The classic book we recently republished, The Elements of Wood Ship Construction, after being approved by the Amazon Kindle Content Team on February 14, 2022 under the content guidelines for “public domain” books, was suddenly blocked on March 20, 2022 by the Amazon Kindle Content Team because we did not have the “exclusive right to publish” the book.

Want to know why that requirement is absolutely unobtainable?
Read the whole story.

I apologize for the long post that follows, but this is a subject that, if you are a long-time reader of the site, you probably know is near and dear to my heart. And this decision has made me very, very angry.

The tl;dr version is: Nearly all of the book links on the site will no longer work. There are hundreds of them across the many pages we have, so it will take some time to remove them all. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Copyright and Public Domain

As you may have guessed at the start of this post, this entire incident revolves around the concept of “public domain.” To understand “public domain” you have to be familiar with copyright.

If you are unfamiliar with how copyright works, think of it as a protective fence around books, photographs, music, and other creative objects that prevents others from using the work without permission from its creator … for a specific period of time. As a professional writer and photographer for more than 40 years, I believe this protection is vital if we want creatives to put in the sweat, blood and tears required to produce truly great work. Or, in my case, work good enough at least to put food on the table and shoes on my children.

However, once that time period elapses, the object enters the “public domain,” where anyone can use it without permission of the previous copyright holder. Without getting in to too much detail, current U.S. copyright law stipulates that anything created before 1927 is in the public domain. The Elements of Wood Ship Construction was published in 1919. So, it is clearly in the public domain. Because public domain allows everyone access to the work, no publisher has the “exclusive right to publish” this book.

Republishing public domain works is a staple of nearly every big publishing house’s range of products. Go into any bookstore and you will find new copies of the works of Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Plato, Socrates, etc. etc. Without the ability to freely publish public domain materials unless one has an “exclusive right to publish,” (again, NO ONE has an exclusive right to publish public domain materials) you would only be able to purchase original copies of these works. Imagine how ridiculous that would be in a literature class, with everyone hovering over an original publication of “Romeo and Juliet,” worth so much that it is protected by glass, and only one person wearing protective gloves has the ability to turn the pages.

The Impossible, Invisible Hurdle

So, to sum up the situation, the Amazon Kindle Content Team blocked this book because we had no “exclusive right to publish” it, a right which simply doesn’t exist with any book in the public domain.

But, Amazon did not just block that particular book, they closed our entire account until we, and I quote:

1. Reply to this message with the following declaration: “I confirm that I will remove any content for which I do not have the exclusive publishing rights and that I will adhere to all terms in the Content Guidelines when submitting new content”; and
2. Review your catalog and remove any titles that do not comply with the Content Guidelines or for which you do not have the necessary publishing rights

If you are familiar with the catalog of books we offered, you know that all of them are reprints of public domain works by authors that have long since left this Earth. Even though every book in our catalog met all of Kindle’s published Content Guidelines for public domain works (and each was approved by the Kindle Content Team as such) we did not have an exclusive right to publish these works (again, no publisher does), so we had to delete all but one of the books in our catalog. That book, Selected Plates from Souvenirs de Marine, includes enough of our own copyrighted material in our opinion that we feel it provides us with the exclusive right to publish it. However, when I asked the Kindle Content Team to proactively review it and give us an opinion on that subject they replied:

As per our policy, we reserve the right to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data and we’re unable to elaborate further on specific details regarding our terms and conditions beyond what is available at [website link to content guidelines that all of our books met, as proven by their acceptance for publication by Amazon Kindle Content Team ]

So, to interpret: “We have guidelines. If you ask, we will not tell you if your book meets those guidelines. If, however, we decide it doesn’t meet those guidelines, we will punish you for not meeting the guidelines that we wouldn’t tell you if you met when you asked us.”

I’m guessing that means in real terms that if a member of their team is having a bad day, and chooses to review the title, it, too may be rejected, and most likely our account will be closed permanently.

Is it worth paying for a book you can read for free?

I haven’t bothered to check, but my guess is that every one of the titles we published is already available free online, created by one of the big digitizing projects funded over the past decade or so by some of the internet giants. However, if you’ve spent time reading the books made available online from these projects, you will know it’s not uncommon to find pages blurred to unreadability when the book moved during the scanning process, pages missing or out of order, or fold-out illustration plates not opened during the scan. The massive scale of the digitizing projects simply made it impossible to go back and repair all of the problems that inevitably occur when scanning a lengthy book. Many times I could find another scan that didn’t have the problems of the first, but sometimes that scan had problems the first didn’t. This required hopping back and forth from one scan to another, sometimes with three or four different scans, just to be able to read the entire work.

But notwithstanding how easy as it is to access thousands of crappy scans of books online for free, I have to admit, I’m old school. I prefer to read my books on printed pages. I enjoy the heft of the book in my hand, the smell of ink in new printings and the “old book smell” of originals. So, frustrated with the online reading experience, I ordered physical books – reprints of vintage books – from Amazon. And found many of those same problems in reprinted books that were found in the online versions. Obviously these books were produced by “book mills” that were simply printing out the scanned books, slapping a poorly-designed generic cover on them, and calling it good.

