Homesteading and ebooks: profiteering in the 21st century

The United States saw unprecedented expansion between the 19th and early 20th century as a result of pro-expansionist policies. These policies -regardless of how avaricious they were- are something which many historians would consider a necessary evil. The losers in this precipitous land grab, by most accounts, where the Native Americans who originally had settled lands west of the Mississippi River. However, there was also another group of losers in this massive race west: the American settlers. By most accounts their lives on newly settled lands were bleak, often hanging on by the gifts or punishments of unpredictable weather trends. Ironically, the largest winners in all of this were the capitalists who were able to convince a growing country that easy to manipulate laws –such as the Homestead Act- were necessary. Through their salesmanship and craftiness they secured immense plots of land which remain in place till this very day.

Ultimately, you may be asking yourself: “so what does all this mean to me and e-books?’ Valid enough question. I believe that we are seeing the same avaricious behavior in a massive public domain “e-book grab.” I am well aware of groundbreaking websites such as Project Gutenberg as well as its spin-offs Manybooks and Feedbooks. My worry is that entirely too many e-book readers are oblivious to their existence. This coupled with the reprehensible trend of selling free e-books may slowly erode our access to free public domain books. Many will of course label such a warning as nothing more than “chicken little” gibberish. But the cynics must be kindly reminded of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 which extended copyright privileges by an additional 20 years. This marks one of those numerous instances in which corporations reworked US laws in their favor. Unfortunately, this particular accomplishment meant that the public’s right to intellectual property –what you and I refer to as public domain- was usurped.

The “21st century e-book grab” is very real and just like most of the settlers lost out on the benefit of free and accessible lands so will many e-book readers lose out on public domain works. Companies such as Apple, Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes and Noble have decided to either aggravate the situation or prevent its occurrence –I contend they intend to profit from it- by offering free e-books. Amazon offers works such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables for free but a simple search brings up pages upon pages of Les Miserables with an average price of $1.50 per e-book. Barnes and Noble attempts to prevent needless profiteering by listing multiple free versions albeit the first couple of search results are even more expensive than anything Amazon offered. I am beginning to see a very insidious trend in which pure capitalists are merely grabbing direct ports of works from Manybooks or Project Gutenberg and merely reselling them. Those of us in the e-book world were reminded of how easy it was to pull this type of stuff off when we were informed of the “MyPadMedia” scam which took in entirely too many people. I believe that many of us were enticed into buying e-book readers due to the abundance of free classics or reduced new release prices. As publishers have all too easily shown us the latter incentive can be easily removed regardless of our resistance, the latter is entirely in our hands to secure. The gradual erosion of public domain e-books is a very real threat to our e-book bliss and if we are not able to prevent it, we may find ourselves just like our western expansionist brethren: conned out of our very own slice of heaven.