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Originally Posted by doreenjoy
In the case I'm familiar with (my own publishing company), the money made from Amazon is peanuts compared to how much we'd have to pay someone to fax every contract to Amazon.
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Not every individual contract--Amazon would (presumably) have a single contract with the publisher; submissions through that publisher would be the publisher's liability to verify.
It's the "self-published" works submitted through Amazon that need a more stringent confirmation process. And while Amazon certainly can't keep up with every single book ever published, it *could*, relatively easily, maintain a list of "5000 popular books not in the public domain" and check new submissions against those.
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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Amazon already has a fairly extensive database. Although it's far easier to describe than implement: they could add a few data fields to each book to indicate whether the book is in public domain, which publisher has the right to add an e-book version for that specific title, etc. Someone adds a book, the self-publishing system runs a query, and voila, book is either approved or disapproved, or perhaps flagged for a human to review.
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No for-profit publisher or distributor has ever been willing to announce what content they provide is in the public domain; all the books are sold as "copyright by [publishing house]" even when the content is hundreds of years old.
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That said, as long as Amazon pulls books and can revoke payments to the infringers, I doubt there are any serious lawsuits on the horizon.
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Ah, but Amazon has said, "We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances."