Got an e-mail from Amazon.com this weekend, promoting a new Seth Godin book, "Everyone's An Expert". Given the fact that I've bought a lot of Seth Godin books on Amazon.com, I jumped at the chance to buy this one for what seemed to be a great price of $9.99.
But in the back of my mind, something didn't sit right. I knew that Seth had written a free eBook with the same title. In fact, I had downloaded it. I brushed it off as a new book that was probably a more in-depth, expanded version of the book he had written.
I was wrong.
After purchasing the book, I wandered over to Seth's site to see if the new book was listed alongside his other books. Frankly, I was kind of ticked at myself for missing the boat on a new Godin book being released without my knowledge!
It was there that I found a blog post from The Great One which was bluntly titled,
"Don't Buy This Book" with an image of the Amazon page showing the book. Evidently, the book was re-published by an outfit called BNPublishing. I'll say up-front that it appears they did so legally, as Godin wrote the book under a creative commons copyright that would not prevent someone from doing what BNPublishing did. That being said, it seems kind of sleazy to take someone else's free work and then profit from it.
But they got what they wanted. $10 bucks from me, and probably a lot of other Godin fans that ordered the book this weekend.
That being said, let me know use the power of the blogosphere to do my part in raising my voice to say "shame on Amazon.com for allowing this to be sold, and shame on BNPublishing for taking a free work and re-publishing it for their own profit."
It's bad salesmanship all the way around. It reflects negatively on Amazon.com, and even worse on BNPublishing.
If anyone out there has any ideas on how a bunch of us can respond creatively (and effectively) to this deceptive sales campaign, let me know. Let's make some noise on behalf of Seth Godin, who deserves better than this.
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