I never read the books, but in my opinion, the only acceptable redhead to put on the cover of an Anne of Green Gables book is Megan Follows;

http://postimage.org/image/u61sz12lr/

Timing is clearly perfect for me to release my version with the goatse cover….

I think what is going on is that people are all attempting to game Amazon’s recommendation engines. The recommendation engine can tell that a print-on-demand book is a copy of the Gutenberg e-text, and it can tell that the print-on-demand book has a color cover picture (*), but the recommendation engine cannot tell if the picture is relevant or not.

(*) Which nineteenth-and-early twentieth-century books generally did not, so you can’t just use the original.

Suppose you are teaching Anne of Green Gables in a school. In that case, you need to buy, say, thirty copies so that each student can have one, and, and so that you can say, “Okay, gang, open your books to page 76, where Anne says, blah, blah, blah, and what do you think she means by it?” Given the kind of students you have, you cannot expect them to read e-texts on-line and write out lists of questions and comments. The paperback book is well-suited to applying controlled pressure to make students learn when they would prefer not to. You basically want some kind of printed edition, but, beyond that, it doesn’t matter which.

Well, Amazon has decided that it doesn’t want to give this kind of business to, say, Viking Penguin, but prefers to steer the business to someone who will use their print-on-demand system, and that is reflected in the recommendation engine. Amazon’s thinking is that, on an order of thirty books, they can quote a reasonably competitive price. The result is that someone who doesn’t read any books at all sets up to produce editions of, say, a thousand public-domain books commonly used in the schools. This person, who is in effect, a kind of Moron in a Hurry, posts a book every five minutes, and literally doesn’t give himself time to think. He has to chose a picture for each book, and hence he chooses these purely idiotic pictures.

If you will recall, something similar happened with e-books a while back, and Amazon responded by pulling in all the Gutenberg/HathiTrust e-texts and making them free on the Kindle, to drive the scammers out.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090717/1559425587.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120310/19034718067/authors-guild-boss-e-book-price-fixing-allegations-but-brick-and-mortar.shtml

The problem is that they can’t do that very well with a paper book. The printing, and the paper, and the shipping have to cost something, and there has to be a profit on it, and it is difficult to settle the matter thus directly, because it might amount to unfair competition. What Amazon might be able to do would be to give Gutenberg Project a grant to produce “paperback print-off-ready” editions, freely available to all, with suitable covers. They would then charge for “printing services,” with charges explicitly based on the amount of paper and ink required, the way a print-shop charges. However, they would also try to encourage schools to buy suitable printers, capable of generating paperbacks. Ideally, the teacher would cross the hall, run the machine, and return with an armful of brightly colored, well-constructed, paperbacks with Gutenberg Project printed on the spine.