Stealing the Bhagavata Purana from Project Gutenberg

This is a big peeve of mine. When I'm not writing my own books (which is most of the time) I donate e-books to Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, I have mentioned before, is where you can get A Study Of The Bhagavata Purana Or Esoteric Hinduism for free.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39442

The Amazon Kindle Store regularly takes Project Gutenberg books and puts their own generic covers on them, then offers them as free Kindle books. There is nothing illegal or immoral about this and the customer still gets the book for free.

HOWEVER there are reprobates who take newly released PG books, slap a quick and dirty cover image on them, and SELL them on the Kindle Store. This has been done no less than three times to the book I donated:

http://www.amazon.com/Bh%C3%A2gavata-...

http://www.amazon.com/Bh%C3%A2gavata-...

http://www.amazon.com/Bh%C3%A2gavata-...

Putting my donation together took me months of work, and very tedious work it was too. It would be incredibly easy for Amazon to reject these crap artists but they don't bother.

Selling what PG offers for free can't be a lucrative business. In a few days Amazon will have its own free version of the book in its catalog so the crap artists don't have much time to get money from their marks.

In the mean time my donation is up to 571 free downloads on the PG website. This is a lot more books than I ever distributed when I was in the Hare Krishna movement. Tripurari Swami, the "Incarnation Of Book Distribution", can't match these numbers.

Of course Tripurari Swami actually sold the books, and made lots of money doing it. If he sold you a book at the airport he left no money on the table. After making your "donation" you'd be fortunate if you had money left for cab fare.

On the other hand, my free downloads will end up being read while his sales generally ended up in the airport trash bins, where the janitors would collect them and sell them back to our book distributors. Or they would end up in a landfill somewhere. Thousands and thousands of books were "distributed" by the movement but you never see them in used book stores or other places where used books can be found.

But Tripurari has retired, so the bane of my life are these Project Gutenberg repackagers. I hope that someday Amazon will realize that it is in their own best interest to clean this crap out of their catalogs. I'm not holding my breath, though.