I was going to buy Charles Dickens’s "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." I went to the page in the normal Amazon catalog for the Penguin edition, because I’d like some commentary in addition to the main text. When I clicked the link on that page for Also Available in – Kindle Edition, I got a mysteriously generic version, which turned out not to be the Penguin edition at all.What determines which version is linked to from the catalog when there is not exact match to the paper version?So anyway, I search for the title in the Kindle catalog. There are 17 versions, ranging from free to $9.99, not to mention appearances in multi-book anthologies.When Amazon claims to have 285,000 Kindlle books, does that mean 285,000 divided by 17?Anyway, there is no way to tell what these public domain books are. Are they all Project Gutenburg versions? Do some have better formatting and markup, and is there a way to tell which? Do some public domain Kindlizer parasite publishers have better reputations than others? Should I just go for version 18: the Mobi version downloadable from Project Gutenburg?For the record, the public domain parasite publisher hall of shame:– Adamant Media Corporation– B&R Samizdat Express– Classics-Unbound– EbooksLib– EGO Books– Enlightened Books– Ignacio Hills Press– MobileReference– Neeland Media LLC– Labyrinth Publishing LLC– Packard Technologies– Penny Books– Public Domain BooksSome other versions list no publisher, and thus may have been put up by Amazon. I think that Amazon should crack down on Project Gutenburg churning unless there is some value added beyond a perl script adding Kindle markup and a random Dover clip art cover illustration. Having multiple versions of paperback classics is O.K. because there is usually some value added in the form of a different scholar writing the introduction or a different translator, and there is a cost to publishing a paper book which weeds out the spammers, but there is virtually no barrier to entry to uploading the whole Project Gutenburg catalog.

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