This Week in Indie Publishing

Amazon makes it easy to buy the wrong version of your favorite book

• Anyone can publish text that’s in the public domain, meaning there are plenty of bizarrely formatted versions of classic novels out there.
• Amazon conflates the reviews for multiple editions of a title, making it difficult to tell what you’re actually buying.
• One customer’s story of getting a bizarrely-formatted version of “Pride and Prejudice” led me to track down the copy’s origins — and publish my own edition of a classic book using Amazon’s tools.

Danielle Kurtzleben wanted a copy of “Pride and Prejudice,” so she went on Amazon and clicked on one of the first links that came up in the search results. When the book arrived in her mailbox, there was a surprise.

First of all, it was huge — the size of a children’s coloring book, not like a typical paperback novel. Things only got…