I’ve noted before the efforts of the Gluejar team to “unglue” books by raising enough money to buy the permission of the copyright holder to put the book out in a special e-book edition in all sorts of formats for free. They freed their first book last June, just prior to the ALA Annual Conference.
Not long thereafter, Amazon shut down their use of Amazon payments to crowdsource this effort. They would not speculate on the reason, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Amazon was likely not pleased with an effort that was seeking to undermine their bookseller business model.
Be that as it may, that brought their efforts to a standstill for a bit, but I’m happy to report that they are back and have four campaigns afoot. One is even of particular interest to librarians — Lauren Pressley’s So You Want To Be a Librarian. So donate early and often!
Update: I forgot to mention that because of changing pledging/payment systems, all previous pledges need to be made again. So if you had pledged before they were shutdown by Amazon, go back and pledge again!
About Roy Tennant
Roy, thanks for reminding everyone that we’re still plugging away.
Though “unglue.it” tries not to speculate about Amazon’s motivations, the Go To Hellman blog loves to speculate about anything and everything. My insider account of the whole getting shut down by Amazon thing is there, http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2012/08/why-im-not-mad-at-amazon.html
Awesome, thanks for the thorough write-up. Somehow I missed it back in August.