Can someone please explain...
 

... why there are so many self-published public domain ebooks offered for free at the bug retailers' web sites? What benefit is there to an independent vendor when they "sell" books for free?

For example, at B&N you can search for a Nook version of "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin." You will see 200 hits! 88 of them are offered for free! And if past experience is any guide, many (most?) of those will be poorly scanned and formatted.

So, why would anybody do this? Why would companies like B&N allow it? It can't help their ebook store that it is clogged with such shoddy merchandise. The poor quality doesn't do anything for their reputation, and nobody is collecting any revenue on the sale.

I just don't understand business.

I don't understand this either.

What I can understand, is something such as the following. I've seen smaller bookstores however, that sell non-copyrighted books for $0, and they only have one copy in their store: their own version. Normally it's of good quality. They're probably trying to make a good impression on customers that end up in the store and "buy" a free eBook. They hope that customers will come back to purchase copyrighted/current/popular books.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Feedbooks and epubBooks are both good that way. If you need something for high school language class it's probably there.

But I can't fathom why B&N allows the flea market to contaminate their site that way. Bandwidth isn't free, after all.

FeedBooks is actually my favorite for free books. I didn't know EPUBBooks yet. Thanks. I'll check them out too.

In the case of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the hundreds of free copies are actually Google Books digitizations, and I believe that Google is providing the epub text for them all. In my limited experience with the Google provided text, it's pretty awful, lots of scannos and bad formatting, mostly just good enough to be usable by a search engine.

It's either a case of someone thinks that they can produce a better copy, or there are other benefits. For example: I have seen public domain books put up gratis, but the description promotes other titles that they charge for. I also suspect that some sort of accounting information is given to the seller.

The benefit for B&N is that they get to claim they offer over 2 million books, or whatever.

They just use it to inflate their catalog. I have a list of sites that I get my public domain books from, like Gutenberg, that I know are at least clean and not bad scans or partial books. B&N classics (their in-house line) are pretty cheap and they're reliably edited and formatted and annotated--if you want that, they're worth the money IMO. I really don't mess around trying to get free public domain stuff on the big retailer sites.


Here's their version of Franklin's Autobiography: like the others, it's $3.99

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/auto...=9781411428218

I think people also get comfortable with a single bookseller and having the freebies encourages readers to stick to the sites.

If the freebies at B&N were any good I never would have come looking for sites like this one. So it didn't work in my case.

I think it is several things. First of course as they are PD they don't cost the publisher anything to get hold of either. Or if they do it's very little I would imagine. So they keep their costs down. And of course some are posted at sites like Amazon by individuals I imagine as well. If they can get hold of a PD book from Gutenberg and put their own cover on it and resell it then they can make some $$ either on that book or on other PD books.