Continuations by people other than the original author/creator aren't worth getting worked up about.

[Kelliezgirl]

This is the reason that Sony made so many Spiderman movies.

They were at least trying to make good movies, with varying degrees of success. I don't think any of the Sony Spiderman movies are terrible. The FF was apparently just awful.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Leaving out the cesspool that Amazon creates with some of that stuff, is this necessarily a bad thing? I'd rather have 15 people fighting over selling me an E-book of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's masterpiece "Paul Clifford" than not be able to get it at all.
Any solution is going to be messy to some extent or other, but I'd rather side with making things more readily available than less.

Why wouldn't everything go straight to Project Gutenberg (or equivalents) and be completely free as an e-book? There probably is a smallish market for quality bound copies of public domain literature.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Why wouldn't everything go straight to Project Gutenberg (or equivalents) and be completely free as an e-book? There probably is a smallish market for quality bound copies of public domain literature.

I suspect quite a few people pay for things on Amazon they could get for free because of the "convenience" of it. Or simply not knowing about Project Gutenberg.

 

[Britva415]

is this necessarily a bad thing?

All I was saying was that it was going to make it hard to succeed with that particular get-rich-quick scheme.

 

[Britva415]

Why wouldn't everything go straight to Project Gutenberg (or equivalents) and be completely free as an e-book? There probably is a smallish market for quality bound copies of public domain literature.

It does.

But that doesn't preclude people from making copies to sell anyway. There are a lot of buyers who aren't informed enough to know to get it from Gutenberg or Internet Archive, and/or not informed enough to know how to get the file formats they find there into their Kindle.

But they still want to read the stuff, so, sellers do rope in a few buyers for any particular title. I don't think any of them are selling a lot. Especially because of the competition, like I was saying, but also because there are readers who know they can get the stuff for free.