If you want something done right …

This was the impetus that led us to produce our own reprints: I wanted good quality physical copies of historic books, which were unavailable. Some originals were priced prohibitively high, or were too fragile to read on the couch over a hot cup of coffee, as I am wont to do. Some were, I assume due to minimal sales of the original, available only in libraries. None of them were up to the rigorous treatment of research use where I needed to go back and forth from page to page over and over, and place multiple notes so I could return at a later time to quickly find and verify information between sources.

So I made them myself. If I could find physical copies of the original book that I could afford, I bought them. In some cases that meant spines that were so broken I was basically paying for a cover and a pile of loose pages. In some cases I couldn’t even find an intact book, and had to resort to government or library archives to complete them.

My interest is in the history of ships, specifically how cultures affected ship evolution and vice-versa, so the titles I chose were quite esoteric. Outside of the odd historian of obscure naval subjects, I thought that these books might be of interest to model shipbuilders – a small slice of the model building hobby that itself is a small slice of the offerings in the hobby world. The obscurity of the topics I chose meant that no major physical book publishers bothered with the titles I wanted to read, and as noted earlier, those that did were not producing quality books. So although the audience was miniscule, there was little competition for it. I decided to post them on the website.

To differentiate our books from others, we spent weeks, in some cases months, carefully optimizing each page. Sometimes we replaced single words – or even single letters of a word – on a page to improve readability. Were our books perfect? Of course not. The source material was very old books subject to all the problems that plague very old books. Some of damage that didn’t severely compromise readability we felt actually made the book feel more original. We also worked to create attractively-designed individualized covers that would make the books look good on someone’s bookshelf. In my humble opinion, our books offered a far better reader experience than I ever experienced from reading the books online.

And when we offered each of them on the website, there was immediate interest. None of our reprints were ever going to be on any best seller list. And at about $1 royalty for every book sold – Amazon takes the rest in printing fees and the percentage of royalties they pay to themselves – we certainly aren’t going to retire to the French Riviera. I doubt I’ve earned back a fraction of the time spent creating them. But I have to admit it felt good to see an email stating I had received a couple dollars from books sold that month.

And in one fell swoop …

After nearly a decade of offering these books we have never had any negative feedback from customers about the content being available free online. Yet Amazon, having apparently never sat down and tried to read their free online books, has now suddenly decided that printed books that are also available free online are a “poor reader experience.” And in response has put in place a requirement which, again, is impossible to meet for public domain books.

And sadly, Amazon’s decision came the same week I received a 101-year-old copy of The Kedge Anchor or Young Sailor’s Assistant that is far better preserved than most of the books we’ve scanned. If you haven’t seen this title, it is as valuable as an intriguing read for the sailing buff as it is a reference for details of sailing ships important to model shipbuilders. The only reason we could afford to buy the book is that the spine is broken, so it has little value to antiquarian book collectors. Of course, you can always download it for free from a number of sources; the Internet Archive has numerous scans of the various editions of the book published throughout the 19th Century. Just be prepared for a “poor reader experience” created by the quality of the scans.

There is one option … but …

There is a solution to our situation: just like Selected Plates from Souvenirs de Marine, we must add enough of our own copyrighted content to these books to “differentiate” them to the point we can claim an “exclusive right to publish” them. This will be a laborious process that, in addition to writing and research time, involves extensive renovations to the digital publication files for both the interior and the cover of the books. That may not be worth it financially on some of the titles (who am I kidding? Like I said, we haven’t earned back the amount of time I’ve already spent on any of these books yet).

But – and there’s always a but – since the Amazon Kindle Content Team refuses to explain how much copyrighted content is enough to claim exclusive right to publish, we’re basically playing darts blindfolded, back to the board, throwing over our shoulder, and all of that work could be fruitless anyway.

Also, to me, this added content spoils the vintage “feel” that made me want to create them in the first place.

After the punch to the head, always watch for the body blow …

Oh, and by the way, here’s the gut-punch of this whole situation: go to Amazon and search for a common public domain title such as Romeo and Juliet. Count how many have no added copyrightable material noted in the book description.

Are we just one of the unlucky first victims of this new, impossible to meet requirement, or are there different rules for us than other publishers? And, if so, for what reason?

Thanks for listening

If you’ve read through this lengthy post to this point, Thank you for your patience. I hope it provided you with a good reading experience. Let me know what you think about the situation in the comments.

James Hitchcock
Publisher
TheModelShipwright.com

P.S. As a humorous aside, the email telling me that our account had been blocked arrived amid the monthly batch emails Amazon sends to report royalties earned from various marketplaces around the world on the books that, according to Amazon, provided a “poor reader experience.”