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Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
That's because the actual printing, warehousing, distributing etc. of these books cost money....
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That's nice, but completely irrelevant.
In the same way that any publisher is entitled to release PD books at no charge, any publisher is also legally entitled to charge for PD books, and that is that.
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Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
Tricking people into shelling money out for something that has no monetary value per se is the very definition of fraud in my jurisdiction.
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Then you fail to comprehend the concept of "fraud." Unless they are selling an incomplete or blank book, there is zero deception going on here.
In many cases free versions of the PD books are available right on the site. E.g. B&N put out their own free versions of a lot of PD books; and free versions often crop up with the $0.99 PD versions.
Nor are all these offerings ripoffs. Rather than deal with 30 different copies of Shakespeare plays, I did the unthinkable and spent a whopping $2 for Shakespeare's complete works in one ebook, complete with a working table of contents, in MOBI format. To me, that $2 was well worth the time it saved me -- either in formatting it myself, or hunting down a free omnibus in the format I wanted and with a TOC.