Free Books!

In a previous post I complained that Amazon's Kindle catalog was filling up with Project Gutenberg titles where the submitter just put together a quick and dirty cover image, submitted the PG version otherwise unchanged, and charged three bucks for the results.

Amazon has cracked down on this practice. From now on if you want to submit a public domain book to the Kindle Store you have to make it significantly different from the PG version. That means a new translation, or a study guide, or original
illustrations. Most of the crap artists I complained about have had their books blocked.

That's the good news. The bad news for me personally is that a couple of my books got the same treatment. I felt that my case was different from the others for the following reasons:

1). I produced the original PG submissions.

2). I then improved on the original submissions by reformatting them for the Kindle. The PG version is a web page converted to an EPUB then run through Kindlegen. Usually this gives you something readable on a Kindle but not up to the standards Kindle users should expect. In the case of books of poetry the result can be unreadable.

3). I only charged .99. I wasn't getting rich from these. I just wanted them to be visible to Kindle users.

Amazon does not feel that formatting changes alone are enough to make the books better than the free PG versions. This is OK with me. I have published the ebooks in question at the Internet Archive and you may download them for free there:

Vidyapati Bangiya Padabali: Songs of the Love of Radha and Krishna

Chaitanya's Life And Teachings: An abridged translation of the Bengali Chaitanya-charit-amrita

Happy reading!