Amazon is taking public domain texts from a free site, and selling the books for profit to Kindle users.

Question: Is this ethical or unethical?

Project Gutenberg, non-profit organization, finds books in the public domain, formats them, and places them on-line for free access to anyone who ants to read them or download them. It even permits direct downloads to Amazon’s Kindle.

Amazon, however, is taking Project Gutenberg books, removing some formatting elements, and selling them to Kindle users who are unaware that the books can be obtained free at the very same source where Amazon acquired the titles. Project Gutenberg uses contributions to pay its employees to prepare “new” old books for the Internet. The  Project’s staff downloads a scan of the book’s pages, runs it through optical-character-recognition software,corrects mistakes, removes extraneous data, and then formats the text to the Gutenberg standards. Then the text file is converted into an HTML version with linked images.  The finished product is uploaded to the Gutenberg site…and Amazon takes it, makes a few changes, and sells it as its own.

Answer: This is unethical, and in more than one respect.

It is certainly legal to sell a commodity that is offered free elsewhere. There are arguments to support the practice: added convenience, for example. Consumers have a responsibility to pay attention. But taking a commodity that is free to the public from a free source and selling it as your own product? This amounts to deception and misrepresentation for profit.

Amazon is also using a non-profit public service to undermine that service’s own mission. Gutenberg gets contributions to advance appreciation and access to literature by making old books available and free on the web, and Amazon uses Gutenberg staff work, paid for by charity, to make unwitting readers pay for the texts.

Yechh. This is a strategy that could have been dreamed up by Montgomery Burns, the evil tycoon of “The Simpsons,” who once schemed to make the public pay for sunlight,

Amazon could give a generous donation to the Gutenberg Project in appreciation and gratitude for its labor to create  Kindle products, of course. That would be a fairer to Gutenberg, though it would, in effect, make the Gutenberg Project complicit in Amazon’s unethical business of making people pay for what they could easily get for nothing. The Project has asked Amazon to provide its public domain books to Kindle users for free.

Amazon’s response: Nope! Why would Amazon do that, when there is a product someone else creates at their own expense, gives away, and can be sold at a profit to Amazon’s customers who don’t know it’s free?

Once Amazon resolved to ignore fairness to Gutenberg as well as treating its loyal and trusting customers with honesty, respect and fairness, selling the e-books is the obvious course. It’s easy money!

As Mr. Burns would say, “Excellent!”