Arch Linux Handbook for Kindle rejected by Amazon

http://archlinux.me/dusty/2012/09/09/arch-linux-handbook-for-kindle/

by stock_toaster • 14 years ago

226 84 14 years ago

sswezey2• 14 years ago

It explicitly states on their content guidelines page they do not accept content publicly accessible from the web. Otherwise people could just publish Wikipedia pages.

The author should check the guidelines before going on accusatory rants.

muyuu• 14 years ago

Doesn't stop them from offering many public domain classics.

armored_mammal2• 14 years ago

Yeah, if that's really their policy I don't see how they can offer a single public domain work in the Kindle Store. Is there a way to file a complaint that their guidelines aren't being followed and request that content be removed from the Kindle Store? Because I would be so all over filing a complaint against every public domain work in the Kindle Store.

eli3• 14 years ago

Amazon itself publishes many public domain books in the store (for free). And, anyway, they have a specific policy for public domain: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2OHLJUR... which basically boils down to "our policy is to not publish undifferentiated versions of public domain titles where a free version is available in our store." Seems reasonable to me.

martey• 14 years ago

This is a misrepresentation of the Content Guidelines. See https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2TOZW0S... :

We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content.

Since the author is the copyright owner, there is nothing in the guidelines that suggest the handbook is explicitly prohibited - Wikipedia pages could possibly be accepted, if the Wikimedia Foundation submitted them.

I think "Megan B." might be confused by the facts that Mr. Phillips is the editor of the content (as opposed to being its sole author) and by the mention of the FDL. I also think that she is using the term "exclusive publishing rights" to mean copyright ownership.

avar• 14 years ago

The Wikimedia foundation does not have the copyright ownership of content on Wikipedia, the content creators do. They just own the Wikipedia trademark, domains etc.

sswezey2• 14 years ago

Did you read the line immediately after?

For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store.

tzs2• 14 years ago

> Since the author is the copyright owner, there is nothing in the guidelines that suggest the handbook is explicitly prohibited

How is Amazon supposed to know that the author is the copyright owner? As far as I can see, when they asked about the book being on the web and for him to confirm that he had publishing rights, all he told them was that it was under a free license. I suspect that Amazon is, quite reasonably, interpreting this response as meaning that he is NOT the author, and just has the publishing rights granted by that free license.

If he is indeed the author, his response should have been: "I am the author of this work and the sole copyright owner. It is available on several web sites because I have made it available under a free license".

ANTSANTS• 14 years ago

> Otherwise people could just publish Wikipedia pages.

Go on amazon.co.uk and and search for "source wikipedia".

Havoc• 14 years ago

Given that it is essentially community created its understandable that Amazon feels unsure about who has the "exclusive publishing rights" to it.

bediger40002• 14 years ago

Sounds like no exclusive publishing rights exist. I mean that in a "first principles" sense, not in a "what the twisted US copyright law says" sense.

Aren't most of the stupidest "IP" conflicts actually conflicts between what makes sense and what "the law" says?

csense• 14 years ago

"Making sense" is not a well-defined concept: Different, contradictory things make sense to different people.

In fact, basing a society on "what makes sense" [to the party that has the power] rather than a written code of laws sounds like a recipe that will quickly turn a country into a distopian dictatorship.

ig12• 14 years ago

I don't think the author understands what "customer-centric" means. People who publish books for the kindle aren't Amazon's customer, the people who buy kindle books are.

Amazon applying a quality guideline that stops people republishing copyleft content makes perfect sense from a consumer viewpoint.

naner3• 14 years ago

That may be the case but that's not what she said, she made it sound like he did something illegal and threatened to close his account.

I have a feeling that Amazon may actually dislike people selling crowdsourced material as assembled books, not necessarily copyleft books (such as Dive into Python).

fastball2• 14 years ago

More books for sale means more money. Amazon likes more money.

I can think of no reason Amazon would be against selling crowdsourced books (besides quality control). If you have ideas, please enlighten us.

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

People who publish books are absolutely customers of Amazon. If they're using a service provided by the company (the ability to publish books) then they're a customer.

ig12• 14 years ago

No, they're suppliers.

By your reasoning Coca Cola are a customer of Walmart because they use the shelving facility provided by Walmart.

I'm not saying suppliers aren't important, they are, but they aren't however customers.

DaemonHN• 14 years ago

It was Amazon's existing customers that requested that the book be published according to the article.

surfingdino• 14 years ago

I have a similar problem with my Vim book. Amazon blocked its sales after I updated it and asked them to make the update available to all 25000+ people who have downloaded it so far. They are blocking the sales, but allow negative reviews to be posted. I released it as a separate book, you can get it while it is still available at http://thevimbook.com

kevinconroy• 14 years ago

Attention all CEOs/high level folks: This is the exact reason why you need to regularly answer questions in your customer service queue and monitor responses (at least some of the time). Yes, sometimes things like this happen, but if you have first hand experience helping your customers resolve problems, you're much less likely to end up with an email chain trending on HN/reddit/etc.

tzs2• 14 years ago

How would monitoring responses help here? Amazon's response was entirely correct. From their short, plain English document describing the rules ( https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2TOZW0S... ):

------

Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content

Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content, however we may choose to not sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books.

