The public domain hobgoblin and how he steals your gold

Okay, so there’s a little bridge near the edge of the village. It’s not used very often, but it still serves a need for villagers who want to cross the river at that point. It’s nearly a century old now and the original builder is dead, and everyone agrees that it’s now public property that anyone can use.

Then one day a smelly, mercantile hobgoblin moves in under the bridge. He writes “MINE” on the side of it with a rock.

Then he adds an enchanted symbol, a little “(c)” icon, and–zing!–magically the bridge now belongs to him. From that day forward, everyone who wants to cross that bridge has to give the hobgoblin a gold coin.

Now replace “bridge” with “book” and “hobgoblin” with “unsavory publisher” (you can probably leave “gold coin” considering the current global economic crisis), and you’ve got this post by Mike Cane, republished yesterday at The Digital Reader. In it, Cane describes a public domain book that is no longer freely available from Google Books, because a publisher has slapped an illegitimate copyright on it, and because Google has grown too big to care about little details like public domain.

The problem with this kind of abuse is it’s invisible to the consumer, so it’s an easy way for you to get ripped off. Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying all classics must be free; there’s no reason you can’t pay someone to go to the trouble to prepare an ebook version for you to save yourself some time. But when it comes to the public domain, that shouldn’t be the only way to get a copy.

The best way to protect yourself from this kind of thing is to check with Project Gutenberg when shopping for classics, especially if the book was written before your lifetime. On the Amazon Kindle store, dishonest publishers will frequently remove the original date and substitute a new one, so it’s harder to tell, but you can usually spot an older work if you look carefully.

Then you can decide whether or not you want to pay a convenience fee or download a public domain edition, instead of being forced into an unnecessary transaction through trickery.

(Bridge drawing based on a photograph by Tim Green aka atoach)