I don't know how I'm supposed to download these books. There's no download option. My US Amazon account doesn't work, so I can't send it to my Kindle. Help?

Headamon wrote:

unfortunately, its not available for download in my country (philippines). I dunno why. Its free so why limit to certain countries?

Because,
a) international copyright law is a mess of conflicting regulations, mostly due to the greed of already-wealthy hollywood that wants longer copyrights than internationally agreed so they can make more money, and the greed of slowly-growing-wealthier china that doesn't want to pay for books, movies, or software when it can just not participate in international copyright conventions,
and,
b) the greed of individual publishers who don't really have any clue about the broader picture but don't want to unlock anything for 'free' unless it's got a clear path as a loss-leader for people to buy other products.

Of course, I can't quite work out which of these reasons is behind making it so damn hard to get ahold of Japanese ebooks and doramas in any legitimate fashion in the US, so I've also concluded that,

c) People with control over artistic works are blinded by greed in such a way that they assume that foreigners -by definition- are stealing the work if they get their hands on it, no matter what frivolous matters like -money- that -would be paid- might suggest.

Crispy wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but the reason these books are free is because most of them have expired copyrights and nobody owns the publishing rights anymore.

I don't know about the Japanese store, but that's not the case for the English one. There are a lot of amateur writers who use Amazon to publish there work for free or very cheaply, and both amateur works and professional publications can be made free for short periods of time. This is good for gaining attention because people are much more generous when rating free books, and although Amazon has a separate section for them, they still treat each free download as a sale, so you'll occasionally see a popular free book suddenly appear in the best sellers list.

Last edited by Splatted (2013 April 06, 5:40 pm)

JimmySeal wrote:

Splatted wrote:

Crispy wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but the reason these books are free is because most of them have expired copyrights and nobody owns the publishing rights anymore.

I don't know about the Japanese store, but that's not the case for the English one.

If you had clicked chamcham's link, you would have seen that after the first page, almost all the books listed are works that were published over 100 years ago and therefore do have expired copyrights.

But that's not really the point is it? From looking at the more established English site it's obvious that Amazon's free e-book section is intended to be for more than just distributing uncopyrighted material, and the download restrictions have to reflect that. I'm not saying I support the copyright laws, but it helps lessen my annoyance to know that Amazon's download policy is actually quite reasonable given the restrictions that are placed on them.

On the plus side, anyone wanting to read classic Japanese books on their kindle can probably find them at aozora and then convert them using this site. You can also convert any text you want to read by pasting it in to the box on this page.

Last edited by Splatted (2013 April 07, 4:20 pm)