------

The author's submission does not qualify, based on the information he says he provided to Amazon.

edit: note specifically that in his response to Amazon, he does not say that he is the copyright owner of the book. His response gives the impression that any publishing rights he has come from the free license that book is under.

xtdx2• 14 years ago

What's the probability that Bezos would have answered this email and not some other email?

Kliment• 14 years ago

It's a matter of policy. If the higher ups at a company regularly service customer requests, and there is a consistent problem affecting a number of users, they can effect a change of policy. It won't necessarily help this particular person this particular time, but it may help both them and everyone else with the problem if it changes policy.

armored_mammal2• 14 years ago

I refuse to use Amazon for anything because of stuff like this.

They will randomly ban your books, kill your services, and do what random politicians or Internet mobs tell them without any sort of due process.

People love to give me flack for it at the office...

shmerl• 14 years ago

If the book is publicly available in a variety of formats already, who needs Amazon at all?

shrughes• 14 years ago

They have a clearly explained policy about content of which you're not the author here...

xtdx2• 14 years ago

Are you saying you would use Amazon if they do what the Internet mob tells them and publish the book?

sdfjkl2• 14 years ago

"In other news, the Arch Linux Handbook can be downloaded in .mobi format, free of charge, from http://archlinux.ca/arch_linux_handbook_3.mobi "

Problem solved? The benefit of having it listed on Amazon is probably negligible - it's not all that hard dragging a file to your mounted Kindle.

paulgb• 14 years ago

Or emailing the .mobi file to <yourname>_<yourcode>@kindle.com and have it delivered wirelessly (The email address appears in settings, charges may apply if you use whispernet rather than WiFi)

hwatson• 14 years ago

or use @free.kindle.com to force (free) delivery over WiFi.

donniezazen• 14 years ago

More or less I agree. Arch Linux is a special niche. People know what they are doing. In fact publishing it on Archlinux.org would suffice.

codemac2• 14 years ago

Special niche?

According to distrowatch it's the 7th most popular distro. Hardly niche.

ChuckMcM4• 14 years ago

I'm confused, the Amazon folks were complaining that he was trying to sell otherwise free information [1], did the OP just miss that? Seems like putting the Kindle version up for free would have removed their complaint.

[1] Amazon has had a huge problem with people who run through Google Books, find a book from before 1923, and then re-publish it for money in the Kindle store, only to have Amazon's customers get angry and bent out of shape when they realize they have been 'ripped off' buying something they could have gotten for free.

mrposty• 14 years ago

where exactly does it say he's trying to sell it?

I can't see that anywhere.

edit: looks like only amazon refer to it as being 'sold', can't see the author mention it.

reledi• 14 years ago

Keep in mind that free books on the Amazon/Kindle store are still sold, there's just no charge for the sale.

ChuckMcM4• 14 years ago

That is the confusing part, Amazon talks about 'selling' it and he talks about 'managing copyright'. So it seems like they are talking about two different things, tied together by the liability of selling someone else's copyright protected material. I was looking for the response that said,

"Yes this stuff is available for free on the web, and it is available for free in this kindle book, I've just collated it into Kindle form to make it more accessible for people. All of the rights holders have explicitly allowed this use."

So that was my source of confusion.

WalterBright3• 14 years ago

I've published a book for the Kindle on Amazon that was published shortly after the Civil War. The price is nominal, but I put a lot of work into formatting the book, proofing it, preparing the illustrations, etc.

It was a labor of love for a book I really liked, and I don't expect to make any real money off of it, but I think a small fee is entirely justifiable. And if one doesn't like that fee, one can go find another copy elsewhere.

_delirium• 14 years ago

I agree with that, but I do think there needs to be some amount of effort that justifies putting out a new "edition" of the book, so to speak (which it sounds like you're doing). What Amazon is having problems with is large-scale automated stuff that doesn't bother to do good formatting at all, like the folks who are just repackaging Wikipedia articles, or PDFs directly from Google Books. I'm guessing Amazon just doesn't want to put in the resources to distinguish those cases.

artsrc• 14 years ago

Selling based false pretenses is unethical and potentially illegal.

Perhaps Amazon should have policy that sources are referenced, contributions described.

ChuckMcM4• 14 years ago

That is an interesting area of Copyright Law as well. You do in fact own the copyright on your new 'work' even through it was derived entirely from this previous book. Good examples of this are the classics like Homer's Odessey which is available here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Odyssey-Homer/dp/0140268863 the translator and their publisher put some work in getting it from Greek to English and voila, new work.

