Recently Amazon has been adding public domain titles to itsKindle eBook store at a frantic pace: over 18,000 titles are nowavailable as free downloads. The step is in addition to other’remix’ titles for sale, such as Sense and Sensibility and SeaMonsters, that expands the original Jane Austen novel with “all-newscenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed seaserpents, and other biological monstrosities”, with some help byBrooklyn, NY-based writer Ben Winters.

This book continues the same ideas laid out in the previousnovel of the “Jane Austen and monsters” series, Pride and Prejudiceand Zombies created by the editors at Quirk Classics. A new trendincluding other classics of English literature now in the publicdomain, that are being re-actualized by adding a pinch of fun andcreativity to their original texts. [13oct09]

Also, as noted by the Download Squad, the rapid growth of thepublic domain library in the Kindle store is more likely a responseto the fact that Sony eBook readers can access Google’s massivecollection of scanned public domain works.

So while Amazon’s 18,000 public domain downloads are a goodstart, Google has over half a million titles, which means Amazonstill has some catching up to do.