I'm having some trouble with an epub from project Gutenberg on my Kobo reader. But since I also have a Kindle I thought: I'll just look if this particular Gutenberg book is available as a free Kindle book and download it there (and then convert it).
And this confronts me with a phenomenon that's been nagging me for a while: the quasi disappearance of a lot of free ebooks from Amazon.
The book I was having trouble with is
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15466
On Goodreads I see that it has been a (probably free) Kindle ebook at one point:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...bled-marriages
But that's not to be found in my "local" Kindle shop (
https://www.amazon.nl), and on .com it's only available as a paperback (!) for 6 dollars:
https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Sho.../dp/B0084A50U8
There are cheaper ebook versions of the same text, but the one thing they have in common is they all cost money. And I'm not against paying for books, even for books in the public domain, if something valuable has been done to them (such as the often excellent introductions and notes that Penguin and Oxford University Press often have to offer, not to mention a standard of text editing that is generally quite a bit better than that on the Gutenberg site, valuable though that is).
But these commercial editions of what are basically still Gutenberg texts (produced by volunteers and, presumably, some kind of public money or philanthropic funding) -- they often have next to nothing of added value to offer.
(Okay, except the fact that I'm having some problem getting the original no frills Gutenberg epubs to display correctly on my ereaders.)
Anyone else noticed it too, that there's been a dramatic downfall in free ebooks on Amazon? Sure, you'll still find David Copperfield somewhere. But even looking for some of the more out of the way Dickens titles, you'll have to pay to download it from Amazon.
Someone uploads a very nicely formatted "collected works of Kipling" to the terrific Patricia Clark Memorial Library here, and before you know it someone else asks a dollar for it on Amazon.
In fact, I can't find any free Kipling titles on Amazon.
That shiny future of free online literature for everybody that seemed to be dawning say 5 to 10 years ago seems to have gone up in smoke pretty rapidly. At least on the big commercial platforms.
(These forums are good alternative, but they're only for the real afficionados, I suspect. Not the big public.)