Recently Amazon has been adding public domain titles to its Kindle eBook store at a frantic pace: over 18,000 titles are now available as free downloads. The step is in addition to other ‘remix’ titles for sale, such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, that expands the original Jane Austen novel with “all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, and other biological monstrosities”, with some help by Brooklyn, NY-based writer Ben Winters.

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

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

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