Does the Church publish to Kindle?

I found this book while searching for others stuff:

http://www.amazon.com/For-Strength-Yout ... h+of+youth

(It's For The Strength of Youth for Kindle.)

So, is the Church publishing to Kindle? I'm not sure why they'd be charging for it...

Or is this some third party trying to make a fast buck?

That is a good question. After looking at the Amazon page for the item you mentioned it does seem that it is from the Church. Under the projects heading, there is a project entitled Digital Books and Magazines and it references making e-books available on Amazon.

I don't know why it costs 0.99$ but all the Churches publications which are available for the kindle cost that amount. If I were to hazard a guess I would speculate that there is some hidden cost in publishing through Amazon and the Church is trying to offset that.

I'm pretty sure that Kindle requires publishers to charge this minimum amount for ebooks on the Kindle. I'm not 100% sure, but I remember reading something like this.

mdyoung wrote:I don't know why it costs 0.99$ but all the Churches publications which are available for the kindle cost that amount.

The Kindle version of Teachings of Presidents of the Church: George Albert Smith is available for free, although even that appears to be discounted from $0.99. Not being a Kindle owner (or publisher), I can't say for sure why most of the LDS publications for that platform are at $0.99.

johnsonth wrote:I'm pretty sure that Kindle requires publishers to charge this minimum amount for ebooks on the Kindle. I'm not 100% sure, but I remember reading something like this.

That doesn't appear to be the case. A search on Amazon for Free Kindle Books returns over 100K hits.

If one clicks on the link to the publisher, you find there's a verity of prices - some free. Even more interesting is the "by" for some of the other publications:

"by Joseph Smith and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints"

and

"by Mormon, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Joseph Smith and LDS Book Club"

Something doesn't smell right.

russellhltn wrote:If one clicks on the link to the publisher, you find there's a verity of prices - some free. Even more interesting is the "by" for some of the other publications:

If you dig a bit deeper, you'll find some were not published by the church.

russellhltn wrote:"by Joseph Smith and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints"

"This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers."

russellhltn wrote:"by Mormon, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Joseph Smith and LDS Book Club"

"Brought to you by the LDS Book Club (a Packard Technologies company)"

I've published to the kindle, and making books free is absolutely an option. In fact, publishing to Kindle doesn't cost anything--except for a percentage of sales. So the church could definitely publish to kindle.

As the church already has many manuals in epub format, it seems like this is something that would be quite feasible.

Or, alternatively, if the church didn't mind, any joe bloe member could digitize and publish them--and make them free, unlike these listings.

I guess the Church figures kindle users can just go to their ebook page.

Except for the items in the public domain, I'd think this would be a copyright issue.

It is not correct to assume that since and individual can publish to Kindle that the Church can publish to Kindle for free. Different rules apply to organizations and individuals, non-profit and for-profit, etc...

But the Church does publish to the Kindle.
Have you loaded the "Gospel Library" program?
Look at all the Items under Epub. I think you'll find that they are all available inside Gospel Library. It is free.
The advantage? You can have 20 years of Conference Talks, and all of your Church manuals.
Want to do a search? Just give it a try on a paid for scripture or Epub program.
It starts at the beginning and goes line by line to find your search. If it has to go all the way to the end -- you could be 20 minutes waiting for results.
But -- the Gospel Library indexes all content (if you enable it), and searches are as quick as on your desktop.
Do you underline and markup your scriptures and epub readings? Are those markups important to you? Where do those markups go if you delete your epub?
With Gospel Library -- you can have it synchronize all your highlights with your account on LDS.org. Have a Kindle and an Ipad? Markup on one, and it is synchronized to the other.
Loose your Kindle and all your markups are there when you replace it.
.... the point is -- that a program like Gospel Library takes you way beyond a simple epub -- so why would you not take advantage of it.

And doing your own epub with Church owned material? No .. no .. no. You don't own the content. Although the church wants the scriptures in the hands of all that would receive it -- they alone own the content. No matter what your intentions -- Lucifer it waiting for any change to trip someone up over a word. Look at what happened with Martin Harris.
Leave church publishing to those who have been tasked with that responsibility.

Wow, OK. I'll back off then.

I should've specified: I meant Kindle library, as in:
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/b?i ... 1286228011

The Gospel Library is great for android (Kindle Fire) but doesn't work on Ereaders like the Kindle Paperwhite.

I'm was (and am) wondering why the Church doesn't make them easily downloaded and available on such ereaders.

At one point, there was a project for Gospel Library for Kindle ereaders. That project was abandoned or put on open ended hold. I don't know the reason, but it could be either not being able to get enough volunteers to work on it. A more likely reason could be that the kindle is not an app based device like android, windows or IOS, so it doesn't really fit the same paradigm.

There are available much of the content of the gospel library that can be installed on a kindle, but it is not the same as Gospel Library. Some is available from the church and others are available from third parties.

As far as I know (I haven't checked for a long time) there are no plans to attempt Gospel Library on Kindle ereaders.

Thank you for everyone's posts. I wanted to respond to some of the comments that have been made.

Yes, the Church is officially in the Kindle Store. We have been publishing a selection of e-books into Amazon, iTunes, Deseret Bookshelf, and the LDS Online Store. We are slowly opening other new channels for publishing as well. Not all Church materials will be available in e-book format but we are taking core materials and releasing them as they are created.

As to the cost, yes, there is a cost associated with publishing e-books to Amazon. I've spoken to Amazon directly and they would not allow us to publish our e-books for free through their site. They will price match a few of our titles (making them free) but that is something we have no control over. We will always price Church e-books to the lowest option available. Pricing is dependent on file size. It will be between ($0.99-2.99) per title.

Kindle's Documentation:
Only if you sign up for Select, in which case you will get 5 free days every three months. Otherwise you can add your book for free on another site (B&N is the biggie) and Amazon might price match it. You will have no control over if/when they price match, or for how long they will do so.

We are looking at branding our e-books in such a way that our readers will know these e-books are officially from the Church. We are still in the process of creating an identifier on the cover art. Unfortunately anyone could post e-books to sites and have the author from "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints". This makes it very confusing to those who are trying to find official Church e-books.

I recommend following the Interactive Books and Magazines wiki page. Any new information on e-books or direction is updated there. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any feedback or have an interest in volunteering to help publish/research/test.

Thank you for your post, hedrickef. And thanks to everyone else for helping me understand everything.

This wouldn't completely remove the issue of multiple authors (some official, some not, and indistinguishable between) but maybe it would help if the Church created an (official) author page:
https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help

Just an idea.

That is a great suggestion! I will look into that today and see about getting the Church into this. Let me know if you have any more ideas like these. I appreciate everyone's feedback.

hedrickef wrote:Unfortunately anyone could post e-books to sites and have the author from "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints". This makes it very confusing to those who are trying to find official Church e-books.

If find that rather odd. Sure there are publications that are public domain, but who is the legal author?

As for the ones not in public domain, it seems to me that copyright law would have something to say about that. I would imagine that Amazon would most cooperative if it was bright to their attention.