project Gutenberg, just a complaint from one of their contributors. It would be nice if Amazon connected people to Project Gutenberg directly to get free downloads (perhaps with a nominal fee for 3G downloads).

@14? That's the entire point of free licensing--reusability and things being free to do whatever you want with it. If I wanted to I could make $1,000,000,000 a year selling and servicing Ubuntu Linux and the official project couldn't do much about it as long as I didn't violate their marks. The Gutenberg license is even more liberal than theirs.