The issue that Amazon was cracking down on was folks who went to Google Books, found some work like *"The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, With Special Reference to his work in Polyphase Currents and High Potential Lighting" and then downloaded it from Google and uploaded it to the Kindle store [2], [1]

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=bhrreukJiLgC&printsec=f... is the Google Books version

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Inventions-Researches-Reference-ILLUST... is the Amazon Kindle rip-off version.

derleth• 14 years ago

> And if one doesn't like that fee, one can go find another copy elsewhere.

There is no sweat of the brow copyright in American law.

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

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat092303.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

I mean, just so you know.

sliverstorm3• 14 years ago

Even if it is sold for $0.00, I wouldn't expect that to remove Amazon's issue with it. Whether or not the book is generating income, the person who "published" it does not have demonstrable rights to its contents.

weel2• 14 years ago

Which is completely irrelevant because whoever does have the original copyright has already licensed them to everyone under publicly available conditions.

da_n• 14 years ago

"I was insulted and hurt by this message. It’s arrogant and it is confrontational. It makes no effort to address the specifics of the e-mail."

I feel like I'm missing something here. I read the emails and their responses seem perfectly acceptable to me, I am not picking up an arrogant or confrontational tone and think they did their best to answer the issue. The author asserts a copyleft license to the work and fully expects Amazon to be 100% compatible with it (one could almost say arrogantly so) and does not, in my opinion, assert exclusive publishing rights of the work. Amazon state they are not confident author holds the exclusive publishing rights and that this is not acceptable on the Kindle Store, linking to the relevant policy guideline. As someone else has pointed out, the author is also not the customer here, they are in effect negotiating a business deal with Amazon, Amazon do not need to tip-toe around the issue. I think the author was a little bit over sensitive here.

If I am missing something here please fill me in.

eatitraw• 14 years ago

> I read the emails and their responses seem perfectly acceptable to me That's probably because you are not the author of this book. Just try to be a little more empathic with this guy: he wrote the book, he did a valuable job(presumably, I'm not an arch linux user, and I looked through the book very briefly). I can see very well that response like "This type of content can create a poor customer experience, and is not accepted" makes him feel exactly the way bis post describes.

If Amazon doesn't support free licensed content, it's time to start doing so.

chrisrhoden4• 14 years ago

I'm shocked nobody has said this yet. They can't.

The ebooks distributed on the Kindle Store are distributed under a license that Amazon has negotiated. The GNU FDL does not permit redistributing under a different license. If the person submitting the book could assert that he was the author, and held copyright to the content, that would be one thing. If it is community authored, and edited by this person (as was actually asserted), Amazon would be opening themselves to actual legal liability from all of the other authors.

It's insane to me how many people who assert that Free Licenses are useful in such situations. This is the same as attempting to put some GPLed software on the App Store. It can be done, but only if everyone agrees to offer Apple an alternate license.

presto8• 14 years ago

A confusing situation - do I have the facts right?

Amazon is ok with publishing public domain works. However, this is not a public domain work so it doesn't matter.

GNU Free Doc License, just like GPL, doesn't care if you charge money or not; only that you pass along the content when you distribute and that you don't add restrictions on what people can do with the content.

Amazon states in their rules that they won't accept freely redistributable content unless the submitting author is also the copyright owner.

Author does not explicitly state that he is the copyright owner in his response to Amazon, which explains the rejection.

Author does correctly state that GNU Doc License allows redistribution even if you are not the copyright owner. Thus he may have been trying to make a political point that it shouldn't matter if he is the copyright owner or not since he has the right to redistribute, for profit, from the license?

In any event, it doesn't matter since Amazon's stated policy is not to accept works in this precise scenario. Why, I don't know; but it is their right to do so.

spaghetti• 14 years ago

I wish the iOS reviewers were this clear and concise. Their rejection information would be something like: Your book has been rejected because it doesn't comply with App Store Review guideline 123.a.2: Apps that are like something else on the internet will be rejected, apps that may contain other things from other people may be rejected, apps that provide limited value when they imply they provide substantial value may be rejected.

jmilkbal• 14 years ago

Another day another headline of a closed repository rejecting something. In this case, it's information for an open source project. Nevermind that these repositories are not beholden to us, as a FLOSS proselytizer, it pains me that my peers so readily build value for these closed repositories in much the same way that publically-funded research papers get stashed behind paywalls. Models exist for publishing for profit outside of the walled gardens and they do succeed. If a potential publisher can be convinced to give it away and pray, so be it. As a community we should really determine where our allegiances lie and what are real priorities. It's trivial to put a book on a E-reader and just as trivial to run a website to publish on.

domdelimar3• 14 years ago

It doesn't say anywhere (or I'm missing it) whether he wanted to sell the book or give it for free.

Arch Linux Handbook for Kindle rejected by Amazon

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