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Originally Posted by barryem
Most free ebooks are put together by volunteers who are willing to spend their time and a bit of money to make sure there are free books available. I personally am offended that someone wants to use the product of their effort to make money.
I've seen this before. In the early days of old time radio collecting and sharing on the internet a lot of us retired guys put a lot of work into locating old shows, cleaning them up and sharing them for free. Then a few people joined our groups for the purpose of getting our shows and selling collections of them on CD on Ebay and on the web.
I'm sorry there are people in this world who want to make money on the backs of volunteers. It's a pretty sad thing.
Barry
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While I have very much respect for the work of volunteers, this is rather harsh and non-pragmatic take on my idea and the post.
- The fact that certain content is in PD means it's made open by its creator, or the
governing legislative body of a democratic government that represents him/her. This clearly means that rights of a creator - the highest rights (higher than formatters / distributors / volunteers) - have been marginalized in exchange for better discoverability + sharing of knowledge.
If my app makes an African kid aware about
Alice in Wonderland in a free trial + cancellation (where I will be losing money for), why should a volunteer have problem? Taking a higher moral ground than the creator or lawmakers is something that doesn't suit volunteers, at least for the sake of the purpose here. (of discoverability)
- I haven't made any mention of which PD source I might use i.e. which volunteer's work I will be making money off of.
Gutenberg exists since 70s, and I simply adore their love for plaintext format - in the sense that it makes it forever extensible. It suits me because it allows me to roll out my own format. If I don't succeed, I will take a hit for sure, but that's my risk.
Given the competition in the space as many contributors have mentioned here, I will have to try
really really hard to make myself break-even, given all the costs involved with subscription model.
This, in light of the fact that my competitors (Publishers + Amazon) are
selling super-popular PD works for $ even on Kindle on per title basis, wherein I will be selling them bunched together as monthly subscription.
While I can credit them for all the formatting those publishers
might have done, I wouldn't be getting anything readymade from Mobilereads or Gutenberg that I could make money off of 2-clicks.
Quote:
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If creativity at scale is something one could hack via a machine (which they are already trying to do), formatting is not even a drop in the ocean.
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Volunteers like those in MR will keep the flame alive for PD works, sure, but the overall writing industry will take massive hit, and our children will have hard time understanding how knowledge is passed down every generation.
So while I totally agree I could go bankrupt the next day this is launched (due to no added value risk), I am also simply providing one more option in the market filled with megaliths making money off of authors' who died 150 years ago. Whether I use someone's formatted work is of totally negligible value here. (not that I intend to do it)