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Originally Posted by H-P
Hi all,
Elfwreck, Why i buy paper book and why i redo all the job even the text is online.
Because as a small company, that illegal to sell free work done by volunteers. With the violation of work law,... By this way, a publisher can't be in competiton with this kind of resellers ( full texts of one author for 1 or 2 $), that definitly an unfair competion.
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Your country's laws about whether it's legal to sell the work of volunteers have nothing to do with copyright law, and whether public domain works can be resold.
If, in your country, it's illegal to make a profit from volunteer labor, it's true you will have trouble competing with businesses in countries that don't have that law. However, in the US and most of Europe, it's not illegal to use the results of volunteer labor and sell them at a profit. It may be illegal to *contract* volunteers to do work for free, and then sell that work, but that's not the same as using the results of labor that they give freely to anyone who wants it.
Certainly, we have no laws saying "no store can allow its customers to pick up wrappers on the floor; they must hire janitors to do that." If a shelf falls over in a supermarket, and the customer start picking up the stock, that's allowed--even though the supermarket saves money by not having its own staff do the work.
If someone has OCR'd and proofread a public-domain book and put the results online, anyone in the US, and anyone in Europe (AFAIK) in the places where that text is in the public domain, can use that text for any purpose they want.
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In some case,... but in this case, on the famous ebooks platforms.... there are too much people which do business with this human works done by volunteers in direct competition. That huge.
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It's legal in most countries. Maybe all countries; you may need to re-check your local laws about this. You should be able to use public domain texts regardless of who did the work of converting them.
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So that not a DP problem. When you do a business, you have to respect the law(s). That why i tall you DP is not the God law. You want to be a publisher based on non copyright textes, do your own work..... and call me back, if you sitll still sell the full texts of one authors after 6 months of hard work at 1 or 2 dollars.
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What laws do you think are broken when someone grabs a Gutenberg text, reformats it, adds a bit of commentary and a table of contents, and sells it on Amazon? Can you name the specific laws of which country don't allow this?
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Wikisouce, put a warning on the free texts: So selling text with mistakes, with missing text, (you don't know what you sell), when you cut and past, can be in certains situation a customer infraction. This kind of guy really don't care about the reader. Easy money is the only one motivation.
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Many readers don't care much about quality, either. They'd rather read a 2-dollar book with several typos and line-break errors than a 5-dollar or 10-dollar book that's perfect. It's not fair to say those readers should have to pay extra for quality they don't care about.
People selling low-quality conversions should have to mention that, or at least allow the comments/replies to mention the errors in the book. But there's a real market for cheaper ebooks of all quality levels, and companies are allowed to focus on that market.