Amazon charges cash for free Project Guttenberg e-books

Amazon is collecting fees for taking free books from Project Gutenberg at the online store for its Kindle e-reader. While Amazon itself does not repurpose Gutenberg texts, it is done by "publishers" using the company's self-service platform. What is more, Amazon takes a cut of the proceeds from the sale.

While the move does not breach the law it may seem unethical for some people. Project Gutenberg's license agreement clearly states: "If you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg from the ebook, you are left with a public domain ebook. You can do anything you want with that."

Apparently, “anything you want” means collecting cash for the Amazon publishers.