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What is not clear to me is what Amazon is supposed to do about it.
As pointed out in other responses, text in the public domain has no ownership, and anyone can get it and do whatever they like with it, including trying to sell it.
The compliant is that people are repacking and selling public domain content through Amazon, but simply reformatting the PG text for the Kindle. (And might not even be doing that, as PG now offers automatically generated Mobi editions for many of their offerings.)
This is perfectly legal, too. Since they are adding no value, you may think it's smarmy and unethical to charge for it, but it's not against the law.
The texts in question are being uploaded to Amazon by third parties using the facilities Amazon provides for self-publishing. The is no requirement that what you package and sell that way be your own work. Self-publishing simply means doing it yourself, and makes no assumption about what you are publishing.
What should Amazon do in such a case?
If someone self-publishes someone else's work that is covered by copyrights, it's a clear copyright violation, and the rights holder can request that Amazon take it down, and file suit for copyright violation against the offender.
That's not the case here.
The obvious suggestion would be that Amazon vet self-published uploads, and decline to accept and post stuff like this. I really don't see that happening. Since it's not illegal, what grounds would they have to do so?
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Dennis
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