Comment by vzaliva
7 days ago
I think it is pretty obvious. While Jack London's martin Eden is out of copyright and public domain now, if they order Penguin edition they still have to pay them some money for it. So Amazon calculated that it is cheaper to print their own. My guess they could not do this for non-public-domain books without securing rights first.
But I don’t think Amazon could “pirate” a Penguin edition like that without their consent. Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy is like you say, but they stripped it out of all mentions of a publishing house. I didn’t mind that one in fact
Why do you think Amazon couldn't do that?
Because Penguin Random House is one of the "Big Five" publishers. I can bet the house that Amazon treats it as a key strategic account within their Books department. They have to deal with them face-to-face regularly. It would be grossly negligent to do this without their consent, not to mention illegal.
It's as if Amazon started selling pirated Nintendo games. Someone from Nintendo would be on their arses in very little time. And while I know very little about the publishing industry, I worked as a PM for Nintendo for four years, and can absolutely guarantee that it would go down like that.
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